What I Learned From an Article That Received Over 55,000 Views
Success leaves clues.
An Article With an Unexpected Response
In July, I published an article about my one-year hiatus from Facebook, which I did without deleting the app from my phone. After I published the article, I forgot about it.
I did not promote it or even share it with my friends. In the original version, I did not even include a call to action at the end. No requests for hearts (this was before Medium switched to claps), no request to share it, no opt-in to my list (there is one now).
Despite having no calls to action, people read it. They commented. And they shared it. A few weeks after publishing it, it had around 3,000 views and 1,500 reads; those numbers dwarfed the reach of everything else I have written — combined. The numbers continued to snowball for the next couple of months.
To date, the article has been viewed over 55,000 times and read over 10,500 times, according to the Medium stats. Medium’s editorial staff picked it as one of their favorites and recorded an audio version of it.
(By the way, the audio is really cool. Thanks, Medium editors!)
