Advice on Getting Boosted and Having Your Story Read
Boost worthy stories and how people find your stories
This article explores the boost program or boosting and how to get your stories read.
If you’re asking “how are my stories on Medium found” this article will answer that.
Medium’s Boost program
In 2023 Medium began piloting or testing a Boost programme. The Boost Nomination Pilot or BNP is about nominators selected from paying members of Medium.
These “community nominators” as they are called are charged with searching for and finding boost worthy stories.
A story that meets Medium’s boost guidelines is given a boost. This means that it is distributed in weekly and daily email digests to tens of thousands of readers and promoted across the platform’s homepage and on the Medium app.
Since June 2023 I have been a nominator for the BNP. I submit stories that I think are boost worthy to the Medium curators.
It’s up to the curator of the day who reads my “elevator pitch” or blurb for why a story should be boosted, to accept the story for boost or not.
At the time of writing this article, there are approximately 110 nominators who are Editors of privately run Publications on Medium.
It is not easy to have your story boosted. It has to meet the boost guidelines and be passed as boost worthy by an individual human curator.
Think about a story that is suitable for a well-read and reputable magazine when thinking about being boosted. The more constructive and the more unique or unusual your story content, themes and main point is, the more likely your story will be memorable enough to a curator to boost.
The curators look at a synergy or a combination of things. In the curator’s mind, above all, the whole story package has to have a satisfying purpose or point while containing original or unique content or a fresh new angle of looking at things.
The boost worthy story (apart from poems and fiction) MUST have a personal element or show the authenticity or credentials of the writer. For example, a technical article should be introduced by how or why the writer is qualified to present the content.
Stories with “run-of-the-mill” or generic main points, like “meditation is good for mental health” will NOT be boosted unless the personal experience or the fresh viewpoints of the writer have a “wow” factor, i.e. are amazing.
Little known topics or stories with little known information that meet the boost criteria are preferred by the curators also.
Even if your story has some original or unusual elements, if the curator doesn’t think the point of your story is strong and important or maybe doesn’t like your style or some expressions in your story, it won’t be boosted.
Poems and fiction that meet the boost guidelines are eligible to be assessed for boosting. For information about the BNP please refer to my article following.
Some Publications have “Boosted Galleries” or pages featuring stories in their Publication which have been boosted. Perusing these may help you write for being boosted. Two examples follow.
The Taoist Online Boosted Gallery
Thirty over Fifty Boosted Stories
Illumination — one collection of boosted stories
Having your stories found
Medium has a high domain authority. This means that stories on Medium appear high up or even first on internet search lists. SEO means Search Engine Optimization, a way of configuring online content so that it is picked up by search engines easily.
Having a well crafted story title that an internet user may search upon can lead someone to your story published on Medium.
You should type a short description of the purpose of your story into the SEO section for your story. Access this by clicking on the 3 little dots at the top right of your draft story. Then click on “More settings.” Then click on “SEO settings”.
The description will have the first 200 characters of text in it by default. For this article you are reading now I changed the description to “How to write well on Medium.”
A tip is to think about what a passerby reader might search for.
Having a possible search term in the first paragraph of your story may enhance your story being discovered.
The standard ways to have your story found and read are listed below.
- Readers search by Tag names using the search field at the top left corner of the Medium homepage.
- Your followers see your story title and your name on the “Following” page of the Medium platform.
- The followers of a Publication, which your story is in, sees your story title under “Following.”
- Your email subscribers get notified about stories that you send out email notifications for.
- Your story is boosted by Medium or nominated by a community nominator and then boosted by a curator.
- You genuinely engage with other writers on Medium and some of them reciprocate by reading some of your stories.
- Someone does an internet search using a phrase that matches the title or SEO description or text in the first paragraph of your story and finds your story that way.
Consider that there are around 10,000 stories published every day on Medium. According to TechJury there are around 170,000 writers on Medium.
Your writing hinges upon what you like writing about. And your story titles should reflect a clear purpose or theme of your story in an engaging manner.
However, if no readers, who are interested in what you write, are online within a day or two of publication of your story, it may not be easily found.
I like to think that “the person who needs to read my story will find it.”
It would be fabulous to have a number of dedicated followers who read every story that you publish, but in my experience these are few for the vast majority of writers on Medium.
This means that you need to resort to consistently publishing on Medium, with best practice being to have one to three stories published per week (from my experience over five years plus of writing on Medium).
If you’re not a well known personality or a professional with a loyal following on Medium and you don’t write about mainstream topics like technology, data usage, income streams, corporate life, performance reviews, and personal development (to name a few), based upon mainstream events or issues, your stories may end up little read.
Conclusion
The first thing is to write well. The article below will help you with this.
The second thing is to accept that discoverability on Medium is not high because of the way searches work.
Try to promote your writing on Medium through online and offline channels outside of Medium, that could help get your work read. Have a business card with a link to your Medium profile page. Hand it to anyone who is interested in the information that you share on Medium!
You may like to mix your story content and themes to work out which are more read. Engaging with other writers on Medium sincerely may bring reciprocal reads of your stories.
Your comments on a story may pique the interest of readers other than the writer of the story. This might lead them to going to your Medium profile page and reading one of your stories.
Above all you have to decide why you write on Medium. Do you write mainly or only to make money? Do you see Medium as a convenient, easy to use platform to host your writing, as I do? Is there an alternative to Medium that you could use?
Even if your work is not as much read as you would like it to be, you can generate lists to showcase your best work related to particular topic or theme categories.
You can try pinning different stories to the top of your Medium profile page and seeing if they get more views or reads.
Your stories can be re-purposed too, for example, you could collate them together into an online book for family, friends, and acquaintances!
And never give up on your work being read. Things are malleable or changeable. Your dream or hope of a blockbuster may manifest just around the corner. You could try to write one story a month that is boost worthy.
In the meantime, all we can do is be grateful for the reads that we do get and relish our stories being captured online for ourselves as much as for others.