How You Tag Your Work Will Decide if It’s Widely Read or Disappears Forever
Why your tags matter
I wrote a version of this piece at the start of summer for one of my other publications but with so many of you submitting excellent work only to be left waiting while the team and I tackle the extensive queue, I wanted something specifically for Modern Women writers to help you get your work the audience it deserves.
Medium is my full-time job, well, home educating three of my four children is my full time job but this comes a close second and is how I support us so I take it very seriously. I am editor of 6 publications and owner of 2 and because of that I read tens of articles, poems, essays, and pieces of fiction every day. While I am permanently fascinated and inspired by the lives you share, I am often frustrated at your misunderstanding of tags.
We’re all used to hashtags on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or X, but it seems that all too often you don’t realise that tagging is just as important here on Medium.
Importantly though it works in a slightly different way.
Essential Point no. 1
Every publication uses tags to organise the pieces it publishes. If you check the header bar you will be able to see the sections in which your work will end up. These sections are essential if you hope to have your work read after the first few days after publication.
You see, once published your article will stand tall and proud on the main homepage screen, it’s carefully chosen image sparkling in the screenlight, working along side your title and subtitle trying to draw in the reader’s attention.
As the day passes, a few more pieces will be published, and after a day or two your slaved over words will drift lower and lower down the screen and past the attention span of most people. And this is when your tag usage can save your work from obscurity and give your work a hopeful boost.
Here at Modern Women we have five reader interest tags which are:
Self
Relationships
Motherhood
Careers
and Society
It is up to you to choose the tag that matches your work, and when you do your piece will drop into that section on our publication as well as the main front page. However, it will stay close to the top of that section a lot longer than it will on the main page where it will appear in the latest stories until newer published pieces knock it off the top spot.
The team and I will sometimes add a tag for you, or ask you to but we leave this largely up to you. But it’s very simple if you want one of our thousands of readers a month to find your work as they browse the different sections, you need to tag your work correctly.
Essential Point no. 2
There are tens of thousands of readers and writers on Medium, and something crazy like 20 thousand articles, essays, poems and stories are published every, single, day!
But before you give up in the face of that daunting number, remember you are not looking for every reader, you are looking for your unique readers. Your corner of the Mediumverse and that is where your tagging becomes even more important.
I like to describe Medium as the Spotify of writing, so think about how you use Spotify to search for new music? You don’t tend to search specific micro genres, at least not all the time. For the most part you use wide searches so instead of ‘dating post traumatic divorce’, you’ll search dating, relationships or divorce. In fiction for example you might crave a short form enemies to lovers on holiday in Europe story but you’ll search romance fiction first and then narrow things down.
If you want people to find you work the tags.
The page I’ve linked to below takes you to the ‘explore topics’ page Medium have provided. It gives you the over arching topic areas and then the main subheading under each one. These are ideal tags to use and honestly I often have a look through to get some inspiration for my own work and when I’ve got my Boost nomination hat on and I want to dig for the writers who self publish and sadly don’t get the audience they deserve.
If you’ve only got 5 options and 1 is taken by the publication you are submitting to, choose the others wisely.
So, do yourself and your editors a huge favour and go back and re-read the submission guidelines one more time. Make a note of the tags you are being asked to use and pick just one so that your poems find the poetry lovers, and your fiction finds those hunting for a new world to get lost in.
Tags aren’t just to help you pop up on the recommended list for Medium reads, they can help that imaginary perfect reader to find you within every publication.
Also did you know that if your work isn’t tagged properly it can’t be boosted… yet another reason folks! Get tagging!