Medium Etiquette Guide For Beginners
A cheat sheet for best practices
Do you feel like you just walked into a middle school cafeteria and you’re wondering how to find your seat with some friends who can tell you what school (Medium) is like? What’s okay to do and what might put you on the faux pas list?
Don’t worry about being a nerd. We’re all nerds around here. Medium is the place to nerd out to your heart’s content. Melanie J. recently asked for some help with understanding the etiquette on the platform. I’m giving it my best try.
Medium is a social media platform in which writers can write almost anything they wish and readers read. Often writers are also readers, though readers aren’t always writers. There is an emphasis on the platform being relational. To grow your account, you will want to interact. You will want to interact with grace.
There’s some general platform etiquette that it would help for you to understand before you begin writing and interacting with other writers on the platform. Pull up the proverbial chair and let’s get into it.
Use Your Five Story Topic Tags
You get five topic tags for your article. Use all five of them. Sarah Paris has an article on the best way to utilize your article tags. Sarah explains:
“Story tags are meant to give curators and publication editors clarity for distribution purposes. And, it’s important to utilize all five tags. If you write a fantastic humor piece on say, your fear of butternut squash — which is admittedly horrifying — don’t solely use the tag “butternut squash.”
I highly recommend you bookmark Sarah’s article. Within this article she has links to her tutorials on writing Titles, SEO, kickers, and submitting to Medium publications. These are great guides, especially for beginners.
To reiterate, when you submit a story (or self-publish one) use all five tags. In order to earn Top Writer status you must use certain topics, such as Writing, Self, and Creativity. These are just examples. I bookmark Casey Botticello’s Top Writer Tag guide for any time I need to reference this. When you earn Top Writer status, it shows up on your profile About Me section. This gives you extra credibility as a writer on this platform.
As far as tagging other writers in your work, like this: Aimée Gramblin, please don’t tag bomb. It’s a rooky mistake that’s likely to alienate and irritate your readers.
You Can Clap 1–50 Times
Writers are paid by read time — not claps. However, claps make writers feel good and may inspire more readership. You can give 1–50 claps. Hold down on the clap button to fill the claps all the way up to 50. You don’t need to click once for each clap.
Etiquette When Submitting to Publications
Research publications. Make sure you’re submitting humor to a humor pub, relationship stories to a relationship pub, and so on.
Learn how to format your article appropriately with a Title and Subtitle. Make sure your article is written for a readership and adds value to their day. Anangsha Alammyan has a wonderful video tutorial under her Submission Guidelines for her publication explaining formatting.
Give publication editors at least 24 hours before reaching out to them about an article you submitted. Some publications take up to 10 days to review submissions. Read the guidelines so you are aware and don’t make yourself a nuisance. That’s a good way to annoy an editor, which is not in your best interest.
Have your writing peers helped you with feedback on your article through private notes? Great! Are you ready to submit your article to a publication? Wonderful! Now, go delete all those notes. Editors can see all of them. We can also see if your article has been rejected by another publication in private notes. Delete that, too. This will help editors not be biased because an article was previously rejected and cleaning up your friend’s notes makes a more seamless read for us when reviewing your work.
Only one person can work in private notes at a time. When two people are using private notes in the same draft, someone will lose their words. For this reason, wait until it appears an editor/peer reviewer has read through your entire draft before using the private notes function to reply.
In Settings, make sure your Private Notes feature is turned on. This is how editors communicate with you about your submission. If your feature is turned off, private notes aren’t accessible to us. We’ll either give up on your submission or try contacting you through email. This is an extra step we’d rather not go through. By the way, the majority of publication owners and editors on Medium are volunteering our time. Please be respectful of that.
Only Follow Writers You Want to Read
Medium is not a follow-for-follow community. Follow the writers whose work interests with you. Interact with them — clap and comment. This is a relational platform. Engaging with other humans is important. When you wish to write for a publication, it is a good idea to follow the Editor in Chief and/or other editors of that publication.
In Settings you can choose to give your followers an option of subscribing to your newsletter. This is a simple function that sends new articles to your subscribers. I’ve been using the feature and like it. I have also subscribed to a few writers whose work I want to see quickly. I’ve even requested some writers I follow (cough cough, Hogan Torah) create this option because I’m tired of searching for their work, but don’t want to miss anything.
Don’t Tick People Off With Tag Bombs
It’s considered poor form to “tag-bomb” as in leaving 100 @names at the bottom of your article. There are some exceptions. Some publication owners (including me) tag our writers in the publication newsletters we put out. It’s also commonly accepted to tag a handful of writers when you are sharing a prompt response and think those writers may also be interested in answering the prompt.
When I reference people in articles, I tag them. I tread on this lightly as it can be annoying. As writers become bigger, they receive many notifications and it’s hard to keep up with all of them. If you tag someone and they don’t respond, don’t take it personally. Tagging never guarantees a response from the writers you’ve tagged. Sometimes I’ll ask a writer for permission in tagging them in my article — usually when I’m borrowing an idea — other times I just go for it. I’m of the opinion that you don’t need to ask permission to tag. Just give credit where credit is due and don’t be annoying.
How Payment Works on Medium
Sign up for the Medium Partner Program through Stripe in order to receive payments on your stories. Make sure your stories are appearing behind the Paywall. Most publications do not pay writers. Medium pays writers through the Paywall instead. Read more about the Medium Partner Program here.
A handful of publications pay authors a flat fee. Better Humans pays $500 per article accepted but your article will not qualify for any payment beyond that.
On Images and Copyright
Click the + button within your article and then click the Magnifying Glass icon to bring up a search for free images on Unsplash within the Medium platform. These images are all okay to use and will already have the credit in the caption.
Want to set the focus on your image so it isn’t cropped weirdly in preview mode? There’s a tutorial for that here.
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Try using the Creative Commons, Pixabay, and Pexels to avoid copyright issues when you aren’t finding what you want on Unsplash. You can also go to Unsplash off the Medium platform and sort images by orientation. I prefer using horizontal images, so I often go to the Unsplash website to sort out the available images.
If you don’t add a caption under ALL your images, your article won’t qualify for curation. Always, always, add source captions.
Sarah Paris has an informative article on image use on the platform.
Citations and Hyperlinks
Give credit where credit is due. None of us want to be called out for plagiarizing. We all want to make the reading experience the best one possible for our readers (at least I hope we do). It is important to put quotes in quotation marks and credit the author. You can make fancy quotes by highlighting your text and clicking the “ option. You can then chose to make your quote appear like this:
If you don’t add a caption under ALL your images, your article won’t qualify for curation. Always, always, add source captions.
or this:
If you don’t add a caption under ALL your images, your article won’t qualify for curation. Always, always, add source captions.
Click once for the first option and twice for the second option.
Hyperlink your work to sources that you pull quotes from. To add a hyperlink, highlight the words you want to hyperlink, click the + and click the little paperclip. Drop the website into the popup box and hit enter. This gives you your hyperlink. It will show up as an underline on the words you highlighted. Don’t do this:
Choose a few relevant words instead to make the reading experience pleasant. Do this instead:
Hyperlink your work to sources that you pull quotes from. To add a hyperlink, highlight the words you want to hyperlink, click the + and click the little paperclip. Drop the website into the popup box and hit enter. This gives you your hyperlink. It will show up as an underline on the words you highlighted.
You can also create footnotes by following this tutorial by Brian Dixon. For further info on when to use hyperlinks, check out my article in Better Marketing here.
Takeaway
I could go into more detail about how to use the platform, but don’t want to overwhelm anyone. Instead, I’ll recap here. When you publish or submit a story, make sure you have added five topic tags that are relevant to the subject matter and preferably correspond with Top Writer tags. Check publication guidelines for tags that must be used when submitting to the publication. Clapping is like cheerleading. Cheer (clap) 1–50 times.
When submitting your article to a publication, make sure you follow the submission guidelines. Check settings to turn on your private notes feature. Wait your turn to write in private notes so no one loses their words. Wait an appropriate amount of time to follow up with editors on your submission. Most editors are unpaid and busy with work, kids, life, etc.
Medium is not a follow-for-follow community. Engaging with readers and writers will build your following much more quickly. It’s okay to use tags, but don’t abuse them. You don’t want to become annoying to your readers.
Sign up for the Medium Partner Program. That’s how most writers earn money. Don’t expect to earn a lot. It’s a very small percentage of writers who earn over $100 per month. I’m one of them (knock wood) — but, Medium still doesn’t pay my bills. Don’t count on this as a source of income. Do count on it as a solid networking platform and a great way to build your writing skills.
Always, always caption your images with the source of the image. Beyond Unsplash, there are many stock photo websites available, including Pexels, Pixabay, and the Creative Commons.
I hope this helps you with getting your feet wet. It was nice having lunch with you! Any questions? Please leave them in the comments below.
