Cheers!

The Pub Has 12,031 Followers! Can You Believe It?

I can’t

Quizz: 12,031 followers, of which how many are Smillews?

My first instinct when reaching this milestone was to invite everybody for a drink.

But then I looked at my earnings and decided to keep everything for my cat because he’s so cute.

I’m sure you’ll understand.

Rights Reserved by The Meow Corporation

What’s the best way to celebrate then?

I thought of sharing my favorite articles published since the beginning, but since I wrote all of them, it felt a bit inappropriate.

I know I should work on my self-promotion skills, but it’s hard for someone like me who’s naturally humble, self-effacing, unpretentious, and generally a low-key, down-to-earth, chill guy.

I also thought about tagging all the writers and followers, but got lazy and restricted myself to Nancy Santos (she was my first), and to Michael Burg, and Philip Ogley, because my publication has more followers than their publications combined.

Would you like to see statistics?

From my experience, people love numbers, and writers even more so. However, they usually prefer to see them on their stats, not on others’.

For example, we could look at June 2025:

Not bad, uh? This could be yours if you were me

I chose it totally randomly. It represents our average number of views, and you can 100%¹ expect to get the same numbers if you decide to publish with us.

See March 2023 for another arbitrary example.

And you can imagine the number of presentations…

I could show you all the other months, but I don’t want to bother you with the same view over and over. You can trust² me, the Pub’s numbers are simply amazing.

Speaking of which, would you like to become a writer for us?

Click here:

[embed]Want to Be Published? The Pub is the write place to gosmillewiloveyou.com

Let’s be serious for a minute.

You might wonder how I did it.

What’s the secret to building a publication with 10,000+ followers?

There are three secrets, in fact. It’s always three.

1. Create the publication ten years ago. Twenty if you can. And then fast forward to today. Half of your pub’s followers will have forgotten about their accounts, and some will be dead, but thanks to the magic of a never-ending Internet, they will still be counted. Of course, they won’t read anything. But who does?
2. Publish viral articles. When an article gets 100,000+ views, magical things happen. For example, readers decide to follow the author and, misclick or deluded hope to see more of this content, they also follow the pub.
3. Speaking of deluded, have a team of Deluded Custodians, led by Ann James, organize writing competitions with prizes monthly. Don’t forget to create a dedicated subpage for them.

That’s it.

Do this, and you’ll get a 10,000-follower pub faster than you’ll give me money on Ko-Fi.

What else can I say?

Thank you.

Thank you to all the writers, readers, and followers for making it happen. You rock!

Thanks to Medium for existing. Thanks to Coach Tony for being the CEO. And thank you in advance for hiring me!

Thank you, everyone.

Seriously.

Even the people who blocked me. It makes me sad to think they won’t be able to read that beautiful article, though.

List of people who blocked me.

But that’s OK.

Let’s finish on a high note.

Let’s be positive and look towards the future with hope.

Let’s subscribe to my Substack!

Joke.

Long Live Medium. Long Live The Pub. Long Live Yourself!

¹Smillew’s standard limitations apply. The offer was valid till yesterday, and you wouldn’t have been able to sign for it anyway.

²See bio for reference.

I dedicate this piece to madi's thoughts, who read (three times) my article celebrating 2,000 followers. Based on my calculations, she will read this one eighteen times.

Madi gets the last word:

[embed]**You Can Leave, Even if It’s Good**