ONE WORD Gave Me 100X More Views
The Surprising Factor In The Success Of My Most Popular Medium Story
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Just like you, I’m constantly looking for ways to tweak my Medium stories in order to get more views, more reads, more engagement and more revenue.
Yet, out of the 70 stories I’ve published so far, fourteen of them have not even reached double figures in terms of number of views. Only five stories have had over 100 views so far and of those, only one has had over 1,000 views — in fact, that one article has had over 8,000 views to date and has brought in over $140 in revenue just on its own.
Naturally, I’ve been trying to replicate the success of this one article ever since and have been trying to isolate the factor which led to this success. At first, I assumed that, since this was the first article I’d ever had published by a publication, this must be the reason for its success and I resolved to set about getting more articles published.
Since then, however, I’ve had several more articles accepted by publications on Medium and it turned out not to be the magic bullet I’d assumed it to be. First, I had three or four articles accepted by a different publication, but that seemed to make little difference, if any, to the number of views they received.
So I submitted two more stories to the original publication where I’d originally had the success but, again, this seemed to make little difference to my stats.
Let me be clear at this point that I’m not dismissing all publications. I’ve read advice from a lot of very experienced and very successful writers on Medium who strongly recommend getting your stories into publications, so it may just be that the publications I selected weren’t big enough, but clearly the publication wasn’t the main factor in my story’s success.
Next, I considered that maybe it was the subject matter, so I wrote several other similar articles in a effort to duplicate the success. It didn’t work. Nor can I put it down to writing style — I tend to use broadly the same writing style in many of my posts and none of those others had taken off in the same way.
The story had been chosen by Medium for further distribution, but then so had many of my other stories, so that obviously wasn’t the crucial factor, either. Nor was the photograph which, while it was fairly decent, wasn’t exceptionally stunning or eye-popping.
And so, finally, I have been forced to conclude that this single success was probably due to the title — and not just the title, but one word specifically in the title: the word ‘masturbation’. Although the subject matter, content and style were obviously good enough to keep people reading the entire article to the end, the single factor which accounted for the 8k+ views is, I believe, just this one word.
It’s been said that in order to be truly successful on Medium you have to grab your audience’s attention in about 0.1 seconds. Apparently, my article (which I’ve linked to here) managed to do this.
It seems that, when it comes to masturbation, people just can’t resist the pull ;)
Finally, if you enjoyed this post, why not become a Medium member by clicking here? You’ll get access to unlimited stories and articles from thousands of authors, and part of your $5 membership fee will go directly to me, helping to support my writing at no extra cost to yourself… Click Here
