Lessons Learned from my First 50 Medium Articles

An analysis of what works, what fails, and what remains to be seen

Although I have been a Medium member since August of 2019, I’ve only really started interacting with the platform over the last month. In my work as a content writer, I have learned how to quickly write engaging articles on a wide variety of subjects. However, content writing does not provide you much opportunity to write on topics that are of personal importance.

The above image shows my views over the last 30 days. The number is inflated because around 7,000 of those views came from a comment I made on a viral article. Still, I’ve been encouraged by the amount of engagement and response that is possible on Medium.

Some of my articles are showing a little bit of revenue. For the first few days, the number doubled, but you can not realistically expect a doubling return to continue, and lately it seems to be stabilizing. Currently, I’m curious to see how long, if ever, it might take to make $100 a month.

In this article, I will go through the articles I’ve already published and provide some quick notes on what I’ve learned. When you research writing with Medium, you’ll quickly be overwhelmed by concepts like SEO optimization, email lists, publications, followers, claps, etc. I’ll try not to bore you too much with those details, but I will provide some real world examples of how those concepts relate to each article.

Here goes:

1. You Have the Right to Speak Spanish in the USA

This was my first article that was curated on Medium. At the time, I didn’t know what that meant and I hadn’t published enough articles to fully appreciate the designation.

I originally wrote this article for a local paper as a follow-up to a letter to the editor I wrote that went viral. Oddly, the paper refused to publish the follow-up despite the success of the original article. This article had a print run in the local arts and entertainment publication.

2. Gus Dorais: Gridiron Innovator, All-American and Hall of Fame Coach

One of the first things I did when I began working on Medium in earnest was to create a publication dedicated to book reviews and writing. I have had great success as a reviewer and I’ve met some wonderful people. Above all, I believe that small press writers deserve to have their work recognized.

This book was written by the local librarian, and I originally wrote this review for my web page. It’s very easy to import articles that have appeared elsewhere onto Medium, and the new post gives the stories new life. I just imported this story this morning so it’s too early to tell what kind of impact it will have.

3. Trump or Trump Lite

One of the main things that I found attractive about Medium was that it offered an outlet for political and philosophical rants. I wrote this article as a response to many of the political arguments that were floating around social media during the Democratic primaries.

I think the article is decent, but it hasn’t done much on Medium to date, although I didn’t promote it on social media as much as I should have.

4. Hey Writers! Stop Giving Bad Readings!

This was the first story I wrote that was accepted into the Writing Cooperative. The Writing Cooperative is one of the largest Medium Publications with a following of over 200k. This article was also accepted for curation.

This article has performed better in terms of views than anything else I have written so far. It demonstrates that publications can add a needed boost to visibility, and curation only augments that boost.

5. How Corporate Publishing Has Destroyed Literature

This was the first article I wrote that was accepted by a publication. It was taken by Thoughts and Ideas which has a following of around 40k. Being featured in a publication brings more visibility, but I’d like to see this article get a few more reads.

6. Scholarly Articles Represent Self-Publishing

Even though the premise of this article is true, I admit that I wrote it to antagonize…and it worked. It was accepted to the Writing Cooperative, and it was also curated. I figured I’d hook an individual with a PhD who would become incensed by the topic, and I did. You can click on the link below to read the comments.

I think the comments are pretty interesting, but I feel I was being lectured to and then blocked. You can make up your mind for yourself. The point of this article isn’t to disparage scholarly journals, it’s to elevate self-publishing.

7. The Billionaire Myth

This was another rant I wrote to get the idea off my chest. I’d originally planned on submitting it to the local paper, but they discontinued their option for publishing articles longer than 250 words.

I’ve had a couple of nice Facebook discussions based on this article, but it hasn’t done much other than that. Perhaps I’ll submit it to a publication at a later date and give it a little boost.

8–9. Stories for P.S. I Love You

P.S. I Love You is another one of the top Medium publications. My article ‘Be Wary of People Who Don’t Swear’ is probably my favorite Medium post so far. I wrote it about a year ago, and I’ve been waiting to find a place to publish it where it might get some traction. It was curated and has been one of my most successful posts so far.

‘Dear Millennial, Gen X Feels Your Pain’ started out as an article I wrote for a different magazine which I reworked to use for medium. I sent a draft link of that story to become accepted as a writer to P.S. I Love You.

10–17. Stories for A Parent is Born

Since I’ve been writing for Medium, I think the stories I most enjoy are the ones I’ve written for A Parent is Born. These represent little snapshots of adventures that I have with my kids. On most days I wake up at around 5 AM, and I come downstairs and write one of these as my first task of the day.

‘The Great Cookie Catastrophe’ was curated, and I’ve received wonderful comments and responses for all of these. My wife especially likes them and that’s always a bonus.

A Parent is Born knew me because I’d submitted a story to ‘The Good Men Project’ about a year ago.

18–23. Stories for Extra Newsfeed

In the course of reviewing my articles, I noticed that the stories on Extra Newsfeed don’t get a lot of repeat traffic after they are initially released. Also, I think Medium editors must not like the publication since they don’t tend to pick articles that appear there for curation.

I’ve dabbled in everything from outright aggression to satire with this publication. It has a pretty solid following, but I think I need to work my way into some of Medium’s political publications for greater publicity. These are still some pretty good articles.

24–33. Stories for Write and Review

Write and Review is the Medium publication I built to showcase my book and film reviews. As I am learning about Medium, I am also learning about the publications. I can see by collecting my reviews here that I have to be more proactive in the titles for these reviews. I think I’ll probably get more views if I use a creative title that has a better chance of getting indexed by Google and appearing in topical search results, rather than just a generic listing of the author and book title.

With a Medium publication, you have an option to insert a navigation bar. Take advantage of that to write a strong ‘About’ article as it’s situated to receive a lot of hits. In compiling this list of articles, I see I should do a couple articles about generating book reviews to fill up the navigation bar.

34–36. Stories for Curiosity Never Killed the Writer

Curiosity Never Killed the Writer is a midsized Medium publication that will publish longer stories. The editorial team is fantastic and they will work with you to make sure your story is in top shape. They’re very courteous about their editing suggestions.

These stories are all good earners even though they have lower total hit counts. I will need to submit some more stories to them.

37–38. Stories for BeYourself

BeYourself is a huge publication, but they prefer that you don’t put your work behind the paywall. I was hoping for greater visibility for these articles. I believe they are both very strong and the photos are some of my best.

39–40. Stories for Illumination

Illumination is a growing publication that does a good job of promoting its writers in its newsletter. Frankly, I think all of these publications need to send out a once monthly newsletter featuring at least one work from one of their authors published that month. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised and more of the stories I’ve already written will get a burst of publicity in the upcoming weeks.

‘Speaking Spanish in America’ is the most well-known thing I’ve ever written. It went viral back in 2016 and was shared over a hundred thousand times. This is an archived version because the newspaper where it was published put the original behind a paywall. They also removed all the comments, which is sad because there were over 2,000.

41. A Quarter Past Cooked

This is a short story about cycling that was accepted to Publishing Well. It’s a small, but growing publication with about a thousand subscribers. This story was originally accepted to be published in a local magazine, but then the chief editor was replaced. It’s a quality piece, I hope it gets a few views.

42. The Short Change Hustle

This short story was accepted with Any Writers. This is another smallish publication that will take a look at short stories.

43–49. Unaffiliated Stories

These are stories that I posted on Medium before I really began to try to understand how the platform works. None of them are featured in publications and they don’t see a lot of traffic.

The last article was published as a newsletter for Write and Review. I find it a little strange that you can link to it as if it’s an actual article.

50. The Article You’re Reading Now

Writing this article proved to be an interesting exercise. I feel I’m doing very well, but I see that there is a lot of room for further advancement. Although a lot of my articles are selected for distribution, I should probably pay greater attention to what Medium is looking for in its curated articles. Here is the link that details the curation guidelines, it’s worth looking at so you don’t accidentally disqualify yourself.

I think for my next 50 articles, I’ll pay greater attention to the curation guidelines, and focus on the top publications. I continue to send out requests to join publications even though I’m currently a contributor for 15. I’ve found that it’s highly worthwhile to promote your posts on social media platforms as well (even though that can be time consuming).

Best of luck to all of you in your writing endeavors, and I’ll check back in after another 50 articles! It will be interesting to observe how my portfolio has evolved at that point!