Medium: My First Month.

I haven’t been thrown off the site *yet*.

It’s been 30 days since I joined Medium. That makes it sound like I’m in an alcoholics anonymous meeting. I’ll try again. I’ve been posting on Medium for a month (that’s better) and it’s been an interesting journey so far. I had a few different reasons for joining Medium. I’d heard a lot of scuttlebutt about the site that piqued my interest on Quora and I was also ready to try a new Medium…(ha!)

I hang out a lot on Quora and the best way to post ‘Quora style’ is in short form → make it punchy, interesting and answer the question. But it can be a little limiting so I was interested in investigating other options and writing about what I wanted rather than the question and answer format.

So here I am. I’ve had some speed wobbles and a few steep learning moments but overall I’ve found the platform surprisingly easy to use. I spent some time investigating how the platform works and the best formats and styles to post and then I cut loose. It was like yelling into a rocky ravine.

Of course, I got sod all attention, what were you expecting? I’m brand new here!

The stats for my first 30 days:

Yep, it’s pretty quiet (in comparison to the happy yet rowdy mess of Quora) but I'm enjoying the freedom of creating articles that run the gamut of topics that appeal to me. I don’t know if these statistics are bad or good (there’s no benchmark) but I guess that means that I can be reasonably happy with them? I’ve also been lucky enough to gain a modest (but precious) amount of new followers during that time. 👍

Curation:

Rumor has it that it’s great if your work gets curated but I haven't had a single article curated yet. I’m not sure why, (I could suck for all I know) but from what I can tell, no one is sure why. I just get this message:

Yup. “Our curators were not able to review this story for distribution in topics due to high volume. This story will still be shared with followers.”

On day number one, I had no followers. I have some now which is nice and I also share the friend links on facebook and sometimes in spaces on Quora so I still get traffic.

Apparently, there’s not enough curators. I’ve loaded 30 posts (I can be prolific) but so far, de nada. Curation or lack of curation, benchmarks or reasons appears to be a mystery to many on here so I’ll watch with interest to see what happens.

The Money

I mostly share unpaid friend links so I wasn’t expecting to make my fortune at all but low and behold:

I can buy a sandwich. It’s money for doing what I’d do anyway — I’ll take it!

The Medium rules I’ve picked up so far:

1. Don’t suck. Do your best to avoid posting craptastic articles.
2. Write good. Pay attention to punctuation and spelling and learn how to capitalize titles, use subtitles and correct headers and photo attribution.
3. Obey the rules.
4. See number 1.
5. See number 1 again.

What I like so far:

• It’s a simple platform and very easy to use.
• I’ve already set up my first publication. This is a template and I figured it out in about an hour and put something together. It’s practically your own blog spot and you can set up multiple publications for whatever interests you. I’ll be spending more time here when I have enough material to warrant it.
• The stats area is straight forward and simple.

What could be improved:

Some transparency around curation. If I suck, feel free to tell me (I’d much rather know). If nothing is actually being seen by Medium curators than that limits the usefulness of the platform and potential traffic. It could be pretty disheartening.