57 Things I Learned From Blogging on Medium For 6 Months

My journey here on Medium started in summer 2018 and I can say that starting out on Medium was one of the best decisions that I made this year.

Not only did I make some extra bucks but the amount of content that I create became much more.

Writing on Medium is so easy that I was instantly motivated and I am still — after 6 monthy.

I delivered much more content than I would’ve without Medium and I still enjoy being active here.

Thus I wanted to share a summary of what I’ve learned in the past few months.

Profile and Growth

1 Your profile should look credible and friendly. I realized that people on Medium are quite attentive and highly interested. Therefore, they also take care of whom they follow and which persons stories they want to read. Even though very personal stories are highly welcome on Medium, you must be willing to show your identity so that people can identify with you and trust in what you are writing.

2 You are allowed to insert a link to your freebie etc. into your description on your profile. So if you are trying to build an email list or something similar, simply link to your freebie.

3 You can follow up to 125 profiles per day. I did that at the beginning of my Medium journey — I clicked that follow button 125 times per day. On average, about 10% of them will follow you back. That’s a solid strategy to gain more followers which see your stories and might turn into readers and fans.

4 If you however choose to follow many people in order to gain readers — I would advice you to choose articles that are related to yours, check the people who liked this articles and follow them — this way you at least know that they are interested in reading about the stuff that you are writing.

5 Facebook Groups can be a huge help when it comes to building an audience and exchanging ideas with other authors. Recently I discovered several different Blog supporting Groups on Facebook. I tried to promote my Medium posts in those groups and realized that they actually get more clicks and views. This is for sure one way to get more people to click on your stories but what’s more valuable is the exchange with other authors.

6 Even though I highly appreciate and love the stats section on Medium, I guess it is not absolutely detailed and doesn’t provide all the necessary information an author would need to optimize his work. I would love to get an overview of how certain tags, publications, headlines etc. work out and perform. Therefore, I have created a spreadsheet for myself where I try to track all the information that can not be found in the stats section of Medium — however, I didn’t completely figure out the perfect way yet so I am still struggeling.

7 If you have more than 10k followers on Instagram, you should post your Medium articles into your Instagram story, linking them with a swipe up feature. My boyfriend Philip Hofmacher has +10k follower, so we tried it out several times and you always get some more views and readers on your stories.

8 Daily Engagement — I’ve set myself the goal to grow a big audience and benefit quite a lot through Medium. Therefore, I have put in several hours per week in the first couple of days and weeks. By now I have realized that you have to be active and engage on a daily basis. Following people, commenting and highlighting on other articles and simply being present through a bunch of own articles should be on your daily to do list if you want to grow your Medium profile seriously.

9 Requests for claps are forbidden on Medium. The official Medium content guidelines say: Requests for claps: Do not ask readers to clap at the end of your story — either in text or an image that shows them how to clap. Applause from members is a key factor to how much money writers receive for their stories in the Partner Program — so if some writers included language asking for claps, it would create undue pressure for every writer to do so, which would be a poor experience for readers. However, I see some highly successful writers who do have clap requests in their stories but in fact, it is forbidden.

10 Although you are not allowed to include certain call to actions in your stories, you are alowed to include the following: A short bio (~2–3 lines) Links to your other Medium stories Link to your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram Link to your website, book or other project

11 You can also use a shared Medium account if more than one person should be able to access the account. This can especially make sense if you are building a brand account on Medium.

12 If you want to grow your profile and gain followers, it might make sense to cutsomize your preferences and be notified about stories in similar fields like yours. This way you can make sure to engage with other authors who are writing about similar topics

13 If you see stories in your feed, that don’t match your preferences at all you can also click ‘’fewer stories like this’’ — that way this specific story will be removed and the data will be analysed to provide you with less similar stories in the future — awesome service!

14 Medium has a range of editors who check the platform in and out and look for stories worth sharing. ‘’One of the most interesting aspects of our editorial operation is the growing team of editors dedicated to scouring the self-published stories on Medium each day to find expert and emerging voices that we want to share with readers’’ The aim is to provide readers with great stories and even if you don’t have a big audience yet, if the editors come across your story and like it, they will promote it and your story might be read by tons of people, which of course also benefits your future success on the platform.

Stories

15 Spell and grammar checking is absolutely crucial. In my opinion, having a spellcheck on your articles is also one form of respect towards readers. When I first published stories I didn’t check them at all and they contained a whole lot of mistakes. Later on, I discovered Grammarly and got used to checking all my stories before publishing and also checked all of my previous stories.

16 It sounds so obvious yet it is super crucial — following Mediums Content Guidelines! Medium has a very well developed help section where you can find all the details about content guidelines that you have to follow. In my first stories, I added a call to action to clap for my stories and soon got an email by Medium that I am offending the guidelines and will be unable to earn money through my stories if I don’t adjust my content.

17 It might happen that you have some questions where you don’t find answers in the FAQ’s — in this case you should message the Medium team. When it comes to advertising products, promoting something etc. you really have to be in alignment with the rules. If you are insecure, simply drop them some lines and you will get a clear answer very soon! I once had a request and got my answer within 24 hours!

18 Even if sounds too simple, having a clear structure of your story and making it visibly attractive will lead to more readers. First, people scan through a text very quickly before deciding if they start reading or not. Several subtitles and paragraphs will help to get a quick overview.

19 In some cases, if your story doesn’t get views and clicks, it might make sense to simply delete and republish it. You have nothing to lose and might gain readers.

20 You can share your drafts! By clicking on the three dots on the right corner of your story you can share a link to your draft. This might be especially useful when you are new to Medium and not feeling confident enough to post a story — simply share the link with your family, some friends or some Medium writers, get feedback and get encouraged to post it!

21 You can download all your stories as a zip file! Before I knew this I saved all my Medium stories through Word documents — this saves me a lot of time!

22 As a premium Member you have the option to archive stories besides of putting them on your reading list. I highly appreciate this feature because my reading list on average consists of 500+ articles and the archive is a great way to save my overall top articles.

23 You can also have so called unlisted stories — those can only be seen thorugh a link. So if you have specific stories that you only want specific people to read, you can unlist them and they will still be able to read if they have a link.

24 Revision History — You can preview past versions of your story drafts! This is such a blessing — until I found this out I’ve lost so much time with re-writing stuff because I didn’t know that I can simply switch to a earlier version of my story.

25 I guess most people know that you can write bold and iteric letters but what I didn’t know for a long time is that you can also have code blocks in your text! Keyboard shortcut: ⌘ + option + 6 / Ctrl + alt + 6.

26 You can even use various emojis in your texts. Not everybody might like that but I do. I think that it makes stories stand out and easier to read.

27 Customized drop caps. This is something that I found out in my 5th month on Medium! You can have custom drop caps to make your stories even more unique! Click on the drop cap letter itself until a green border appears. From your desktop, drag the custom image file you’d like to use in place of your drop cap directly onto the green box. Your custom image will now appear in its place.

28 You can embed many different types of content into your Medium stories. It is much more than I thought at the beginning, you can find all different content forms that you can embed here: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214981378

29 If you want to change the title that should be shown in the preview of your story — you have to click the three dots at the right corner and ‘’change display title/subtitle.’’ Otherwise, if you only change the title in the story itself, the displayed title won’t change!

30 You can import your stories that already exist. So if you have an existing website or blog and want to gain a bigger audience through Medium, you can also import your existing articles without any disadvantages.

31 You can leave private notes to stories. If there is any feedback that you don’t want to give publicly or if you want to ask the author something etc. you can simply add a private note to a specific section by highlighting and clicking the lock symbol.

32 There are several keyboard shortcuts to use on Medium! I didn’t know many of those until I found out in the Medium Help Section — check it out — those shortcuts can save you a lot of time!

Headlines

33 During my first weeks, I did a lot of research on how to succeed through blogging in general and I realized that great headlines are one of the secrets to success. There are many tips on which headlines perform best, but in fact, the key is to take your time and think about your headline wisely. It is one of the main reasons according to which your readers decide whether they click on your article or not.

34 Co-Schedule has a free Headline Analyzer which simply checks your headline and tells you how you could optimize it — big love!

Visuals

35 Stock photos are great. On Medium you have instant access to Unsplash and can find a perfect photo for your stories within a couple of seconds. Statistics say that articles which contain pictures are clicked much more, so you should make sure to add some visuals to every story.

36 Even though the selection of stock photos are great I would advise to create own pictures whenever it makes sense. Canva is my most favorite design tool for that kind of things — it will take you not more than a couple of minutes and you will have a unique design which will make your story special and more impressive.

37 When adding pictures to your stories you should be careful with the first picture, which will be shown in the preview of the story. You should choose a long format of the picture so that the picture in the preview is oblong and not in a square format.

38 It took me about 10 articles until I found out that I can access the photo databank of Unsplash directly on Medium. By clicking on the little loupe when writing and editing an article you can instantly access all free Unsplash stock photos. You can instantly type in a searching term and place it in your posting.

39 Flaticon.com is my most favorite website when I create images for my blog posts. It is a website where you can find and download thousands of icons to use in your images. You can adjust the colors and the format of the icon and use it in several ways.

40 Create your own visuals! With Canva you can easily create your own dividers, pictures to your social media profiles etc. This will make your articles stand out from the crowd.

Publications

41 Smedian.com is your greatest help when you want to publish your stories in publications. You get a great overview of the best performing publications and can instantly apply to become a writer for them and submit your stories. In my opinion, using Smedian is the easiest way to access several publications and engage with them.

42 When submitting a story to a publication you have to be careful about the confirmation. Normally you should get a notification mail once your story gets confirmed and published in the publication. As I have deactivated to get email notifications I never got the confirmation, thus, I didn’t even know if my stories were confirmed or not. Therefore, if you want to be sure, you have to check if your stories got confirmed. If not, you can, of course, try to submit the same story in an other publication.

43 Everybody can start a new publication. Many people might not know it but everyone can start an own publication. You can simply apply the design of your own brand or build one from scratch and attract people who are interested in that field.

44 Publications can email their followers. That’s one of the best reasons to start and grow your own publication — you can send emails to your followers!

Series

45 In the last 30 days, I tried several variations of Series on Medium. What I’ve learned is that every time you start a new series from scratch all your followers get a notification. This is super special because when writing normal stories your followers don’t get notified. So, for example, every time you write a new, longer posting you could create a short series with the key elements and link to the actual story. That way your followers will be much more likely to see your story.Additionally, people can decide to get updates of your series, this way they will get a notification every time you update this specific series.

Advantages of Medium

46 It sounds so obvious but yet it is super powerful — when writing on Medium you present your work to an already established audience of tons of people. Even if not millions of people will see and read your work on Medium — it’s much easier to get readers at the beginning than it is with your own website. You can link to your articles and drive traffic by engaging with others, it’s a great starting point.

47 I don’t want to say that it is super easy and effortless to earn money on Medium, but in my experience, you can earn your first dollars quite quickly if you make some effort. August being my first month I earned almost 80$ and I guess that this is completely fair for my writing skills and the amount of work that I have put into my profile. When building an own blog you have to put much more work and time into it before you can even think of monetizing it at all.

48 One more fact that I love about publishing on Medium ist that you can maintain the whole control. You can import existing blog posts if you already have an own blog and even if you submit your story to publications you keep all the rights. That way I am super comfortable with publishing here.

49 While you would need a clear niche when establishing an own blog, on Medium you can write about anything. Choosing different topics and categories will not affect your success as it is not irritating at all. This is a great way to try different things out and figure out what makes the most fun and profit.

50 Blogging on Medium was my first ever income generated on the internet. Therefore, I was quite skeptical about the payment procedure and how well it actually works out. To my surprise, it went super smoothly. Opening the Stripe account and connecting with my actual bank account was super easy and quick and I received my first payment super quickly.

51 There is really awesome stuff to read here. I generally educate myself through various channels and platforms but when I first registered on Medium I was not really interested in reading others articles. But once I started to scan through various posts I realised that people create awesome stories. By now it became a habit that I consume at least five Medium stories per day and I can for sure say that I have highly benefited from it so far. It helps me to get a quick overview on topics that I am not engaged with and to get some deep insights on other topics and I really appreciate the great work of Medium authors.

52 People are really interested in what you write. This might sound simple but in my opinion it is super important. When I started blogging, I was not sure about whether there would be any people reading the content at all. Throughout my first month I received so many thoughtful comments and messages to my stories which prove that people are highly engaged and thoughtful about what they read.

53 You can find really passionate wirters here on Medium — Professional writers or people with completely different professions who write out of passion! I love my small Medium family. You can simply get so much support and love if you also care for the people.

Blogging Tools

54 The Hubspot Blog Idea Generator can be your best friend if you struggle with coming up with new blog post topic ideas. You simply type in three nouns which interest you or about which you want to write and the generator suggests you several different headlines and topics. You can either choose one of them or simply take it as an inspiration. It’s a great way to come up with an idea for an article in just a couple of minutes.

55 Copy Clip is a smart Clipboard history manager which can make your blogging life a whole lot easier. It enables you to make use of sections which you have copied previously. This means that you can copy various quotes, links etc. and make use of them once you are working on your article. This can save a lot of time as you don’t have to switch between tabs anymore.

56 Play.ht is a free software which enables you to create audio versions of your written stories. In general, people are in a hurry and more likely to listen to content than reading, therefore, creating an audio version is an opportunity to gain an additional audience which engages which your stories.

57 Buzzsumo is a website that enables you to research the most popular articles and postings according to your searching terms. In the free version you get access to the first ten most searched, clicked and shared articles. This way you can research what people are most interested in and which kind of articles get the most engagement.

So far my journey on Medium has been a highly interesting one.

I will keep going as long as I feel like I and my readers benefit from what I produce.

For me, Medium was the starting-shot to writing and generally producing content — mainly because it is so easy to get started.

I highly appreciate the opportunity to deliver content that might help others and will definitely push forwards more and more.

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