12 Curations in My 2nd Month — You Can Do It Too

All my tips and tricks revealed in easy-to-follow steps

September has been my 2nd full month on Medium. My first month (summarized here) was not a bad start by any means — but I feel quite good about the success of this past month.

I got a pretty satisfying result with 12 curations across 21 topics of which 17 were unique. I wrote over 30 stories during the month, with my usual run-rate of a story a day, of which about 5 were written for purposes that meant it wouldn’t be eligible for curation.

So from the remaining ~25 curation-eligible pieces, about 5 are still “under review” and so there’s hope. So from the 20 pieces that were either curated or got the “Not Distributed in Topics” verdict — I have a 60% curation rate for the month.

For my 2nd month on Medium, and for someone that does this as a hobby outside of my day job, I am quite proud of achieving this. However, I don’t consider myself an exceptional writer, but a good learner who is good at getting the basics right. And that’s all there is to curation — the basics.

Here are my learnings on how to crack the curation code that will hopefully help you too.

Step 1 — Follow the Curation Guidelines

This is obvious but can’t be stressed enough — there’s a simple set of rules Medium advises you to follow if you want a shot at curation, so just stick to them to be “curation-eligible”. I will summarize them in a nutshell for you (not exhaustive):

• Be an editor’s delight — Write, read, edit, re-read, edit, submit. This is the minimum iterations I’d recommend you follow to get a solid piece — don’t have typos, grammatical errors, structuring issues, and you’ll have done yourself a favor.
• Formatting — The title, subtitle, images with appropriate credits, headers/sub-headers, quotes, referencing to sources of facts — familiarize yourself with the formatting tools Medium offers, and stick to them.
• Calls-To-Action or CTAs — DON’T. Simple. Don’t link back to too many of your own articles, or ask people to clap and comment, or put in links to your blogs, etc. To an extent, Medium is ok with self-promoting, but too much of it can get you disqualified.
• Content — Make sure the story is a subset or a combination of being well researched, written from a personal perspective, written for the reader, in a structured flow with a clear start, mid and end, and something that VALUE to the reader.

Step 2 — The Content

From my perspective, there are a few things that work well with the curators — some of these are listed below.

Have a look at the “Topics”

Medium has a list of topics under one or more of which your story will be curated, if it does. So having a look at these and trying to see which ones potentially fit your story would give you something to work towards. You can pick a niche and constantly write about that, or like me explore anything and everything. I’ve probably had curation over roughly 20 unique topics so far.

Your tags should include some of these topics or should be related, as tags often give a bit of a guidance to the curators in terms of where this piece could possibly go.

Now let us understand how you should go about your story.

Your story should either be about you…

The most unique thing that you can bring to any topic is your own perspective. Whether it comes from your personal experience or stems from your own very personal views on something of broader interest, make sure you don’t hold back in bringing your own personality to your writing. Readers want authentic story-tellers and their unique perspectives, and not people who just write the same thing as everyone else with no uniqueness.

…or about the reader…

If you don’t want to share something personal, think of what the average reader is looking for and make sure you give them something that adds value. Stories on life lessons and self improvement often get success if they’re actually adding value to the lives of the readers. If it isn’t great “advice” on something then it should be something that engages the reader and gets them “thinking” or “contemplating”. Your story is your way of engaging in a dialogue with your reader — whether it is by helping them inculcate something into their lives, or by leaving them with a thought to ponder over.

…or the best outcome — a combination of the two.

If you can bring in both elements of a personal experience / story and something that leaves the reader with something to gain, then you’ve hit the jackpot. These are the pieces that help you gain followers who want to hear from you again, and readers who will more than just view your story and actually bother to read it because they’re truly engaged.

Another thing that works well is to add legitimate sources of facts and research to supplement your “views” and “opinions” and link to them appropriately or provide references. A scientifically-backed piece of story just feels more credible and is easier to believe than just one person’s views.

Step 3 — The Hook

Well you’ve followed all the steps and have a great piece of content ready to be read by thousands. But in this muddle of thousands of stories written everyday, many of them of high quality, how are you going to get the reader’s attention?

Here is where the much-hyped, but rightly so, titles, subtitle and image come in.

Your title should be something that both engages the reader i.e. is “catchy” but also gives them sufficient information about the story so they EXACTLY know what they’re getting into. When you’re picking from a 100 possible reads, you really want to spend time only on something you KNOW will be worth it.

So DON’T leave your reader guessing, or mislead them with clickbait, but guide them and seduce them into reading your story.

We’re all visual creatures — so a powerful image to go along with the story will attract attention and get you a higher chance of getting a view and hopefully a read.

Medium Curators prefer well-formatted, catchy but informative titles and also similar subtitles which give the reader enough information about the actual content. Don’t waste your headline in trying to be too cute, or too unconventional, as that will reduce your chances of curation.

Step 4 — The Publications

You can choose to self-publish an article or look for a suitable “publication” for it. Publications do give you the chance to reach to a bigger audience unless you're a celebrity writer, in which case you’re probably not reading this.

Publications do also get noticed a lot more by curators, although I’ve had enough “self-published” pieces curated to know it isn’t the ONLY way.

Some publications have “auto-curation” as they’re partnered with Medium but also have VERY high standards of acceptance — some that I know of are The Ascent, P.S. I Love You, Writer’s Cooperative etc.

I am lucky to be an editor with Illumination and Illumination-Curated, and a benefit to go with such a publication in addition to their huge following is the fact that they have great, and very willing-to-help editors who will work with you on your story to give it the best shot at curation.

That is true for some other publications as well — so publications do not just give you a larger audience, but also a second and third pair of eyes to go over your content and help you refine it like you may not be able to yourself.

If you follow all of the above AND meet the basic but most important criteria of just being a good writer, you will sooner or later figure out the Curation Code.

If you need more advice or guidance, I am happy to help — so feel free to reach out to me — you can tag me or drop me a private note, and I’d love to give specific advice. You’re also most welcome to contribute to Illumination and Illumination — Curated, to write with a bunch of like-minded, helpful writers and editors.

Happy writing — and all the best in the quest for Curation! Below are all my 12 curations from September (1 published in Aug / curated in Sep), in case you want to see what worked for me?