The Inside Story of How to Get Nominated for Boosting

What I’ve learned about getting your work the audience it deserves.

As you will all know, I’ve had the absolute pleasure of being part of the Medium boost program for a while now. My area to nominate is ‘women’, which for me means women’s stories of all kinds and occasionally articles or essays written by men that I believe women would benefit from reading.

Genuinely, I have loved the process. I don’t just nominate from Modern Women, I spend hours every week looking for pieces written by women from all over the world and self-published. Women whose work doesn’t get the audience they deserve. Social media platforms can be amazing at helping us reach our readers, but for those writers who just want to do the work of writing, they can sometimes feel like an impossible hurdle, and I like knowing that for some women, I can help them bridge that gap.

I want to make it clear however, that you do not need to have your work boosted to get a great response; great writing will do that for you.

You also don’t need to have your work boosted to actively increase your earnings from an article, having a good number of followers and publishing work in a large publication like ours will give you a platform that can do that for you.

Having said that, being boosted can feel very validating and put your work in front of people who would never have found it otherwise and isn’t that what we are all aiming for as writers… to be heard and share our stories with the people who will be impacted most from reading them?

I’ll be sharing with you some of my favourite work from Modern Women writers below that has been boosted in the hopes to answer some questions about how to improve your own work and to take you behind the scenes of what I personally look for in an article or essay. And remember I am not the only nominator, this article of Ariel’s gives you access to many of the editors and publications that can help you if being boosted is your target.

First and most easiest is length and style. I have only nominated essays and articles so far, so even though I’m open to fiction and poetry don’t limit yourself to me if that’s your style of choice.

As far as length goes, I’d say 6–8 minutes is the goldilocks zone. Much less than that and you haven’t really had a chance to get into your subject and much more than that and you risk your reader losing concentration.

This isn’t a rule for me or anyone else, but I’ve noticed a pattern of work that is just far too short, and I think it is a result of a social media fuelled drive to put content out as quickly and in as much volume as possible. Medium isn’t just about putting out content, the goal here, is to put out quality writing, and often there is a big difference.

The second draft is your best friend. You can weed out the unnecessary as well as think about how to expand on an idea by going deeper.

Another problem here is using ‘flowery’ language in an attempt to sound somehow more intelligent/eloquent than is needed. Remember you goal is to connect with your reader not to alienate them by using language that creates distance. Using description even in a factual article can draw someone in, making it feel as though you were having an intimate conversation… that is how you invite them to read to the end.

Big no-no’s.

The obvious big off-putting things are spelling and grammar mistakes. Our editorial team tries to catch as much as possible but like you I often have a typo somewhere and sadly they can really break the reading flow for your audience and have them clicking away.

Call to actions (CTAs) can be a real problem. Most people hate the feeling of being sold to, so adding a sprinkling of your other articles, books you’ve published or links to your coaching business can be horrible, and I wouldn’t nominate a piece that did this. As an editor I will ask you to remove all but one and place it at the end of your work but even then, let your work speak for itself.

When I read a great piece, I immediately want to find out more about the author. I check out their profile, read some of their other work and then follow if I want to see even more. Trust the quality of your work to make connections for you.

In the same vein as this, please do not put in a CTA asking people to stay on your article for 30 seconds plus, and to give you 50 claps. It reads terribly and will shut down your reader.

So, if those are the things you should never do, what are the must do’s?

For me, there are a finite number of topics in the world. What makes them so readable is your unique telling, your individual thoughts and experiences which encourage me to see things in a new way or galvanise me into action.

Yes, there is a gender disparity, but instead of rehashing the same conversation we’ve all had with friends numerous times, why not show me how it has affected you personally. How it has shown up in your life, how you have fought against it, or what insights you’ve gleaned on how we can change it.

This essay of inthewaves’s is a perfect example of this. Every person who has been pregnant has had to travel through the emotional and mental adjustment that there body is no longer their own. They have had to learn that there are new limits which keep changing, and new fears and worries that no book or conversation could have prepared you for. But in this article she brought us into her world, her experience, and while we identified with her and saw ourselves reflected in her words, we were still completely invested in hearing her story.

The personal element of an essay or article is the magic that creates real connection and empathy across countries and cultures through the screen. It is what enables us to feel a shared bond and know we are not alone, no matter how isolated some days can feel in the ‘real world’.

As a person who has decided not to belong to any one religion but who considers themselves to be very spiritual, I am always interested in hearing the experiences of others. When I read this piece by Salma F, the way she wove the common experience of beauty, societies expectations of women and our bodies, and the unfamiliar experience (for me) of wearing traditional Muslim clothing, in this case the hijab, I was at once fascinated by the insight she offered but also completely connected to her as a woman. She took our shared experience of womanhood and enabled it to be the connecting bridge over the potential differences religion can bring up in people.

I want to be left thinking about your words long after I’ve closed my laptop, and I want to bring you up in conversation this weekend with my friends. And no matter what you believe about the mundanity of your life or how ‘unexciting’ it may be, I have never met a person that didn’t interest me.

We share so much as women. There are universal experiences we can all shake our heads at, laugh over and speak to each other on without a word ever needing to be spoken. But then, there are the experiences within that and the insights that are all yours. Those are your wisdoms to share. Those are the places where you can make others feel less alone. Those are the places in which you can be what you needed and didn’t have.

So, what more can I say. Turn your private note notifications on when you submit work, getting writing and when you can, let the words sit awhile and come back to them. You might surprise yourself with the layers you can add.

Here are a few other recently boosted Modern Women stories I have personally loved. I’d like your next piece to be among them.