Should You Use a Call to Action at the End of Your Medium Story?

That’s the debate.

Medium is all about quality. Medium wants you to publish your best story. Medium encourages great stories with their curation team. They review published stories and highlight those stories that meet their high editorial standards.

Medium is a great platform because it’s ad-free.

What about call-to-action (CTA) free?

The case for no CTA

Some publications such as Better Marketing are heading toward discouraging CTAs.

Here’s their thoughts on why:

Per Medium’s best practices: “Avoid CTAs. Readers tell us that they find repeated calls to action — to sign up for a newsletter, to clap — annoying.” At Better Marketing, we have decided to eliminate CTAs altogether. That means no “Please clap for my story,” “Join my newsletter,” or “Buy my book” at the end of your post. For more on our reasoning behind this decision, see here.

The case for a CTA

Medium writers such as August Birch, Tom Kuegler, and Casey Botticello promote their email newsletter at the end of their Medium stories and on their Medium profile page.

If you go this route, Medium officially recommends email sign-up form Upscribe. Posts with forms are allowed, but not often curated as Shaunta Grimes points out:

Some Medium writers add a short bio at the end of their story. Some Medium writers add 1–3 Medium stories at the end of their story. This provides readers with a “you also may be interested in” approach.

What does Medium say?

According to Medium:

Do not ask for claps or include other calls to action, including gifs of clapping, requests for donations, or other links or embeds for the purpose of capturing user information or soliciting money.

We respect the desire for creators to promote their work on other platforms to interested readers, and ask that you do so using plain, minimal text links. You’re still welcome to include the following in your stories:

A short bio (~2–3 lines)

Links to your other Medium stories

Link to other social media profiles

Link to your website, book or other project

CTA or no CTA: It’s up to you

Whatever you do, you should create a CTA strategy that works best for you. Create a CTA at the end or intentionally don’t.

Do you use a CTA at the end of your Medium stories? If not, why not? If so, what do you use?