Self-Curation on Medium
Following a clue left by Casey Botticello
Curate — from Dictionary.com
“ to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation”
I’m not sure that curation jail even exists, but I’ll save that thought for another post. I have, however, been following the debates closely, and one of the few purveyors of light rather than heat about this topic has been Casey Botticello, who has several times made the case that official curation might be less necessary than we all like to think.
If we look at the definition of curation above, there is no reason why writers can’t arrange their own writing in a way which simplifies the navigation process for their readers, directing them to topic areas related to their interests.
Perhaps the simplest way to achieve this is by having your own publication, with sub-headings clearly showing your areas of coverage, driving readers to your scribblings via a clean, attractive layout and careful choice of tags. That will be my task for January 2020, but in the meantime there is another option which seems to work well — internal cross-referencing between your posts.
As soon as you have developed a reasonable back-catalogue of articles, you will start to find that your new posts touch on similar themes to other items you have written. What could be more natural than to feed the appetites of those who have read to the end of your article by directing them to other related pieces? It’s non-intrusive (if placed at the end), completely optional and much less irritating than the barrage of external links, email sign-ups and other needy, clinging behaviour that you will often find at the end of an article.
Casey Botticello reported that his views had doubled after implementing this simple trick. My experience has been very similar, including a significant uptick in followers.
Here’s why it works.
Under the new partnership payment rules, claps don’t matter a damn, except for a little frisson of pleasure at being appreciated. What matters is to keep people reading, as it is reading time on your material which translates into dollars.
The worst thing for someone to do when they reach the end of your article is to hit the back button and return to their feed. What you want, if and only if they have enjoyed your initial contribution, is to give them a very easy segue into reading more of your stuff. For this reason the cardinal rules are:
- Keep it relevant and somewhat related to the first post. Don’t just say “here’s some more of my stuff you might like”. I try to keep it light with a tinge of humour in the link “If you’re a fan of toxic masculinity, you’ll find more of the same below”
- Don’t swamp them. This isn’t the place to list everything you ever wrote. Two or at most three article links directly below your post is sufficient to give the reader the option of following you some more or giving up on you at that stage.
I really don’t mind if the reader gets so engrossed in following links that they forget to clap for the first or subsequent posts. The important thing is always to keep them reading.
Is this manipulative? Sure, to a certain extent. But I don’t mind when I disappear down the rabbit hole of reading certain authors end to end, once I have found one I can really relate to. Similarly, when members of my tribe have finally found me, among the myriad distractions of their Medium feed, I don’t want to let them go without making at least some effort to retain them.
Many thanks for reading!
Writing about writing is a rare departure for me, but you can check out other examples below:
