Medium Earnings / Medium Writing Tips

5 Non-Obvious Tips for Profitable Writing on Medium

A beginner’s guide to profitable publishing on Medium

Making money from your writing is an amazing feeling (perhaps second only to having people actually appreciate your writing). Yet many writers on Medium find themselves disappointed when their articles fail to gain traction with readers.

There are lots of generic guides to writing on Medium. The “expert” advice these articles typically dispense is:

• Follow everyone on Medium so that a small percentage will follow you back, increasing your followers.
• If at first your article does not succeed, delete it and post it over and over until you see views.
• Randomly share your content across social media.

Below are some of the tips and tricks that I have picked up (through much trial and error) that are essential for a new writer on Medium, hoping to make money through the Medium Partner Program.

1. Remember Medium’s Specific Value Proposition

Paying readers on Medium are looking for value when they read one of your articles. This is true on other publishing platforms as well, but Medium is unique because the reader chooses how they want to distribute their monthly payment through Medium’s clap system.

So, try to make sure that your posts add value to a reader’s life. One of the best ways to ensure this is to make your point clear and concise. If a reader has to spend 2 minutes figuring out what your article is about, and how it can help them, they are likely to move on to another article.

If they find your content valuable, a portion of your readers will follow your profile, clap, and are more likely to engage with your future articles.

Also worth noting, paid subscribers also enjoy an ad-free experience and many subscribe just to support this alternate model of subscription based journalism. So while Medium allows self promotion to some extent, it is generally against the community experience to create content resembling an advertisement.

2. Edit Articles for Length

Try to keep articles relatively short. Medium has a tool in the “articles” section of your writer profile. This can be very useful for estimating how long it will take readers to read your article. Articles that generate a lot of views are typically 5–7 minutes in length. If an article is projected to be longer than 12 minutes, consider splitting the article into two separate pieces. This makes it easier for the reader and will potentially increase your article views.

But don’t just take my word for it. Here is a post excerpt from the former Head of Data Science at Medium, Mike Sall:

3. Choose the Perfect Image for Your Medium Article

Many veteran writers will insist that good writing alone is enough to attract views and claps. This is not my experience. Choosing the perfect image for your medium article plays a crucial role in maximizing article reads, views, and reader engagement. Although Medium’s emphasis is on written communication, most readers still have a stronger response to images than the brief written description provided in the subtitle or title.

You may not feel like you can sum up your article in a single picture, but remember that the featured image is used to set the tone of the article. If you are illustrating more complex processes or events those can be laid out clearly within the body of your article — they don’t need to be the featured image.

4. Submit Your Articles to Publications (And If That Fails, Create Your Own)

One of the best ways to increase article views and to engage new readers is to submit your articles to various Medium publications. Where can you find Medium publications looking for writers or new content? One of the best places is Smedian:

Smedian makes the process of submitting your writing to publications (or creating your own publications) quite simple. I have seen a huge boost in views after having an article published in a large publication.

What should you do if publications aren’t accepting your work? Create your own! I created Making Money Online because a lot of the “more prestigious” Medium marketing/entrepreneurial publications would not accept my articles or they would accept them and add their own branding all over my article. Remember — the premise of Medium is that anyone should be able to share and publish their ideas. Don’t let “gatekeepers” at these publications dictate whether you choose to write and publish.

5. Approach Writing on Medium as a Long Term Venture

Many aspiring writers focus on articles that go viral and achieve massive success overnight. Obviously if there was a secret to consistently achieve rapid success people would not share it with you and this would defeat the point of Medium’s algorithm, as only large institutional publications would succeed.

As I’ve noted before, Not All Successful Medium Articles Go Viral.

And by that, I don’t mean that “you are still a winner in my book just for trying!” Rather, I mean that even if the Medium curators/internal search algorithm “fails” your article, it is still possible to obtain large amount of views and have your content shared with a large audience.

To illustrate this point, I examine the analytics behind two Medium articles I published. An article that essentially went viral and had a very brief, but massive surge in views, Uber’s Latest Scandal: Vomit Fraud and an article that grew in momentum months after being published, How to Bypass Virtually Every News Paywall.

The viral article achieved massive traffic over a few days, and I imagine this is the trajectory of many articles that are selected by curators on Medium. And this makes sense because Medium’s algorithm places an extremely high emphasis on the recency of articles. The Medium analytics for this article underscore this trajectory:

The Paywall article was published on February 6th and follows a much different trajectory. As you can see from the screenshots of my Medium article analytics, below, the article initially saw a surge of traffic a few days in.

Traffic then remained flat for over a month before it jumped from being completely overlooked (Google Search Results Page 10+) to being somewhat accessible (Google Search Results Page 3–5). Also worth noting, the article was almost immediately indexed in Google after publication due to: (1) Medium being a publishing platform with high domain authority; (2) The initial surge of traffic ensured it would be indexed quickly.

As the article oscillates in page rank in Google’s search algorithm, daily traffic continues to grow at a steady rate:

Now, in May and June, several months after the initial article was published, traffic is still consistently growing with approximately 1,000 views per day!

What caused this? Primarily, views continued to grow at a fairly steady pace as the article climbed page rank in Google’s search engine. It gradually reached the bottom of the first page, then the number one spot on page 1, and finally it started becoming the featured snippet (position 0) in Google’s Search results.

So what are some of the takeaways from this last tip?

• Your Medium article does not need to “go viral” for it to be successful — you can still achieve massive exposure by creating useful content that is boosted through Google’s search engine organically.
• Content is still king. The Uber article took me a fraction of the time to write, and I was shocked when it went viral, as I thought it was virtually useless. The Paywall article provided tremendous value to users, and even if Medium’s curators didn’t deem it noteworthy, tens of thousands of people who found an answer to their question through Google, would probably beg to differ.
• Original content wins out in either growth scenario. Regardless of whether an article achieves growth through viral momentum or slow algorithmic reinforcement, it must have unique and original content. Readers expect Medium curators to select original content and Google’s algorithm heavily favors unique content and can penalize websites for posting duplicate content.

— Casey Botticello

Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have any questions, and if you want to learn more about blogging, content marketing, or subscription newsletter strategy, be sure to sign up for the Blogging Guide Newsletter!

If you liked this article, here are some other articles you may enjoy:

Casey Botticello is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Blogging Guide, an online community of writers with an award-winning newsletter. He is also the creator of the popular Medium Writing Course and the Substack Newsletter Course.

Casey previously worked at several tech startups, a lobbying & strategic communications firm, and has created several businesses of his own. He is a graduate of The University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban Studies.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, follow his Medium publications, Digital Marketing Lab and Medium Blogging Guide, or reach out to him directly on his personal website.