My error. I apologize.
There's a far better way of gaining an audience. That is simply by commenting on articles. They do, however, need to be genuine comments with a point to them. That brings far more people to your stream than anything else.
After 4 months, i did have requests for my work for some magazines at the time. Not a single one of them brought me more than a handful of views.
The thing that changed in mid-April was that I moved from South Africa to Germany - from the 3rd world to the 1st world. I used to be a web designer, so I'm fully aware that sites can program in such a way that readership is more dominant in the country you are in. So, for instance, the fact that I was living in South Africa would mean that my work was seen more by South Africans and less by Americans. INitially, I saw a drop off when I left Scotland/Spain in 2015 to go to South Africa. (Not on Medium).
That's one possible reason there was a spike, and once my work was in the public eye, it simply took off.
The other reason is that I wrote an article on why I muted all the writing publications and muted everybody writing about writing. I had a tremendous response. There were a lot of other people out there who were sick and tired of people who were writing about writing.
https://medium.com/born-to-write/why-i-muted-all-writing-publications-yesterday-52edcb3acda0
That was written on the 25th March (when I was still in South Africa), but then it peaked 3 weeks later 12th April - 2 days before I left South Africa. And from then on I got a lot of traffic.
That traffic stopped. The piece was never distributed or submitted to a magazine. In fact, I think in April, I removed everything of mine from magazines, opened my own, and have never looked back.
That piece pushed me from earning around $60 a month to $128 and it was April, and I won the $500, and every $500 subsequently.
In May, I got a lot views because, for the first time, Medium distributed my articles, and I had 40,000 hours of reads just on one article. So, again, this has had nothign to do with the quality of my writing, so much as luck that people saw my writing and wanted to read it.
Then I upset Medium and that was that. Since then, very little of what I write has been distributed, but now I have sufficient readers who like what I write to keep going. I have no interest in submitting to publications.
So, I would say that the rise in my fortunes was the result of two factors. The first was that I coincidentally wrote a piece that reverberated with a lot of people - that they were sick and tired of articles about writing, and the second was that I moved from the third world to the first world around that time.
All in all, nothing but luck.
