Tracing the source of my organic views on Medium

I’m considered small 🐟 on Medium.

I don’t write in any considerable professional capacity (yet). I share cool stuff. I write about funny things. Sometimes serious things.

If you’ve heard of the Pareto Principle, it states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. On Medium it’s affectionately called the 80/20 rule.

Surprise, surprise, 80% of my pageviews come from only one of my stories.

I wrote this story over 2 years ago. Definitely not my best piece.

5 Reasons Why College Confidential is Slowly Killing You.

I didn’t submit it to any publications, partially because publications weren’t a big thing, and also because none of them were appropriate for my story. It was edgy, clickbaity, and rather short.

After sharing my article for a while, I gave Medium up for some time. At that point in time I just felt that Medium just wasn’t mature enough. Too many authors were needy and all they wanted was your email.

I didn’t check views or reads. So it was just one lonely article hanging out on the interweb.

Until I resumed my activity circa 2018…

2.1K views on a pretty much non-promoted post is almost unheard of.

I’m not claiming 2.1K views is an astronomical figure. But the fact that such an uneventful piece is capable of garnering such views is an anomaly.

An anomaly well worth investigating.

Checking out the referrers page…

Well, the almighty Google rears its head. People are probably Googling for something!

And looking at the views based on the months…

Increasing number of views leading up to March and dropping off significantly after April?

College Admissions frenzy. Ka-ching!

College Admissions decisions are released around this time.The influx of searches must be the cause.

Even now, organic views are still rolling in…

To summarise…

• Medium’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is really good.
• Clickbaity titles are mean, but for some reason everyone still falls for it.
• Any well written article on Medium has the chance to see at least some viewership. Hopefully.

Cool side note: if you Google “College Confidential”, my original article ranks on Page 4 😎

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Where are my organic views on Medium coming from? was originally published in blog.shawjj on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.