3 Simple Rules Most New Medium Writers Ignore For Too Long

These are so simple, yet so powerful — please apply them.

I joined Medium back in August 2018 and published my first post a few hours after setting up my account. Now, Medium was founded in 2012, so I was indeed not one of the first writers here, but almost two years of experience have taught me quite a lot about what it needs to succeed here.

Of course, everyone’s definition of success is different, and there are a lot of different goals one can pursue on Medium, but two main achievements many people are after are building an audience and making money through their writing. Currently, my posts have been seen by more than a million people, my following is growing by around 50 gorgeous souls every day, and for the past months, I averagely made $5,000 through my writing on Medium. So I guess these numbers are good enough to share some of the lessons I learned on my journey, hoping they’ll also help you to create similar results.

To be honest, if I could start all over on Medium and do one thing differently, I’d reach out to successful writers and ask them to mentor me. Or I’d join their programs and courses. I could’ve saved so much time and energy if I knew what worked right from the beginning.

Instead, I chose the path of trial and error and wrote more than 200 posts until I understood what it really needs to make people read your posts. For me, this approach worked. And I believe that it can still work for new writers if they invest a lot of time and energy into their writing. But it’s not effective or fun.

For me, Medium has been a nice little side project for more than a year. I didn’t rely on it as an income source, and I didn’t know what to do with the email subscribers I got through my posts because my entire business was in German. So I wrote for fun without expecting too much. And if that’s what you are after, go for it!

But if you want results, readers, and an income through your writing, there are more effective ways to find out what really works here.

Now, some of the rules on Medium are quite straight forward and obvious. Some others are trickier but can be found out if you put a lot of effort, such as headlines and formatting.

But I found that there are some more critical rules most new writers simply overlook. Here are three of them:

Create An Attractive Bio

You don’t have lots of opportunities to customize your author profile. In fact, you only have 160 characters and your profile picture to impress a reader. But if designed correctly, these can be enough to impress your potential readers and gain their trust.

First things first: Your profile needs to look credible and friendly. You don’t need your CV picture, but you better take one that is not too blurry, dark, or weird.

Most authors here don’t change their profile pictures too often because it’s kind of a symbol, a logo for their writing, and people might not remember your name, but they’ll probably recall your picture because of the colors or style of it. That’s why I chose a flashy picture in red instead of a simple selfie.

Whenever I see an interesting headline on my front page, I first check the profile of the author, and if that doesn’t look credible, I don’t even open the post. I’d probably never open the post of an author without a profile picture.

You can’t share too much on your bio, but what you communicate matters. Your picture already says a lot about you and also how you use your 160 characters matters.

There’s no right or wrong in what to share, but make sure it matters to the audience. Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you doing what you’re doing? What’s your background? What can I expect from your writing? How can I get in touch with you?

Many writers include their email in the bio so that people can easily reach out. I personally chose to use my Instagram handle and found that this works pretty well as I’m quite active there anyway, so people feel comfortable in sending me private messages.

Get Rid Of Mistakes

I don’t know why I see so many people posting articles with tons of spelling or grammar mistakes or even typos. I really don’t get it.

When I see such posts, I seriously ask myself what’s wrong with these folks.

You don’t really expect a post to perform well if it’s full of mistakes, do you?!

If you don’t put effort into checking your post and getting rid of the mistakes, why should I spend minutes reading it?

The internet is full of great content, and millions of writers are making sure to write posts without mistakes, so you bet your post won’t catch my attention if it’s not free of mistakes.

You can’t expect posts with spelling and grammar mistakes and typos to perform well. Period.

I personally use Grammarly and love it. It’s easy to use, straightforward, and also makes me a better writer by learning through my mistakes. But you can as well use any other spelling and grammar checker. Just make sure to use one!

Now here’s an assumption of mine: I guess Medium has an algorithm that separates posts once they are published. And I believe they have a spelling and grammar checker that basically sorts out all the posts that contain too many mistakes. So if your post is full of mistakes, I assume it gets disqualified from curation right away.

Again, that’s only an assumption of mine, but it would totally make sense.

Follow The Content Guidelines

Lately, I found myself in a discussion of whether new writers should follow the rules of established writers or just do their own thing.

And I’m scared by how many people don’t seem to understand that you must follow the rules if you want to succeed on a platform.

If you want to be creative and if you write for fun, go pursue your creativity and do whatever you want.

But if you want to make it big on Medium, build an audience, and make money through your writing, you have no chance by merely following your creativity. It just won’t work.

There’s a good reason why more than 90% of all writers here are hardly making $100.

I sincerely believe there’s always room for one more person on the top, BUT to make it to the top, you need to follow the rules that those who are already there applied.

To make it big on Medium, you need to follow Medium’s rules. You want to make sure you get published through big publications and get curated, and that’s only possible if you follow the content guidelines plus the rules provided by writers who already made it big here.

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