7 Things I Wished I Knew Sooner When I Joined Medium In October
Practical methods to grow an audience for your stories
It was like skydiving out of a plane at 10,00 feet.
That’s how I felt when joined Medium in October. I was overwhelmed looking at all the articles, and I wished it was like the first (and only) time I went skydiving with an instructor attached to my back and jumped out of a plane.
I could have used someone to yell me, “Pull the cord!” on Medium as my skydiving teacher told me, and so if you’re a newbie or veteran to Medium, you know how you’re totally on your own at the beginning on Medium.
You have to jump out of the plane and figure out how to land on two feet.
So here are eight things I wished I knew when I joined Medium in October. Some of them you may already know, and others might be game-changers that you didn’t know (just like I didn’t realize until the last couple of weeks):
1. Find publications to write for using a Medium Tag
I’m sure you love writing as much as I do, but on Medium, I’ve learned we have to also be good at marketing the stories we write. Writing for publications is the best way to put your stories in front of more readers than self-publishing.
Thanks to Tom Kuegler, I learned there are six easy steps to find the right publication to write for and I used this tip to write for 17 publications in December (I’m off work and so, yeah, I had a lot of extra time to write):
- Go to your URL and type in this: https/medium.com/tag/parenting.
- Replace “parenting” with any one of the 74 tags Medium uses to share articles on the 74 Tag pages on the platform.
- Pick a tag that you write and read about and press “Enter.”
From here you’ll see a page like the one below:
4. Scroll through the articles and look for the names of publications next to the writer’s name.
5. Click on the name of a publication in a story.
6. Look at the kinds of articles they publish (and if they have recent posts) and check out their submission guidelines to be added as a writer.
It’s that simple to put your stories before more readers’ eyeballs. Some of the readers of the publication will follow you when your story gets published in the Coffee Times or Evolve and you have readers who look for your stories.
2. Find people to follow using one of the 74 Medium tags
This is not another one of those follow me-to-follow strategies. Be smarter than that, folks. You’re following people who won’t even read your stories because you don’t have anything in common.
Here is a much better way to find followers who write in the same niche as you, thanks again to Tom Kuegler:
- Type https/medium.com/tag/parenting (or whatever tag you want_
- Find a popular article on Medium on that subject page.
(The next step is the Holy Grail to gain followers)
3. Open any article, click on the number below the clapping hands.
4. You will see a list of people who clapped for the article will appear.
5. Click “follow,” and many will most likely follow you back, and if you read-and-clap for each other’s articles, you can develop a reciprocal relationship
What’s cool about this is the list of people shows the bio for each person who clapped for the story, so you can see if they are a good fit for you to follow. I think you’re allowed only like 50 follows per day, but don’t me on that : )
3. Change your title after publishing
We’ve all written at least one terrible title. A bad headline can make a difference between someone reading or scrolling past your article. But did you know you can edit and change the title and parts of your article, even after an article has been published in a publication? I didn’t know this until recently.
So if you look at your stats for one of your stories and see it’s not doing too hot and think it might be because your title doesn’t indicate the audience (who it’s for) and the benefit for your readers, consider making a change to your title.
Thanks to Nancy Peckenham, owner of Crow’s Feet for emailing me back and letting me know you can edit your story after it’s been published.
4. Tag Your Way to More Claps
Another thing I picked up from Tom Kuegler is tagging other writers in your story. What’s great about this strategy is it sends a notification to the person’s in-box who you tag saying they’ve been mentioned in your story.
Of course, KiKi Walter, owner of The Memoirist, will be curious why she is mentioned in your story and be grateful to you for introducing readers to her publication, and she might give you a shout-out in her next newsletter.
FYI: The Memoirist is a great outlet for creative nonfiction/memoir writing.
5. How to become a Top Writer
If you like to write a lot, it’s not that hard to become a top writer and for the algorithm to place your articles at the top of a Tag Page. This is another thing no one told me about … pick one of the 74 tags for your articles and write frequently under that tag. This is how I became a Top Writer in Parenting and Diversity.
6. Good formatting, good titles, and substantiate claims with links is how a story gets curated
The algorithm is a computer science dweeb kind of guy/gal who wants you to give links to substantiate all your claims, so make sure you have claims and links in your stories, and I’d say he’s a bit biased against more personal articles, and so it’s a good practice to drop some links in those as well.
Good titles + substantiate claims with links + format your article with subheadings and pull quotes + get some reads and claps to your story. This is the Yellow Brick Road for a story to be curated for more reads.
Of course, you have good writing too. That’s tip #8 coming up. And the title of your story has to grab a reader’s attention in .2 seconds to not get swiped past.
7. Write something with soul in It:
The trick to getting people to read your stories is simple: to provide relevant information or to tell a good story with a touch of your heart and soul in it, so the reader can get to know the person behind the writing and don’t forget to respond to all the comments you receive. That’s the fun of being on Medium.
Good writing is the surest way to get the claps to earn some algorithm juice for your stories. But if you find other writers in your niche by clicking on the number of claps for a story, tag other writers in a story, and follow the other tips in this article you can build a greater audience for your stories.
Correction: This story was published at 4 p.m. on January 5th. In that story I misquoted Keira Fulton-Lees as saying Medium writers are paid based partly on claps to their stories. I got this information from a comment she made to a story when this was true for Medium stories until October 2019. Moreover, I did not follow socially acceptable protocol to ask her permission to tag her in my story. I deleted this inaccurate information as soon as I was made aware of it one hour later. You can read more about how members of the medium partner program are paying by reading the following article from The Medium Help Center. Since I misquoted information publicly to Keira, I wrote and self-published a story to make a public amends/apology and to share what I learned from the story. You can read it here, “Something I Learned About the Right and Wrong Way to Tag Other Writers.”
A shout out to Serenity Jean and her story “Turns Out I’ve Just Been Autistic All This Time (Part I)” that inspired me to write, “Turns Out I’m Autistic, and I’ve Missed The Signs For 52 Years.”
Shout out also to: Lisa's Desk Chat, Alexandra Christensen, Jeff Peirish, Maria H. Khan, Rebecca Morton, Pam Winter, Lu Skerdoo, Lorrae G., Jo-Anne Oliveri, Janet Meisel, Alison Acheson, Richard Armstrong, Hope, Shanice Lawton, Alan Simpson, Danielle Hestand, Rain Aizle, J.R. Spiers, Jimmy Misner Jr., Madison Sasser, Scott Ninneman, John Walter Raney 1st, Doa Demir, Jan Sebastian, D Geiger, Katt Kennedy, Alison McBain, Alex Frederickson, Sue Stroud-Speyers, Nicole Hilbig, Don Sabado, Harold Zeitung, Bonnie Joy Sludikoff, Dawn Bevier, Sally Prag, Amanda Payne
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Or check out my YouTube video on Seven Tips for Success on Medium.
