Become a More Successful Writer On Medium

Seven Effective Strategies That Have Helped Me Increase Traffic and Earnings

Methods that can help you become more successful on Medium, based on first hand experience.

While there are countless articles with advice to help your writing perform better on Medium, I have found that many of them are just regurgitating what has been said a thousand times already with adding any first hand knowledge or evidence supporting the suggested strategies.

Having now written for Medium for a year with a number of successes and failures during that time, I have collected knowledge on what has helped me improve my writing performance. When I practice these strategies regularly, they never fail to lead to an increase in my traffic and earnings and when I don’t use them I have noticed my performance drops off. Having observed this several times now, I feel confident about sharing writing them.

Start Early in the Day

This is by far the most important strategy that I have found to help me be more productive, publish more and gain more traffic. When I have something that I’ve written or published early, it improves my mood, outlook and writing satisfaction. The later I wait to start working, the more stressed I feel about getting something finished before the day ends and the pressure can often cause me to become blocked. Plus, it makes me feel even more like a pretender to the throne.

When I start early, if I have trouble coming up with an idea to write about or have a topic but can’t seem to get the article going in the right direction I can take a break and go for a walk, or do something else that will help me get back on track. When I start again, it is still early enough that I can finish it and possibly write a second piece.

If I’ve already written something for Medium, I also feel like it’s okay to give myself permission to work on a creative writing piece like flash fiction or poetry or to explore new things that might provide another writing outlet for me.

Additionally, I have found that when I read and engage with other people’s work earlier in the day, I get a larger response to my own work. While some people have said that reading other people’s stories doesn’t increase your traffic significantly, I have found that this isn’t the case. Maybe it’s true for those few writers that are making six figures from writing on Medium alone. But I think that for most of the rest of us, reciprocity and name recognition provide a significant amount of traffic. And the earlier you engage with other articles the more time the authors of those stories have to be online when there is a notification to let them know that you have done so and the more likely they will read and engage with something you have written.

Read Three Articles That You Can Engage Before Anything Else

Before you start writing, self-promoting, or getting involved in social media groups for the day, look for three stories written by authors who you aren’t familiar with that interest you and which you feel that you can clap for and comment on. In addition to providing you with content that might trigger new ideas, this will also help you expand your circles on Medium.

A lot of people on Medium read the same small group of writers who they interact with regularly in Facebook groups. While we like to read content from writers whose work we know we enjoy, there are many great writers on the platform. Making a point of reading work written by people who you don’t see in any of the groups you belong to lets you discover new writers.

When I began making a point of doing this, I noticed that often two out of three, and sometimes three out of three of the writers of the stories I wrote read and engaged with at least one of my stories before the day was out. Many times they followed me as well. It took me almost eight months to reach 1000 followers.

Committing to reading three articles that you take enough time to read so that you can comment thoughtfully on them on can earn you new readers while making your name more visible. It can also help you discover possible collaborators, contacts and other opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

Be Smart About Linking to Other Stories You’ve Written

There are a few rules of thumb that I use when including links to other stories I have written. These rules were developed based on my informal analysis of how they appeared to affect traffic.

The first one, which I’ve discussed before (Everything You Need to Know About Using Internal Links to Promote Articles on Medium) is to only include two links per story or three if one is an embedded link (like in the post that you are reading). These can either be put at the end or embedded in the text. Anything else looks overly promotional to me, and I have found this to be the best strategy in terms of increasing traffic. I try to “spot check” performance of links by watching to see when older stories increase in traffic after I have included a link to them in a new story. Stories with more than two links don’t get as many reads per views or views to stories linked to as those with only two links.

Another rule I stick to is to make sure that the stories that I link to are related to the story to which they are added. This was also covered in the article cited above. People who are drawn to a piece are likely to be drawn to similar pieces that you have written.

A final rule I apply to links is to make sure that I mix up links so that stories aren’t all linking to the same ones. This means linking back to older stories and not just to your most recent ones. Regular readers may have already read your recent stories so your most constant traffic sources won’t click on newer links but they may not have seen your older work. This is also a good way to remember to edit your older stories to make them stronger and to get new traffic for them.

Start a Publication for Your Own Articles

It’s easy to start a publication and doing so for your own articles can help you in a lot of ways. It can help you learn the basics of how to design the elements of a Medium publication in a low demand manner. This means keeping it simple instead of starting a publication open to everyone where you are learning the ropes while you are also trying to learn how to do the wide variety of other things involved in a multi-writer publication.

A publication for your own writing is also a great way to keep pieces that aren’t in other publications organized in one place. If you are a niche writer this can be very effecting for attracting a larger following. If you write in several niches or in different genres such as non-fiction, fiction and poetry, starting a publication that incorporate several areas you write in under one organizational umbrella can help you promote yourself in those specific areas.

I have seen some writers who write in several topics in different publications who have successfully started their own publication for poetry, humor, and politics. As my area is psychology with a focus on stress and coping, I started a publication called Mental Gecko, in which I wanted the overall organizing principle to be psychology while incorporating several areas that interest me. I came up with the idea of looking at various strategies we use to cope with a complex world. I included topics such as writing and journaling, positivity and optimism, humor, fiction and poetry writing, social support and relationships among others. The journal has been slowly gaining readers with over 100 followers in the first few months.

Unpublish Old Articles, Revise, Republish

We all start somewhere when beginning to write on any platform. Over time, we read what others on the platform have to say about how best to present ourselves on it, learn more about how to be successful and continue to grow in our writing. As we do, we change and adapt the techniques that we use and how we promote out work.

When I started writing on Medium, I wrote the way I did on other platforms. This was predominantly long form, academic essays that didn’t do as well as similar pieces had done elsewhere. I also didn’t know how some of the editing and formatting features on Medium worked and so didn’t use them. Regarding article promotion, I wasn’t aware of how to embed links or add the boxes at the end of articles. I didn’t know whether a bio and CTA with a profile link helped or was even allowed.

In the months that followed, I learned about these things and came to incorporate them into later articles. As I determined which were useful, I stylized them in ways that worked best for me.

More recently, I have selected some of my older articles to unpublish and revise. This has included updating out of date information, tightening up the text and reworking clumsy sentences, incorporating links to other stories, adding bios to some, and including CTA’s with a link to my profile. The articles I chose were those that had little engagement. After altering them and republishing them, in every case they received far greater attention and a significantly better response.

Use a Bio to Establish Credibility

While I don’t put a bio on every article I write, I do when the topics are in my areas of focus and expertise, specifically articles about psychology or writing. At first I felt this was a bit egotistical since you can add a few statements to your profile which already shows up on all of your articles. I experimented with a few articles on psychology then a few more and consistently the ones with the bio seemed to do better than the ones without. I started adding a different bio to my writing articles and found the same thing.

Over time, this has been what I have consistently found. I think that this is because it establishes credibility and people reading about different subjects like to know that the person has skills or a background that gives them some authority in the area. On personal opinion pieces I think it helps the writer come across as more legitimate increasing the likelihood people will take what they say seriously especially if the area is controversial.

Some things I would suggest for a bio are to include one when:

• It can be used to establish your credentials as related to the topic of the piece.
• You have an advanced degree and want your opinion to be taken seriously, even if the degree isn’t related to the topic
• You have a lot of professional or formal experience in an area related to the topic of the article.
• There is something significant in your background that has provided you with special information about the topic you are writing on
• You want to connect with readers using humor or informality

Schedule Stories in Advance

This is a strategy I have found really helps me in a lot of ways. When I finish a story later in the day, I prefer to wait until the next morning to publish it. Some people have said they get increased traffic when they publish at different times throughout the day for example, 7:00 am, 12:00 pm and 5:00 pm EST. But I have found that I get the most traffic when I publish first thing in the morning, between 6:00 am and 7:00 am EST.

Since I am not going to wake up, start and finish a new story to publish by o’dark thirty in the morning, in order to get articles out at that time, I have to schedule them. I am as prone to the desire to hit publish no matter when I finish a story as anyone else. But I know my stories perform better when I publish them early.

Take Away

It can be frustrating trying to gain a following and discover how to realize earnings from your writing on any platform including Medium. The strategies that I have listed here have helped me maintain an online presence and attract readers which have consistently resulted in increased traffic and earnings over the course of my first year writing on Medium. While I hope they will help you reach your writing goals as well, you can determine what works best for you by keeping track of the methods you experiment with to improve how your work performs.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had work featured in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press & Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost among others. She is Editor for 1-One-Infinity, The Partnered Pen & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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You can find links to my other work on Medium and follow me here. Thanks for reading!