Summary

The article provides insights into six lesser-known features of Medium that can enhance a writer's experience and platform, including custom domains, content licensing, SEO settings, newsletters for publications, and enhanced statistics through a Chrome extension.

Abstract

The author, reflecting on their four-month journey with Medium, shares six valuable yet underutilized features that can significantly improve a writer's presence and engagement on the platform. These features include the ability to set up a custom domain, which personalizes a user's Medium profile or publication URL, and the option to license content to protect against unauthorized use. The article also highlights the importance of SEO settings provided by Medium to increase visibility and traffic. For publication owners, the newsletter feature is recommended to keep followers engaged. Lastly, the author suggests using Medium's Enhanced Stats Chrome extension for a detailed analysis of user interactions.

Opinions

The author believes that Medium's Help Centre contains valuable information that users often overlook.
They express a personal struggle with setting up a custom domain due to a lack of IT savviness.
The author is disappointed with the total views they have received on Medium but recognizes the value of the platform.
They find the SEO settings and Enhanced Stats to be particularly useful features.
The author hints at the possibility of Medium features changing over time, as evidenced by the removal of certain topic-related functionalities.
They recommend a third-party article by Rita Atlas for guidance on finding curation topics, indicating a reliance on community knowledge.
The author is yet to utilize the newsletter feature for their publication, suggesting potential for future exploration and use.

6 Ways To Better Your Medium Experience With These Hidden Features

These uncommon features will help you boost your writing platform and experience.

I’m coming up to my fourth month on Medium now and the platform is absolutely huge, but you don’t need me to tell you that.

A few days ago, I needed to find an answer for something so I decided to look in the Medium Help Centre. Then I realised, I don’t ever think I’ve actually looked through this before, I’ve only ever looked at what I need to find. Has anyone else actually ever stopped to take a proper look?

So, I had a browse through and I’ve found 6 hidden gems that I want to share with you all:

Custom domain

What’s a custom domain? It’s basically a website. Instead of your profile saying www.user.medium.com you can change it to www.user.com. You can create domains for either your personal account and for publications.

Recently, Medium had made this free for Partnership Programme members but it looks as now you will have to purchase domains again, which is unfortunate.

I did manage to apply for a custom domain whilst it was free, but I’m not IT savvy at all so I’m convinced I did it wrong as my URL address has not changed…

If you do want to create your own domain, you can find out more here.

Find out curation topic

For a long time now, Medium have stopped letting writers know what topic your article has been curated in and have taken away a few features in regards to topics. There is a fancy way of finding this out. As it turns out, the curation topic is in the HTML coding of the article.

My laptop is old and due an upgrade, so I cannot take fancy screenshots to show you what to do. What I will do, is refer you to Rita Atlas’s article which helped me find out about my curated pieces. You can find the article here.

Content Licensing

Sick of websites stealing your work? Ever type your article into the internet and find that someone else has just copied and pasted it and published under their own name? Unfortunately, it does happen but you can reduce the chances of it happening.

A content license is you putting a stamp on your work. If any third party is wanting to use this work then will be charged a fee, or in this case it’s more likely to be traffic referrals.

If you want to find out more about how to set-up a content license with your article, you can find out more here.

SEO settings

Search Engine Optimisation is a huge part of our work within Medium. Everyone wants those all important views and traffic referrals. Many SEO websites will charge you to use their help which is not something many writers can afford.

Lucky for us, Medium does establish a way for us to enhance our SEO. You know those three dots next to the green ‘Publish’ button? Click on those and then click ‘More Settings’. On the left hand side, you will see a tab called ‘SEO Settings’.

Medium do not yet allow us to send newsletters from our personal page, this one is for those that have a publication only.

A newsletter is very convenient for getting your publication followers to engage even more in your publication, to showcase what has been published this week and to even have Editor picks if you get enough submissions.

Please be advised that not all of your followers will receive an email, only those that have their setting open to receiving newsletter.

I am yet to set one up for the publication Show Your City. If you want to find out how to setup a newsletter, find out more information here.

Enhanced Statistics

You will have to download Google Chrome for this. Enhance Stats are an excellent, in-depth overview of the interactions with your Medium account. For example, ever since I first started on Medium I have 8,500 views in total which I am actually pretty disappointed about, but it’s better than nothing.

You can download Google Chrome Enhanced Stats here.

I will admit, the only features I use frequently is SEO Settings, curation topic and Enhanced Stats now and again.

Even if you knew about one or two of these features, unless you’re a Medium master, then I hope these will benefit you massively. I most certainly didn’t know about all of them, and I’ve been on Medium for 4 months now.

Enjoy!