MUSINGS

My Follow-for-Follow Proposal

Keep it professional, keep it real.

Purple background with ‘Follow for Follow’ centered in white Viner Hand text.

I have seen several ‘Follow-for-Follow’ articles here lately. The authors of these articles want to build a community of mutual support among newer Medium writers. I like the spirit of this idea. It encourages us to help each other reach our mutual goal. We all want to gain 100 followers so that we can join the Partnership Program and earn income from our writing through Medium. I entirely support that idea. However, I have some caveats.

These articles usually promote a couple of practices I don’t care for:

• I will follow you and never unfollow
• I will give your article and/or comment 50 claps.

If you love your Medium followers, set them free.

My reason for writing articles on Medium is professional. I want to create a portfolio of articles to build credibility for myself as a writer, line editor, and proofreader by demonstrating to others that I know what I’m talking about and know it well enough to practice the concepts and teach them to others. Ultimately, I want to write and line-edit for other people — college students or writers who hate to proofread, for example.

Thus, I feel selective about who I truly want to follow on Medium. The people who I truly want to…