Booost!

How to maximise your Medium audience

Have you ever written a story just to receive an email from Medium a couple of days later telling you that “your story was boosted”? And did your story-statistics looked like this before and after that boost?

Well done! You have been… boooosted! Oh, you do not know what Boost is? Keep reading, we have gathered all the juicy details we know about Boost next.

What is Boost?

Boost is a program introduced by Medium on February 2023. Boost tries to identify the best stories in Medium and expose them to a wider audience. There is no guarantee as to how much such exposure will affect the number of your readers, however practice shows you gain an initial boost of a few hundreds to a few thousands of additional readers.

How long Boost lasts for?

Boost does not last for very long; usually, it lasts for just a few days. And that is good. The essence of Boost is not to provide you additional readership in perpetuity, but to bring to the surface stories, or writers, that are of exceptional quality but otherwise might have gone relatively unnoticed.

Your story will get that initial boost, more people will notice it, and hopefully more people will read it and interact with it. It is then Medium’s resident algorithm to pick it up, or not, for additional distribution.

Who picks stories to get boosted?

The Boost program is managed and supervised by Medium, however it is Medium’s users that nominate stories for Boost. At the beginning of 2023, Medium started approaching users active on the platform to enrol them into the Boost Nomination Pilot. Many people that have been invited to Boost Nomination Pilot seem to be very closely related to publications, as owners or editors. However, Boost Nomination Pilot is open to anyone.

It is therefore, us, the users of Medium that pick the stories to get boosted. In Mac O’Clock, half of our editors are members of the Boost Nomination Pilot and can nominate your stories for Boost.

How long does it take to get boosted?

It depends. Here is how it works:

You should be expecting a turnaround of a couple of days, however that depends on Medium curators and the workload they have to deal with at any given time.

“Wonderful news! All my stories now published in Mac O’Clock will get boosted?”

No.

You see, Medium’s first priority when creating the Boost Program is to allow exceptional, possibly undiscovered, stories to be discovered and brought up to a wider audience. “Exceptional” being the key here.

Medium keeps tabs on each participant’s nominations and calculates a success percentage. Nominate subpar stories that get rejected and see your personal percentage plummet. Have your success percentage reach low numbers and you might get expelled from the Boost Nomination Pilot.

Effectively, the editors of Mac O’Clock are extremely careful when choosing stories to be nominated for Boost.

“Will my stories be affected if nominated but rejected?”

No.

If our editors nominate your story and Medium’s curators decide that it is not worthy of Boost, your story will still receive its usual audience exposure. Nothing changes.

“Can a rejected story be resubmitted for Boost?”

It depends.

Before Mac O’Clock editors nominate a story for Boost we have already contacted the writer if we believe certain things within the story need to be changed to maximise the chanced getting accepted into Boost. When our editors receive feedback on their nominations, sometimes that feedback might contain actionable items. In such cases, we contact the writer back and work together to amend the story to be resubmitted. However, please keep in mind, this happens quite infrequently.

How to get Booosted!

Time to get to the meat and potatoes.

In this section, I will present some guidelines which are public knowledge, as well as, some tips which stem from my experience being a Boost Nomination Pilot member from, almost, the beginning of the program.

Please be aware that Boost Nomination Pilot members are in direct contact with the people working at Medium, discussing the Boost Nomination Pilot, including forthcoming features that we have been asked to not publicly disclose nor discuss. I will not spill the beans here nor betray the trust Medium has put in its Boost Nomination Pilot members.

A. Hard YESs

“Hard YESs” comprises of points that you should definitely aim for, so your story becomes eligible for Boost. The more boxes your story ticks, the better the chances:

• Be 100% compliant with the Medium Rules for publishing.
• Be Constructive: A reader of your story feels they have advanced in some way by learning more about the world, other people, or oneself.
• Be Original: Nobody wants to read the same things again and again. Find a topic you love and write something original about it.
• Have Relevant Experience: Your stories should be on topics you know well, have a lot of experience, and know very well what you are talking about.
• Well-Crafted Writing: Your story should be written in a way that readers find it easy to read, navigate, and understand.
• Memorable Writing: Not all stories need to be memorable, but the ones that excel, are.

B. Soft YESs

“Soft YESs” are points stemming from our experience in nominating stories. Keep in mind these are not hard rules but can help your story to be accepted into Boost.

• Story length: Aim for a minimum of 3 minutes-long stories.
• Choose a topic and stay with it: Your story should have one topic/theme and stay with it. If you plan, to e.g. cover the daily news and your story contains 4 paragraphs/sections on separate topics, it is probably going to fail getting into Boost.
• Clean look: Your story has to be readable. Do not use unnecessary formatting, sections, illustrations, etc. Use only what you need and only what serves your content.

C. Hard NOs

“Hard NOs” comprises of reasons we have seen stories being rejected for before. You can be sure, with a very high degree of certainty, that if your story falls within the following list, it will probably be rejected for Boost.

• Not being compliant with the Medium Rules for publishing.
• Having nothing special to say: To put it in a different way, not ticking any of the boxes of “Hard YESs”. If your story does not satisfy any of those criteria, it will be very difficult to be boosted.
• Having long CTAs: We all like to promote our newsletter, ask people to join Medium using our referral link, etc. If you want your story to be successful in its Boost nomination, you should keep your CTA section down to an absolute minimum. Aim for just a couple of lines of text and include only one link to whatever it is that you want to promote. Please be aware that stories with more than one link in the CTA section will not even be considered for nomination to Boost.
• Misuse of Medium drafting tools: Do not use the story editor’s tools as a fancy way to give “colour” to your story. A quote-block should only be used to quote someone, a Header 1 block should only be used to provide structure, etc.

D. Soft NOs

“Soft NOs” are, similarly to “Soft YESs”, points stemming from our experience in nominating stories. “Soft NOs” are things you should try to avoid while writing your stories:

• Very short stories: We have rarely seen stories in the range of 1–2 minutes getting boosted. As this is a “soft no” it does not mean it is impossible for such as story to get boosted, it is just very rare.
• Excessive linking: Try to minimise, even better do not use at all linking to other stories, resources, etc. Medium will automatically put links to your other stories below your story’s text, so there is no point adding more links yourself polluting the “clean look” of your story. If you need to reference external sources, do it in a separate section at the end of your story and remove embeds (i.e. keep just the text of the link, not the preview).
• Affiliate links: Although affiliate links are not prohibited, try to keep your affiliate links to an absolute minimum.
• “Listicles”: Stories with the sole purpose of presenting “a list of things” do not get along well with curators. We have had very limited success trying to nominate such stories and, in general, we will stay away from nominating such stories.
• Speculative stories covering the news: At Mac O’Clock people write about technology and, quite often, about upcoming technology. Unfortunately, speculating on upcoming news is not welcome in Boost.

Here is a quick figure with most of the above guidelines:

An epilogue, or… just write good content

I plan to keep this story updated as me and other Mac O’Clock editors we nominate more stories to the Boost program and we learn more about it. The more we learn, and we can share with you, the more updates you can find here.

If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments and I will try to address them, or include them in future updates of this story.

Thanks for reading and… just write good content!