a single source, nothing corroborates it

Play the odds on the slot, not on the piece

The same unchanged article went from flat to roughly thirty times its first week purely because an editor put it on a homepage two weeks later, so early performance says more about placement than about quality. Since the feature cannot be engineered, raise the number of attempts: keep publishing on a schedule, push each piece into every channel you can reach, and keep the bar high because editors are comparing you against the whole queue.

The method

1. 01

   Judge a piece of writing by the distribution slot it lands in, not by the piece itself: the same unchanged article went from flat engagement to roughly thirty times its launch-week numbers purely because an editor put it on the platform's homepage two weeks later.

2. 02

   A post can be picked for a platform's homepage weeks after you published it, which arrives as a second wave of responses you did nothing to cause.

3. 03

   Getting picked up by a large publication produces an overnight jump in followers, which is a different outcome from the same post on your own site.

4. 04

   Do not read a post's early performance as proof the content was good, because a piece often performs well as a consequence of being featured rather than being featured as a consequence of performing well.

5. 05

   Keep the content bar high even though gatekeepers control placement, since the editors picking features are comparing your submission against everything else in the queue.

What it returned

• 75

  First week on Medium: 75 reads from about 43% of viewers and roughly one in ten readers clapping; the later homepage placement produced about 30x more engagement than the initial release

• 50

  Hacker Noon published Zue's Google Ads post overnight and he woke to 50 new recommends and follows on Medium; it became his most popular piece to that point

• Zue's On Sabbaticals article turned up on the medium.com front page well after publication, bringing a fresh round of responses and recommends

• Zue's early piece on testing a place card maker MVP took off on Hacker Noon only after somebody placed it at the top of the front page

Sources

• Week 19 RetrospectiveCory Zue · coryzue.com · 2017-07-31
• Week 9 RetrospectiveCory Zue · coryzue.com · 2017-05-22
• The Secret Formula for Getting Traction from Your WritingCory Zue · coryzue.com · Distribution is King · 2017-09-15