How to Format a Blog Post
And increase your readership.
Medium is a website for writers. It encourages writers by making their website super user-friendly, including the simple format editor.
There are no other writers’ websites like Medium that serve as your blog with such little effort from you. It is almost ridiculous how easy the site is to use.
Sign up for an account and start writing.
Medium lets new writers publish and quickly find an audience for free. Well, virtually free, there is a small annual fee of $50.00 to sign up for the Medium Partner Program, but with that comes the potential to make money — a significant amount.
Knowing how to use the site’s feature editor to the best of your ability will help you to find an audience and increase your chances of curation — your goal if you want to make an income from your work.
While you won’t be making thousands of dollars or even hundreds of dollars overnight, you can make money in a three to six-month timeframe, with dedicated work and sustained effort on your part.
The Medium editor feature
The editor feature makes it easy to format a post so that it looks beautiful and organized. It’s super easy. Select the text you want to format and choose the appropriate option from the toolbar.
Add formatting to your writing for magazine-quality posts to attract readers and curators.
Let’s talk about curation. Medium’s curators scour the site for quality writing that fits Medium’s standards and is visually polished, including photos that reflect the content and appropriate headlines and subtitles.
When a post is curated, it will get a broader audience on Medium. Curated posts are promoted through algorithms and will ensure your story gets in front of more readers.
The curation gods make it so.
If you write well, edit for spelling and grammatical mistakes, have content that is interesting and entertains or informs — all three is best — and you format correctly, you can get more eyeballs on your work through curation.
How to format a post to increase chances of curation
Headline
To format your headline correctly. Select your headline and click the large “T” icon from the popup menu. When you select large “T,” the correct formatting for a headline, it will format your title.
Make your headline title case. Here is a website to format your title into title case, if you’re unsure how to write title case.
Subtitle
The space directly below the title is considered the subtitle.
To format a subtitle correctly, select your subtitle text and click the small “T” icon from the popup menu. Your subtitle should be written in sentence case, a regular sentence with a period at the end of it.
The same formatting can be used for headers and subheaders.
- Headers: To set a header, select any text that isn’t the title or subtitle and click the large “T” icon.
- Subheaders: To set a subheader, select any text that isn’t the title or subtitle and click the small “T” icon.
White space is crucial
Make sure you add a lot of white space to your post.
You accomplish this by varying sentence and paragraph length. Make sure you break up paragraphs where it makes the most sense in the story and enhances flow for your readers.
Most people read on their phones. To ensure a pleasant reading experience, make sure you don’t have too many long paragraphs with no break.
The image
Under the subhead, insert your photo.
Unsplash has the most stunning and attractive photography, but they are often overused. Too often, writers on Medium use the same photo over and over again, try not to.
Try to use an image that no one has used before, it can take time to find a unique one that fits your story, but the image is important.
Think outside the box and choose an unusual photo.
Reality
When you post your first story, you may not have anyone read it or clap for it. That is OK.
Please don’t allow the absence of an audience to stop you. Keep going.
If you are consistent, you will find your voice and an audience.
Once you have followers, they will give you a better idea of what Medium readers like to read.
You learn through experience, trial and error, so keep trying. Medium is a slow burn, it takes time.
But once you find your niche or someone comments on one of your stories or lets you know what you have written has helped them in some small way, you will know you are on the right track.
My advice to new writers on Medium is not to obsess over stats right away and write.
Try Medium for a year, and if after a year, you like the ups and downs of a writer’s life — the inconsistent income and the hustle, keep going.
You will see results. But you have to see them when there aren’t any to see; you have to believe your writing will find some fans, you have to have faith in the process.
Get your ideas in motion. Action leads to results.
Here are the steps to make in on Medium
- Publish five to seven times per week. Focus on both quantity and quality, but don’t obsess over perfection, it doesn’t exist. You will get better over time, with practice.
- Pick a compelling headline and photo. Use Unsplash and make sure to cite your picture correctly. Medium curators look for whether a photo is properly cited.
- The headline has to be interesting and reflect the main point of your post. Don’t make it clickbaity; Medium doesn’t like clickbaity titles. Make it unique, though.
- Run your essay through Grammarly before you post to avoid any spelling and grammatical errors.
- Share your work everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, any social media site where you have followers.
- Enjoy the process; there is no point in writing if you dread and resent it, you have to bring joy to your goals, or it will feel like a struggle.
- Reply to comments from your audience, even if your audience consists of two people — those two people are your true fans. Get 9998 more true fans, and you could have a million dollar business. Your audience will appreciate you.
- Have a set routine you follow daily to maximize output.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering Type A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
