Suggestions that will Help You Soar to Success on Medium
What to do and what not to do to increase your writing success on Medium.
Everyone has different goals for writing on Medium. But no matter what they are, you want to see your efforts pay off. You may think of this in terms of readers, followers, shares or income, or maybe you are looking at the the comments you receive as an indication of reader engagement and connections.
No matter how good a writer you are, you can’t just expect to write what you want and hit publish then sit back and wait for the accolades to come in. Succeeding on Medium, regardless of what this means to you, takes work. Some of this involves understanding the Medium platform. Some of this involves best practices for writing and promoting yourself online. The rest involves finding your voice and how to use it to create the most effective articles possible.
Once you learn some basic strategies and determine the specific methods that work for you, you can write stories that don’t just get attention but which dominate news feeds and attract readers who soon become fans. Here are some suggestions that can help you on your way.
Keep a Record of New Ideas and Suggestions You Run Across While Reading
You can keep them in a notebook or create a document on your computer that makes new ideas easier to organize as you add to it. Personally, I do this by writing articles. This helps me keep track of them and explaining them helps me remember them for my own use. Plus if I feel like I’m composing a new post that I can publish, I’m more likely to write down what I come across when reading. Otherwise, I’m likely to say, “I’ll do it later,” which generally means “I’m being lazy and know I’ll forget about it.”
I was always taught in school when reading new material, to put it in my own words. This meant first processing it so I could summarize the way I understood it. This made me more likely to remember it. This strategy works with any reading we do when we want to be able to apply something and utilize it for example, in our writing.
Don’t Use Clickbait Titles — Just Don’t Do It
This is self-explanatory and mentioned extensively in countless articles on and off Medium. But since it’s one that annoys me to no ends, (and as I’m the one writing this, I get to decide what gets included), I’m going to repeat it. I know I’m not alone when I say that I can’t stand articles that promise one thing and not only don’t deliver it, deliver nothing at all. If you say you’re going to provide something, then you darn well need to provide it. If you don’t, and don’t even provide anything of value. then please don’t complain about your lack of traffic, reader engagement, claps or follows. Honestly, we just don’t want to hear it.
Don’t Waste Time Trying to Figure Out What Has Already Been Popular So You Can Imitate It
I know of several writers who spent a lot of time sifting through articles in order to find those that were the most popular so they could write something similar. This was done based on the assumption that if the first article went viral, then theirs was bound to also. This hope was not realized for any of them despite each writing over 20 articles a piece using this strategy. When the articles they wrote resulted in few views, fewer claps and almost no comments they became discouraged. Two of them didn’t write on Medium again for close to a year and the other two stopped writing for Medium altogether.
There are several reasons that this is a faulty conclusion. First, every article is characterized by a number of different facets such as tone, voice, POV, how personal it is, how formal or informal it is, how well the topic is covered, how serious or lighthearted it is etc.. This means that trying to write something just based on the topic someone else wrote about is not going to have the same effect.
Second, trying to imitate someone’s style is akin to trying to write in their voice. Regardless of what we choose to write about, we each have a unique voice. Trying to tell a story using someone else’s voice will never come across as genuine.
Third, a writer may already have thousands of readers that regularly read their work when they publish different posts. If you don’t already have an audience, you aren’t likely to see anywhere close to the same outcome as that of the original author.
Third, you have no idea what marketing and self promotion efforts the writer may have used, if any. This leaves you in the dark as to how your efforts may compare.
Finally, you may not know how long ago the article was published. Successful writers know that it is important to update and re-purpose old articles to keep them fresh. An article that says it was last edited or updated recently, could have been written a year or two in the past and re-purposed a couple of times since then. Each time it’s viewership would have gone back up so by the time you see it although you may think it was just published, it has been gathering a following for much longer.
Bottom line, instead of wasting hours searching for what others have written about that has been very popular, write on what you are passionate about and work on developing your skills and voice to gain your own following.
Spend More Time as a Reader on Medium
This point is what inspired this article. It is something I came across in a post written by Tesia Blake entitled, If You’re Not Successful on Medium, You Might Be Making These 6 Mistakes. (See how I’m following the first suggestion here?) While lots of articles talk about how say reading other people’s articles will lead to them reading yours, this one made a different point. The author states:
“I read on Medium because it was fun, and because I could easily find so many stories I identified with and/or learned from. But at the same time, the months I spent as a reader allowed me to learn a lot about how the platform works.
I learned which kinds of titles make me click, which photos look best, which writing style holds my attention all the way through the end.”
This is an important outcome of reading. If something really catches your attention in terms of a title, topic, tone, POV, etc. it stands to reason that it will do so for others as well. Take notes when something hits you, impresses you, draw you in, makes you feel strong emotions or otherwise causes some kind of reaction. Write down titles that catch your eye, ways different writers have of presenting their message or whatever seems to contribute to you really enjoying an article.
When you review the notes, see what they may imply about a different way to construct your own articles. For example, what do the titles have in common? What are different things that you like in a title? Length? Clearly stating exactly what the article is about? Humor? A clever take on something familiar? How can you incorporate these aspects into your own titles?
Although I’ve mentioned it before, I think it bears repeating as this can be a top way to come up with new articles. Articles that catch your attention and make you think in different ways about something, especially when they elicit comments from you are often some of the best places to come up with ideas for new posts. See more about this here:
Collect Data So You Can Be Methodical About Where You Put Your Effort
Keep a record of different kinds of information that can provide an indication of what is associated with increased traffic and related outcomes. This can be one of the best ways to improve your readership and following.
Marketing and Self Promotion Sites — I keep a record of which social bookmarking sites, personal sites, blogs and social media sites and pages I post each article on, along with the date and the views I’m getting from there. You can find the source of an articles views on the associated stats page. I keep track of this in an Excel spreadsheet. This allows me to determine which sites to use the most and which I might want to list something once in a while so as not to over saturate the others. It also helps me prevent listing the same articles on the same sites over and over.
Topics — Additionally, I keep a list of topics I publish on with an a mean for views, reads, claps and comments in another spreadsheet. This is done by creating topical categories like Mental Health and Psychology, Writing, Writing on Medium etc. and then assign each article to one of them. This gives me an idea about which topics are performing the best. While this doesn’t mean I only write on the top couple of topics, when my stats seem to have fallen off, I turn to one of my more popular areas to come up with a new post.
Tags — Tags are also something I keep track of. I list each tag for each article along with whether it was curated or listed as a top writer in an area associated with one of the tags, and the the number of readers for each tag. This helps me better determine which tags seem the most effective in getting the results I want. While it’s obviously not a direct correlation between tags and being curated or named a top writer, they can get your story in front of the editors for areas you’re most interested in writing about and the most number of readers.
While all this might seem overly time consuming at first, it can also be invaluable for learning what strategies result in the outcomes you want and what is mostly wasted effort.
Keep a Running List of Ideas for Future Posts
To make sure I am publishing regularly even if not every day, I keep a list of ideas for posts. These are things that come to mind as responses to other posts here or elsewhere, things people say to me that cause a reaction, memories of experiences and events that come to mind or result from conversations with other people, seasonal ideas etc.
Some ideas are more timely than others. These are ideas I get from things that pop up in my notifications first thing in the morning or as breaking news throughout the day. I try to write these up first thing in the morning or as soon as I see them to get the posts out while the subject is still on people’s minds. Before writing them up I do a quick search since sometimes what pops up as breaking news is a rehashing of something that is actually old news. Unless there is a good reason that these stories are in news again other than a slow news day, I don’t bother with them.
Publish Early
From what I’ve found , It also improves views to publish as early in the day as possible. This is because your stories are placed on the Medium home page or the home page of publications based on the date you published them. So if you publish late tonight there will be fewer readers who are on to see your story. The stories published early tomorrow will push your story down and possibly off the front page.
The Takeaway
I’ve mentioned this in other articles, but it’s probably the most important point I can make. While many advice articles are great for giving you a place to start, ultimately you have to create a system that works for you. Certain strategies may help some writers to create popular articles but may just cause you stress. Other methods might be more in line with your particular personality or preference for doing things.
For example, some need a structured way to maintain order such as through spreadsheets to adequately organize their efforts or they get overwhelmed. This may especially be the case if they are the type to try several writing experiments or marketing effort at once. Others may prefer to focus on only a single change at a time or advertise their writing on one or two different sites where they list each new article as soon as it’s published.
Read everything you can, and try out those techniques that are suggested that make sense to you. Then keep what works, discard the rest and build on what you’ve kept based on your own style and characteristics. Making your efforts on Medium worthwhile takes work, and there really aren’t any shortcuts. But if you’re willing to put in the work, particularly at the beginning, it will pay off in the long run.
If you have other strategies that have helped you increase readers, followers, and engagement please share them with us below.
Thanks to Tesia Blake for the inspiration for this story.
You can find more useful advice for succeeding on Medium in these articles: