My story got thousand views !
By: Lal Verma
Tags: Blogging Tips, Blogging, Crosslinking, Medium Curation, Digital Marketing Tips

My story got thousand views !

It was neither curated by the Medium team nor published by any Medium Publication. This is an article about a story of mine, which crossed 1000+ views recently, attributed to my amateur blogging maneuver.

Photo by Cam Adams on Unsplash

I started my journey on Medium a year back with the hope that it could be my retirement plan. Soon I realized, I am a misfit. None of my stories crossed more than 10 views. I always assumed the story will fly on its own. If there is a quality in my content, it will click automatically. I did not bother about curation or the Medium publications at that point of time.

Its only a few months back, when I started exploring the platform with more sincerity. The unusual high number of views on the story, which is neither curated nor published, is nothing less than the magic. But the success of it is attributed to my blogging maneuver and not just luck.

Story with 1000+ views

If you are expecting a quick mantra, you might be disappointed. But at the same time, the factors behind my story success are easy to follow. More than thousand views on my story is the result of three fundamental steps —

Finding my niche

Finding my key to Curation

Cross Linking

Finding my niche

I restarted my journey on Medium, with the promise, that I will write every day. This is the most successful mantra I came across, shared by many successful bloggers on Medium. I did it for ten days but could not continue. My ten day exercise did improve my writing and narration but the content was still lacking.

I wrote on varied topics. I always considered myself to be an analysis guru, irrespective of the topic. I explored and enjoyed connecting the dots, in the world of Business, Politics, Economics, Social, Pandemic and many more areas. This approach helped me in developing a good understanding, across multiple domains but none of my stories got curated or published. I was everywhere but nowhere!

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

I was looking for the answers when I came across few articles about “finding the niche”. This gave me some direction to move forward. By profession, I am a software consultant. I always treated it like my routine job but never realized it could be my niche area. I thought to give it a try and it clicked.

This is the first important step I learnt in my blogging journey. You cannot write about everything you came across. The depth on the topic will always be missing out, if you follow this approach. Be it your job, hobby or life, you must find your niche.

This is the key reason that my stories started delivering the quality. My last seven stories are specific to the software technologies and all of them are curated.

Finding the key to Curation

Curation guidelines are up on the wall, so I will not spend time on the already written guidelines. I read it, at least couple of times. I read the curation tips from other Medium gurus as well. It did help in improving the quality of my content. I worked on my grammar, spellings and sentence formations to make the story error-free. I tried to keep the content flow as readable as possible.

But the real value came when I found my niche. With this, I was able to focus on one particular area. I worked as a software consultant throughout my career so it helped me in following the path easier. I focussed on my technology niche, both from the depth and breadth perspectives. My stories provided real value, when I tried to fill in the details, and not just being superficial.

All of my curated stories are at least ~ 1500 words. Earlier even a thousand words article used to stress me out. But when I covered my topics in detail, even two-thousand words fell short sometimes. The details helped me in articulating my thoughts much better than before. A thorough understanding on the topic automatically brought up, the curation values of being Rigorous, Honest, & Complete. My stories started passing through the curation filters.

One after another. All of my last seven stories got curated. Thorough explanation of the topics provided help and value to the readers. As per the Medium statistics, my fans and followers both jumped in numbers, during this period.

But wait! You must be wondering why I am talking about the curated stories. Isn’t the article about the story which is NOT-CURATED?

The final piece of this puzzle lies in the concept of Cross-Linking.

Cross Linking

Here is the story I am referring to. It belongs to my niche area. This is an introduction page to a technology learning series — Spring Boot Microservices, one of the popular programming frameworks.

Going forward, I will call this as an introduction story. My last seven curated stories are child-stories of the introduction story and discuss more specific technology areas.

This created a good platform for me to create references. At the end of each of these stories, I provided a link to my introduction story. I also provided the story reference inside the content of the curated stories. My curated stories had already gained momentum and this automatically lifted up the introduction story.

Total number of views for my seven curated stories is roughly ~12500, at the time of writing this article. With ~1000 views for the introduction story, the conversion rate of these links become ~8%. If the “conversion rate” term is new to you, do check out the definition from Google here.

The conversion rate of ~8% is relatively a high value compare to the online ads or other digital marketing tools. The power of cross-linking stories should not be underestimated and we must seek out the opportunities. This provides one of the most valuable marketing channel to consider.

Find the possibilities of linking the stories. Try to find the relation between them and provide valuable references. In my case it was a parent-child relationship, but it could be any other in your case. Relation could be based on location, work, interests, references, inspirations, categories… the list is endless. Even if a single story is curated or accepted well by its readers, it can uplift other stories with the help of these references.

Just providing the links with no relation, will not be effective though. Its efficiency could be much lower than the online ads. Cross-linking is a powerful tool and we must use it diligently. If not, it will just become a spam.

Summary

As every individual has a different journey to his life, every blogger has a different journey too. I shared my experience based on the things I came across. It does not mean, your journey is limited to this. You might find something different, probably much better ideas than me. I guess the most important mantra is to “keep trying” and “keep learning”. It does not matter what path you take, what matters is to reach there.

I hope, I created some value by putting up my small success story on blogging. Do take my advice with a pinch of salt though, as I am still an amateur blogger.