4 Ways to Not Promote Your Medium Article

Lessons learned after 4 months of writing

I started writing on Medium in November 2019 with the primary goal of earning a side income. I decided to write about my areas of expertise: software development, machine learning, and life in a tech startup.

I treated the whole thing as an experiment, quickly learning as much as possible. In this article, I’m going to share some of my insights into what doesn’t work, and end with some pointers about what does.

1. Sharing With Your Social Network

Sharing your article on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter might seem like an obvious thing to do, but don’t expect your post to go viral.

I have 1,500-plus followers on Twitter, which is well above average. I have a comparable number of LinkedIn connections. It’s also fair to say that many of my connections and followers are interested in the topics I’m writing about. Out of 127,000 views, less than 2% came from social media.

Yet, for my most successful story, which gained over 70,000 views on Medium, less than 0.5% originated from Twitter. Overall, for my top three stories, only 1.8% of views came from social media links.

Too much self-promotion on social media can also get annoying for your followers. Someone actually thanked me on Facebook when I switched my Medium promotions to a separate account!

Tip: if you write regularly, only share your best stories with your social network and don’t expect huge results.

2. Paid Facebook Ads

Next, I decided to experiment with paid Facebook ads. I bet a small amount of money to promote my most successful articles. I initially tried spending $10 on promoting one article to a very broad demographic, then successively targeted the audience most likely to click the article links.

The average cost per link click worked out between $0.02 and $0.06 depending on how much was spent on the ad. Yet, my average Medium income per view is more like $0.016. My guess is that the ratio of Facebook advertising cost to the Medium income generated is more like $1 earned for every $10 spent.

Tip: paid advertising is just not worth it for Medium posts.

3. Facebook and LinkedIn Groups

My next experiment was to join and post to a number of relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups. There is a Facebook group for almost every possible topic, and many tech groups have numbers comparable to big Medium publications.

On the surface posting to Facebook groups feels like free Facebook advertising. In reality, I found some problems with promoting Medium articles to groups:

• Engagement with Facebook group posts is very low
• Many groups have a no-advertising policy and moderators will block self-promotion

For the posts I got approved, I received roughly 20 likes per group with over 100,000 members. My guess is that most of those likes didn’t even convert to link clicks, let alone article reads.

Tip: posting to groups can generate a small amount of interest in articles and help slowly build an audience, but don’t expect overnight success.

4. Scattergunning Publications

A final technique I’d suggest avoiding is what I call scattergunning. This means submitting your story to another publication after one publication rejects it.

Publications generally have a lot of experience reading and reviewing stories, and if a publication rejected your on-topic story it probably means it isn’t going to do that well. I’ve tried resubmitting the same story to multiple publications and never had a publication accept after another has rejected.

Tip: if your story gets rejected by a publication, take the hint and move on.

What Does Work…

Get accepted into publications

I have found getting accepted into publications to be a promotion dealbreaker on Medium. Of the 20 articles I’ve published, the 15 in publications have received over 150,000 views, with the remaining five receiving less than 2,000!

I’ve also found that choosing the right publications matters. If your article is a really good fit for a publication, it’s more likely to be promoted and readers will naturally pick up on it.

Get curated

The vast majority of my views, somewhere in the region of 60–70% come from Medium’s own distribution. This includes the Medium homepage, app, emails, and social media accounts. You can increase visibility on Medium by getting accepted into a publication, but another way to increase visibility is to get curated. Further information on this can be found here.

Write content that people want to read

This is the number one for me. If I’m really honest, the articles I’ve written that have done badly are either boring, hard to grasp, or overly specialised. The successful articles have been snappy, easily digestible, and have delivered genuine value to the reader.

As well as being a writer, I’m an avid Medium reader, and whilst the platform isn’t perfect, I think in general, good quality, high-value articles do tend to float to the top of the pile.

Conclusion

While it’s been an interesting experience experimenting with different ways of promoting Medium articles, my ultimate takeaway has been that if I focus on the writing, the promotion takes care of itself. On Medium, all the mechanisms are already in place to promote quality content. I’m not claiming that curated stories in publications will automatically be successful. But if you write genuinely high-value articles with broad enough appeal, they stand a higher chance of success as a result of that.