James Horton, Ph.D
1 min readJun 12, 2023

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Messaoudi,

Apologies, but I don't do follow-for-follow, or follow-upon-request. Write something that compels me to click the "follow" button, and I will.

However, I hope this will allay your concerns a little bit; it turns out that the follower count is not a good metric of success on Medium. There are people with tens of thousands of followers who have difficulty finding readers for their stories. It's because of how the algorithm works on this platform; following someone is not a guarantee that you will see their stories, unless you are following very few people. (Which is a large part of why I don't follow many people).

If you are looking to be a successful writer there are two things that you should be doing:

1) Get stories in publications, and preferably in good publications. Start with Illumination or one of the publications directed towards beginners, and find a community of like minded writers who will help you become more skilled at the craft. But also, you should quickly try writing articles that get published in better publications (my first good one was Lessons From History).

2) Aim to write stories that meet all of Medium's guidelines for being boosted. If you get a single story boosted it will benefit you greatly and will bring in a large number of followers (around 40 to 60) each time you get a boosted story.

J

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James Horton, Ph.D
James Horton, Ph.D

Written by James Horton, Ph.D

Social scientist, world traveler, freelancer. Alaskan, twice. Writes about psychology, well-being, science, tech, and climate change. Ghostwriter on the side.

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