The Most Common Misconceptions About Blogging and Writing

Some Blogging Tools and Resources You Need to Know 

I have been blogging on Medium for almost a year now, and along the way I have learned some valuable lessons that I think are worth sharing with the large community of writers on this platform.

I have compiled a list of the key assumptions that I believe have been proven wrong. This is evidenced by how many authors have believed in these false assumptions - myself included - and I'll give you some advice that I wish I'd had when I started.

Assumption #1: The more followers, the more readers for your stories.

When I first started blogging, I was envious of those who had thousands upon thousands of followers and thought that they must be making a lot of money from their writing because all those followers, of course, mean more readers and therefore a lot more money coming in.

I am sure any author who is on Medium or other blogging platforms can attest (assuming they are honest) that there is very little correlation between the number of followers an author has and the number of views their stories get.

I have compared my own stats to those of authors who have thousands of followers, and in many cases our stats did not differ much, if at all.

You can be a brand new author with virtually no followers and publish a story that is viewed thousands of times.

I know this because when I started on Medium, that was exactly the case. I had maybe twenty or thirty followers when I published a story that got me hundreds of views in no time and continues to generate views today, which I'll talk about in more detail here:

Creating Stories That Never Die

How to keep your readership over time

Even though my fan base has slowly grown over the past few months, many of my stories have not reached the audience numbers that this one story had when I started.

Therefore, the opposite can also be true. You can be an author with 10,000 followers, post a story and it only gets a few views.

Assumption #2: Using social media will greatly increase your story's visibility and viewership.

As many experienced writers will tell you when you are just starting out in blogging, sharing your published stories on social media is an important way to gain more exposure and attract a larger audience outside of the blogging platform.

I certainly do not disagree with this advice, but the impact of social media on your audience is minimal at best, especially if you are just starting out. If you already have a large following on Twitter and Facebook, then you can probably expect a decent amount of traffic on those platforms. However, if you do not, then the traffic from these platforms will not make you quit your full-time job to be a full-time blogger anytime soon.

To be fair, external traffic can be very platform dependent. For myself, and from what I have heard from other writers, LinkedIn can actually be a good driver of external traffic to your posts depending on the content, especially if the content is more business related. In contrast, Twitter can sometimes be virtually worthless as engagement is much lower (even if you think you have mastered the art of tweeting).

Assumption No. 3: Publishing an article in a major publication will generate more views than a smaller publication will

Another incorrect assumption I had earlier was that authors who have their articles published in Medium's largest publications must also have a high number of viewers for their articles.

To test this assumption, I published stories in both large and small Medium publications, including my own newly created publications that had very few followers. The largest publication had over 500,000 followers, while the smallest had about 10.

I found that the smaller publications, including my own, generated far more views on average than the larger publications. This is especially true when you consider the relationship between the total number of followers of each publication and the number of times an article was viewed in that publication.

What might be the reason for this?

Once again, the answer has to do with the misconception that more followers equals more readers.

I think part of the reason that the smaller publications generate more views is because those followers are more interested in the work of the smaller publications, especially if the publication covers niche topics that are of great interest to those types of readers. Also, when you write for a smaller publication, your story is not as easily drowned out by other stories as it is with larger publications that publish multiple stories per day.