THE SECRETS OF WRITING ON MEDIUM, PART 13

A Marketing Primer For All You New Writers Out There.

Your guide to the dos and don’ts about self-promotion on this social media writing platform that shall remain nameless.

There are three truths you will learn over time from writing on this platform.

1. People who claim they are making tons of money ($10K per month) from writing here are almost all lying, a fact you can prove with a calculator and a little research.
2. You will notice all the claims that this platform wants “quality” writing never includes qualifiers such as “great,” “high,” “top,” or even “good” for a reason. Monetizing a site means trying to attract paying subscribers with content in the same way that news tries to attract viewers: sensationalist bullshit.
3. Unless you absolutely can’t string three coherent sentences together, the only difference between your writing and that of the most popular writers on this site is marketing ability.

There are a lot of good writing resources to explore if you want to improve your craft. But if you want to build more readership, you have to learn to promote yourself.

If you’re looking to improve as a writer, you’ll find those resources in the footnotes.

This article focuses on how to promote your writing to build your readership.

The picture I’m going to paint isn’t pretty.

There is no easy way, no short cut, or get-rich-quick scheme (although there are people who will try to sell you their courses and books with that type of promise).

A little history of this site will help you understand how much has changed.

Since the end of 2015, there have been a lot of changes — almost none of them for the better.

Originally, people recommended stories with little green hearts that were the equivalents of Facebook likes.

As the corporate masters of this platform tried to monetize the site, they made numerous changes in the software interface, and the way articles can attain wide circulation among readers.

Here’s how the site used to work:

FEED

The article feed came from one of three places: subjects you chose, articles recommended by the people you followed, or articles written by the people you followed.

There was a smaller box on the right side of the page that contained the most popular articles on the site.

Even back then, people complained about all the “popular” crap clogging our feed.

Here is a compilation of the funniest satire pieces ever written about Medium’s self-help gurus, life hackers, tech bros, and content marketers.

CURATION

In the beginning, there was no curation, only featured articles chosen by the editors.

With fewer writers and fewer total articles, it was much easier to have a feature article.

Without compensation, one could argue that social media headaches outweighed the benefits of increased public exposure.

My first featured article attracted external users, not my normal small group of friends, and marked the first time some jerk trolled me. (This obnoxious behavior was a revelation to me into what women have to deal with every day.)

COMMENTS

Writing responses was so much easier.

At the end of each article, if you clicked to see responses, a list of comments just opened under the story.

You could read comments and still scroll back up to refer back to the story.

If the author recommended the comment, it was given preferential placement at the top of the comment section.

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

In the old days, Medium’s email newsletters contained short reviews of featured articles with links.

For those fortunate enough to be featured, this type of promotion lasted for the life of that email.

THE GAME

I’m not going to say Medium was perfect — the site turned writing into a social media game from Day 1.

The social media geniuses dominated the site, trying to sell the same services, and telling the same lies that “you can, too!”

But money changed everything.

Imagine if Angry Bird or Candy Crush created a special game for paid subscribers that allowed a tiny percentage of people to make money. Now imagine if they allowed players to sell their books, e-seminars, and personal coaching with the promise of helping new players make big bucks. Suddenly, you have a new gold rush, with a flood of people trying to sell digital shovels.

After researching gamification, relative deprivation, cognitive dissonance, and the Dunning-Kruger effect to figure out what makes social media sites, including Medium, so addicting, I wrote this:

If you think great writing will rise to the top, guess again.

The changes in this site have made it impossible for the vast majority writers to gain any traction.

It feels as if I wrote a book on it. I guess you could say I wrote an ebook on it, considering there are 12 chapters and counting.

But we have entered a brave new writing world since the end of October, and there are new rule changes to learn.

Let’s review the promotional methods currently accepted as “normal” on this site:

• People with massive social media followings have their derivative, unoriginal self-help articles (which violate Medium’s curation guidelines) featured or curated automatically.
• People who write personal essays with the slimmest connection to hot button issues get curated regularly, regardless of the writing quality.
• People who write sex “confessionals” (most likely fiction rejected by the Penthouse Forum) are exposed repeatedly to the public, and enjoy the deepest market penetration.
• Medium’s paid writers dominate the articles that populate Medium-owned publications. Those publications make up 9 of the 12 links at the top of the Medium home page, a significant advantage in attracting eyeballs.
• Clogging up your daily feed with stories that have nothing to do with the topics you chose when you “customized” your reading preferences (for example 20 out of 30 articles I counted in my feed were not the topics I chose).
• Reducing the visibility of the writers I follow to a tiny 4-article box. Yes, I can click on the box and see a page of writers I follow. Since the latest change in October, I can go days without seeing my favorite writers. The only way to find them is to go directly to their profile.
• In-article requests to join the author’s newsletter may be a violation of Medium’s rules, but it is ignored even though it is an obvious form of self-promotion.

Here are the tactics a writer has on this site to promote their work, and most of them are frowned upon by Medium:

• Follow, clap, highlight, or comment on the work of other writers in the hopes they look at your profile and read your work.
• Comment on an article and add a link to your article, when it is relevant to the original post. This is far simpler than copying and pasting a long passage.
• Respond to an article by writing a new post and then tag the writer of the original article.
• Promote the work of other writers in a review and tag them by name. They will read about themselves and possibly read your work as a thank you.
• Start a publication, then send out promo letters to your followers, which will go to their email address. This is the only way to ensure they will see your work before it gets buried in the feed.

Here’s the only tactic that is off-limits and might get you into some hot water:

• Tag a long list of people, hoping they will come to find where they are mentioned and then read the article. (If they are your friends, it’s not a big deal. If you tag a thousand strangers, it’s spam, and I’ve only seen that happen once.)

After you’ve done all the basics, the real challenge is to learn how to leverage social media.

This is the area where I’ve still got a lot to learn, but I have gotten some good results by taking the following baby steps:

• Join Facebook writer groups for support in writing, to learn more about self-promotion and to share your work when appropriate.
• Use twitter to promote everything you write. Because the founder of Medium was also the founder of Twitter, every person directed to your article can view it for free. Hopefully, you can build a readership in this way. If some of them become paid subscribers, that will increase your compensation.
• Use hashtags on twitter to call out groups of people who would be interested in your article. I did this for the first time with a tennis article and it brought in a large (for me) number of people over the next few days: “Secret #4: I finally harnessed the power of social media!”

• For more information on improving your social media following, you will need to do searches outside Medium. In all of the “I made $11,369 last month and you can too!” articles I’ve read, none of them address the real secret sauce that helps them build a huge following. And why would they? If everyone developed a similar number of followers, that would decrease the money they make each month. (As I’ve written before, Medium is a zero-sum game.)
• If you have the budget, it might be smart to hire a social media expert and learn from them.

Of all the things you will do as a writer, never forget about marketing.

Regardless of whether you are self-publishing books on Amazon or trying to build an online career as a blogger, marketing will be the most important work you will do.

Not everyone can write, but that doesn’t stop people from becoming successful writers.

Some of the worst books I’ve ever read have been written by New York Times Bestselling authors.

I’ve been making jokes with my sons about one especially horrific passage:

She headed downtown, under a sky the color of malice, dark and foreboding — Sidney Sheldon

With the help of his agent, publicist and the marketing clout of a big publisher back in the days when that was the only way to make it as an author, Sheldon sold a bazillion books by writing crap.

Even though you will slave over your craft to become a professional writer, all the time you spend to produce good work will be wasted if you don’t learn to market yourself.

Here’s a quote I love from a writer who seems to know a lot about marketing but may not be so good in the math department:

Let’s say that my first third is creating intellectual property assets, of which writing books is one part. And then, another third of my day will be things like marketing, so stuff like this. And podcasting, I will do in another third.

And then a third will be running my business.

— Joanna Penn

In sports, coaches talk about great players giving 110%.

It appears that writing is much more difficult, as you have to give 133%.

Remember those words and one day you will become a true success.

(Okay, there’s no guarantee that you will become a success, but remember those words anyway because I wrote them and they’re kind of funny.)

Maintaining your sense of humor about all the twists and turns and ups and downs you will experience during your writing career is the only thing that will keep you sane and motivated to keep pushing that boulder up the hill.

Good luck!

FOOTNOTES

Here are some resources for everything you need to know about writing on Medium:

Part of becoming a better writer is the willingness to look at your strengths and weakness and then going outside your comfort zone.

Finally, learning a little etiquette in relation to your fellow writers couldn’t hurt.