How to Get Started on Medium: Becoming a Top Writer in Your First Month
Stats and advice from a novice who gets the struggle
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- How to Get Curated
- How to Get Published
- How to Get Reccomended
- How to Become a Top Writer
- How to Get Your First “Repeat Readers”
- How to Get More Views in General
- The Stats on My Stories
Introduction
In my first month of Medium, I’ve reached several major milestones: I’ve been curated and recommended by the platform multiple times; I’ve been published in some of my dream publications, and I’ve won multiple top writer awards. Success is — as many will attest — a combination of luck and hard work. My achievements are nothing compared to so many talented writers on Medium. However, what little success I have achieved, I’m sure I can attribute almost exclusively to luck.
I happened to stumble upon a great deal of success by accidentally doing things I realize now I should have done more from the start. These accidental stepping stones are what I want to share in this article.
Disclaimer
I must acknowledge that I am a fish out of water when it comes to writing articles on any platform, forget Medium. However, immersing myself in the world of writing for even just thirty days has taught me so much.
While I could reflect on what I did right and wrong alone, I realize that perhaps it could be helpful for all the new writers on this platform if we shared our experiences and our advice. After all, it’s new writers that understand the struggles of new writers the best, and so maybe we’re the ones most qualified to help each other.
How to Get Curated
Perhaps the best thing about Medium is this:
You don’t need to have followers for your work to be recognized and read.
This is all thanks to curation. Stories that are curated on Medium under some tag show up as suggestions for readers who express interest in that tag.
Since curation is linked to tags, the tags you choose to put on your stories are perhaps the most important decision you’ll make as a beginner writer.
Certain tags curate stories more frequently than others, especially tags related to programming and technology. On the other hand, from observation and experimentation, it seems that when your stories are posted to tags such as love or self-improvement, curations become more difficult.
That being said, my verdict (from my limited experience thus far) would be this:
- Publish stories to a range of larger and smaller tags to maximize your chances of getting curated.
- Proofread your writing through Grammarly or the auto-correct on Google docs before posting to make sure grammatical errors don’t dissuade curators on Medium from your story.
- Pay extra attention to your introduction, conclusion, and formatting
Apparently, real humans decide which stories are curated and which are not. This means it’s extremely worthwhile to make sure your introductions and conclusions are solid, as well as your formatting: if someone skims through your writing, fixing these things will make your stories or articles appear as professional as possible.
Keep in mind that whatever you do, certain stories just cannot get curated, ever. For a story to be curated, it has to fit Medium’s guidelines for distribution, which I’ll post a link to here.
One more word of warning: you might already be curated and just not know it yet. To check if a story is curated, look for the following words hidden under the title of an article when you check its stats.
Chances are, if your stories have more views than you have followers — or even nearly as many views — you’ve been curated. I missed my first few curations because I expected my stories would skyrocket in views if they were curated.
Spoiler alert: That didn’t happen.
How to Get Published
Curation, while highly desirable, isn’t guaranteed to get your story recognized by a huge number of people. Getting published isn’t either, but I’ve found it’s far more powerful in general — especially if you manage to break into publications that are super active. This is because publications also distribute your content to their followers.
Before we look at how to get published, let’s look at which publications you should aim for.
Which publications should you aim for?
Some — not all — of the top publications on Medium are listed below:
- The StartUp (745K followers)
- Towards Data Science (624K followers)
- BetterHumans (385K followers)
- BetterProgramming (203K followers)
- BetterMarketing (113K followers)
- LevelUpCoding (73K followers)
- JavaScript in Plain English (57K followers)
- CodeLikeaGirl (43K followers)
That being said, the publications with some of the most followers aren’t necessarily the best. Some smaller publications, like CodeX, are super active, with over half a million reads a month despite only around 10K followers. I’ve gained more views from these than far larger publications like LevelUpCoding.
You should make sure you apply to any publication that’s active and has more followers than you, multiple times. It’s often the second or third application that’s successful.
More than the number of followers a publication has, pay attention to whether or not it’s a fit for your content.
Even if your stories get published in a publication, people will only read them if that’s the type of content they followed the publication to see.
Four Tips for Getting Added as a Writer to Publications
To get into a publication, the first step is getting added as a writer by an editor. To do this, the following tips might be useful.
- Make sure your existing articles are of high quality — editors want to see evidence of good writing quality
- Make sure you have a number of articles that match the niche of the publication(s) you’re applying for — editors want to see you know how to write quality content that’s relevant to them
- Try to get your articles curated — smaller publications especially are really looking for curated content as that content is sure to drive at least some traffic to their publication
- Apply, apply, apply!
Apply to as many publications as you can to maximize your chances of getting into them: even if your odds of getting published are as low as 1%, if you apply to 100 publications, you can expect to get added as a writer to at least one of them.
A great website that helps you both find publications and apply to them easily is Smedian. It’s totally free so I encourage you to join if you haven’t already.
How to Get Recommended
Published stories that are curated also have the chance to be recommended. The difference between curation and recommendation seems minimal to me, but from what I gather, fewer stories are recommended than curated. This means recommendation is likely better.
When you’re recommended, you’ll actually get an email, like the one in the screenshot below.
For those of you interested, here’s my first recommended story:
Neither of my top stories has been recommended, so I’m not sure recommendation is all that important, but I assume the steps to getting recommended are the same as the steps to getting curated.
My only takeaway here is this:
Just write and hope for the best.
How to Become a Top Writer
Becoming a top writer is much easier than you might think. When I first became a top writer in the category “Women in Tech”, which has 32K stories published to it, it surprisingly didn’t take very much.
Case in Point: I barely gained any traffic before I was given that title.
Just by publishing stories multiple times to the same tags, I’ve become a top writer in several other categories too, each of which was larger than the one before.
Again, I can’t be totally sure how I did this, but I assume the following tips should help.
- Publish stories to the same tags every time
- Write stories that are likely to get curated in the tags you use (basically, make sure the tags you choose fit your stories)
- Make sure you publish to less common, or medium-sized tags (you can become a top writer in this category with a lot more ease)
- Publish stories frequently (this will ensure you contribute enough content to your chosen tags to be declared a top writer)
How to Get Your First Repeat Readers
To get followers, referred members, and email subscribers, you need to first get people interested in reading your content regularly.
How do you go about this? From a writer’s point of view, this question seems super difficult to answer. When you see things from a reader’s perspective, however, it’s a lot easier.
Think about who you follow and subscribe to. These writers likely caught your attention not only because they had one article you liked, but because when you visited their profile, they had several other articles on similar topics of interest to you.
Therefore, it seems logical to keep the following advice in mind when trying to build an audience.
- Choose a niche — post content that focuses on a select number of topics. I, for example, focus on technology and women.
- Post consistently. This way people feel like by following you, they’ll be able to read new and interesting articles they like.
How to Get More Views in General
We’ve established that to get more views, getting curated, getting published, and building an audience are all super important. That being said, there are some other things you can do. Namely: advertise your content. How?
- Share your content in your own stories by referring to them either in the middle of a story you’re currently writing (where appropriate) or at the end of a story (where you can refer readers to similar articles they may like)
- Advertise your content on online platforms. Some subreddits allow you to do this as well as places like Twitter, Linkedln, and Hackernews (for tech writers).
- Also, write content based on what you’ve found your readers like. If your readers like a certain story a lot, write more stories on similar topics. For example, since a lot of my readers liked reading “If Programming Languages Were Disney Characters”, I wrote many other stories like that, such as “If Programming Languages Had Jobs” and “If Programming Languages Were High School Teachers”.
The Stats on My Stories
I was super interested in learning about other writers’ progress on Medium, especially if they were new to the platform. I find that seeing others reach milestones can be super encouraging.
That’s why I’m going to share my stats for this first month here: everything from views to total earnings.
Overall Story Statistics
Top Three Most Popular Stories & Their Stats
- If Programming Languages Were Disney Characters
2. How to Format Your Python Code
NB: This story was published before I entered the Partner Program, which means I earned nothing for it until its peak days were over.
3. If Programming Languages Had Jobs
Audience Statistics
Earnings Statistics
Top Writer Statuses
My Publications
I’ve been added as a writer to the following publications:
- AWS in Plain English
- Better Programming
- Betterism
- Code Like a Girl
- CodeX
- Geek Culture
- ILLUMINATION
- ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR
- JavaScript in Plain English
- Level Up Coding
- Python in Plain English
TL;DR
For those of you in a hurry, here’s a summary of the advice in this article:
- Write consistently
- Pick a niche
- Use a writing editor tool
- Apply to many publications
- Publish to the right publications
- Choose your tags wisely
- Choose the same tags over and over
- Just enjoy the process
Thank you for reading!
I wish you the best on your writing journey. If you have any advice for me or other writers, please feel free to comment. I for one would really appreciate it!
