Increase Reader Engagement for Free With 3 Clicks

Share your work…in the right place(s).

Getting started as a writer isn’t easy. I know, I have been there. And sometimes it’s hard to remember that the top dogs on Medium who rake in literally 20k per month once started with zero followers, zero stories, and not even a morsel of an idea of what to make of this platform.

If I have learned anything throughout my past two years on Medium, it is that self-promotion is incredibly important. If we don’t promote ourselves, then who will? How will we be discovered?

It can be an uncomfortable or even awkward feeling to “gas” yourself, as the kids say. And sharing every single thing you have ever published to your Facebook newsfeed is definitely not the answer.

I am not discouraging you from sharing your work across social media. I’ll share maybe an article a month, one that I feel targets a very broad audience. It doesn’t matter if it’s evergreen or time-sensitive. I am just very careful with how much I share. If you share excessively, people will start to ignore your posts and tune them out. …just like when you see an annoying ad for the 15th time over the course of the week. You tend to ignore it.

Share Where Members Will See

Remember, when non-Medium members read your piece, you are not earning a cent (unless they end up converting, which is far and few in between.)

I share to Facebook for the sake of helping others and entertainment. I also want people I know to associate my name with that of a writer. If they or someone they know needs a writing service, perhaps they will consider me, someone they know in real life and can trust.

So what’s the alternative?

Many Stories

Many Stories by Smedian Network is a platform that is connected to Medium. It is a place where you can share literally any and every story, and add appropriate tags to help readers find it. You can also add more than five tags.

You can follow others and people can follow you. You can even add the stories you share to a “Collection,” which is similar to the “Lists” feature on Medium.

It exists as a one-stop-shop for readers to network, share work, favorite or ❤️ another’s piece, and most importantly, promote themselves, shamelessly.

Now, Many Stories is not just to share your Medium articles. You can share links to any of your articles, making this the ideal platform for bloggers and freelance writers.

Many Stories can help you reach a wider audience and create new connections on Medium and elsewhere. After nearly two years on the platform, I just discovered the website about two months ago. I just earned my first 20 followers this week!

I really wish I had learned about this platform two years back because it would have provided an additional opportunity for networking. Rather, I spent time within Medium Facebook groups picking up things here and there, but in retrospect, nothing was really worth the time I spent there. Live and learn, I guess.

Top Writer on Many Stories

When you share a lot of posts in one day, you can earn a Top Writer badge on Many Stories. The top writers of the week are featured on the home page, offering extra exposure for you.

Since it took me so long to find Many Stories, I had 140+ articles to share, so I try my best to spread them out and maintain my top writer status from week to week. In a way, I have an advantage since I have a tremendous backlog of stories waiting to be shared.

When people see your name over and over again, this will increase familiarity, and further likeability and trustworthiness. This is actually true, as I studied Psych during undergrad. This is how advertisements work, and you can imagine repetition is effective since advertising is a monstrous industry at $249.8 billion annually in the U.S. alone.

So why not promote yourself for FREE and potentially earn a handful of loyal readers that actually appreciate your content? Because to be frank, the follow-for-follow technique is really never an effective strategy, long-term. This, I know from experience.

How to Share on Many Stories

Log in with Google or email. You may be put on a waitlist when you first create your account. For me, I don’t think it was more than two weeks.

During this waiting period, read, comment, and make connections with other writers. Don’t be stingy with giving some time to the platform before you reap the benefits. I assume that’s what Many Stories is looking for, but I cannot say that for certain.

I don’t recall receiving an email that I was off the waitlist. I just kept checking in periodically, and sure enough, one day I was.

After creating a bio, adding a picture, and linking my Medium profile, I was all ready to share.

When you’re ready for this step:

• Go to the article you want to share in Medium and adjust your SEO title and SEO description. Learn how to do that and why you should do that here.
• Go to the top right corner of your Many Stories profile page and click the Share button.
• Drop the link to your article.
• It will ask you if you are the author.
• It will allow you to add tags. Be aware of the spelling of your tags. Once you press enter, you cannot go back without clearing all of the tags. Tags should be relevant to the piece so others can find it through tag searching.
• Add your article to a Collection.
• Create a Collection and find a picture to represent it on a copyright-free website like Unsplash or Pexels.
• Voila!

When you share an article from Medium on Many Stories, readers will only be able to see a portion of the article. Of course, we want them to actually read it in full on our profile so we can earn money from their read-time.

It’s really important to have a captivating title, subtitle, image, and introduction paragraph. It doesn’t matter how good your piece is. If you do not satisfy the reader with those four things, you will not retain them for more than four seconds. I say this from learned experience and earning pennies, nickels, and dimes from pieces I spent an hour + on.

While initially, I thought I was just a bad writer, I soon learned that my low reader engagement and retention had more to do than what meets the (inexperienced with Medium) eye.

For good measure, and to remind you that you or anyone can make money on Medium, too.

So what are you waiting for?

Get sharing!

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