897 Reads and 91% Read Ratio — I Accidentally Discovered a Simple Way to Get More Reads
To tell the truth I’ve mostly used Medium as a journaling exercise for myself, and never really cared about my read ratio or views. It’s exciting when a story does well, and I do love when people read what I write, but I was never set on “hacking the algorithm”. Then last month, my story My 2023 Bingo Card blew up (I use blew up a bit lightly here, but it got waaaaay more reads than I ever expected).
And I did it by accident. The story was very short, and I hesitated even posting it due to the silly, light-hearted nature of it (basically pop-culture predictions for the year). But when I did I couldn’t believe how fast the reads racked up.
How did I do it? Take a look at the story and see if you can guess. There was very few words to read, but I added a certain type of graphic as a photo. Not any old photo or graph will do, it’s an image that demands time for analysis. There are many colourful blocks with short strings of text. A block of text looks intimidating, but a short string of text, sectioned off on its own, really draws the eye in. It’s the same effect as a subtitle — the human eye can’t help but to read it.
