What Every New Medium Writer Should Know

Strategies for success that will make your Medium journey better

To writers just starting out on Medium, I recommend the same success strategies a lot of other writers recommend: put out your best quality work, don’t be a perfectionist, get your work into the large pubs, and read the curation guidelines.

But there are a few other things I wish writers had told me when I started out. Maybe they did and I wasn’t listening. Or maybe it just didn’t sink in. Either way, knowing those things ahead of time would have changed my expectations and saved me some disappointment.

My advice isn’t about how to make a full-time income on Medium. You can find that advice elsewhere.

I’ve done better than I ever imagined, and you can, too. But I don’t make a full-time income, because that’s not my goal. I enjoy earning a few hundred extra dollars a month, and I like getting paid for my writing. But it’s not my career.

I used to write full-time, as a career. A lot of nights, I stayed up late banging out articles to meet a press deadline. Sometimes I had to write so many stories in a day that I hardly had time to proof them, let alone tweak them until they were perfect.

So I don’t want to bang out several articles a day for Medium. I’m a slow writer, despite my newspaper background, and I like to leave room in my schedule for other activities. I’m rarely able to write more than 10 or 12 stories a month.

You might be different. Maybe you’re a fast writer, or you aspire to make Medium your career. We all have different goals, and that’s fine. We can read advice from Medium writers and pick and choose those parts that apply. We have different strengths, different goals, and different methods of reaching them.

The other day, I read a post about how to write an article in 10 minutes. If I could complete quality articles in 10 minutes, I’d be pumping stories out and doing everything else on my schedule, too.

But I can’t. Writing fast is not my strength.

We will not be able to copy anybody else’s success

And that leads to one crucial thing every writer should realize. We are all, every single one of us, unique. We have different skill sets. We will not be able to copy anybody else’s success story.

We can use some of the advice. A lot of it’s good. But that doesn’t mean we will be successful in the same way somebody else is successful. Write your own success story.

What if a top writer recommends getting your work into a Medium-sponsored pub, but you haven’t been able to? Or what if a writer says “bleed all over the page,” tell your innermost, most shocking secrets, but you aren’t geared toward that much personal disclosure?

What if somebody says you’ve got to write an article every day, but this level of productivity stresses you out?

My advice is to utilize the takeaways, the things that apply, but don’t try to be something you are not.

You can be successful with your own unique skills

Maybe you are an extremely gifted writer who can churn out stories fast. But maybe, like me, you’re not. What if you believe your talent will never be equal to the best writers on this site?

It doesn’t matter! You have other skills that can make you just as successful. Maybe your strength is perseverance. You are willing to keep at it, to read and study and write and write until you get really good.

Or maybe you have something important to share; some life experience or knowledge or wisdom so valuable that you attract and enlighten readers, despite not being a Stephen King or a James Joyce.

Maybe you have a gift for writing humor, or a talent for fiction. Maybe you can research something and turn your information into an entertaining and educational article.

Whatever it is, on this platform you can experiment until you find it. You can write and publish and get feedback, discovering what resonates. Your readers will let you know, through their claps, their read time and their engagement.

You might end up discovering gifts and talents you never knew you had.

When I first started out on Medium, I thought I’d write devotionals. I wanted to share my faith. Then I discovered I had no interest whatsoever in writing devotionals. It bored me. Leave that to other writers. But I loved writing humor, and I enjoyed writing inspirational essays. I found I could share my faith in other ways, because devotionals weren’t my thing.

If you keep writing different things, you’ll find out what you like and what you are good at.

Support other writers

Another thing I learned is the importance of engagement.

Reading the work of other people and supporting them in their endeavors should be viewed as an opportunity, not a burden. You have a chance to provide support with your feedback and kind words.

This opportunity is not a negligible thing. Why do you want to write? If you were only interested in making money, you would most likely be in a more lucrative profession. Most writers want to impact people with their words. We want to make a difference; to entertain, enlighten, educate, or inspire.

Think of how impactful you are if you support someone else in their endeavors. The things you say to encourage others might even turn out to be more impactful than your most heartfelt essay.

Read the work of others, highlight, comment and clap. Meet new writers through Facebook writing groups. Engage with others in the publications you write for. Comment on their Twitter posts. Share their posts to Twitter.

Don’t allow yourself to be envious. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. You are unique and you have something special to offer your readers.

Nobody else has lived your exact experiences. Nobody else can say things exactly like you can say them.

This is called your voice. Your voice is unique, and you’ll discover it or develop it as you write.

I’m thrilled that I get to communicate with writers all over the world. This is a diverse, talented group, sharing parts of their culture and experiences and opinions. What an exciting opportunity! Don’t envy other writers. Support them!

Be open to change

While we’re on the subject of other writers, I’ll mention something that surprised me at first. Many writers on the site, ones you have befriended and supported, will drop off suddenly and unexpectedly.

You will wonder what happened to them. Sometimes they come back, and sometimes you don’t hear any more from them.

Some writers announce with great fanfare that they are leaving. They write an article about it. Others drift quietly away and disappear. Some publications you write for fold up and die. They might announce their imminent demise, or they might not.

What does this have to do with you? It’s important, because if you plan to stay on the platform and remain successful, you need to engage with new writers all the time.

The little group you were part of at the start of your journey could disappear. Make it a priority to cultivate new writing buddies.

This turnover is not unique or strange. It happens in every business. If you’ve ever been in sales, you know you need to constantly cultivate new customers. You expand your customer base.

Businesses I’ve worked for have re-organized, brought in new managers and CEO’s, implemented new programs, and the most flexible people survived and thrived.

Be ready for change, and for people to drop on and off the platform. Make it a point to engage with several new writers a week.

Stay flexible

And speaking of change, remain flexible, because Medium changes constantly. You get used to one algorithm, one way of doing things, and suddenly the old ways are finished and something new comes along.

You can get all bent out of shape and bemoan the loss of “the good old days” when Medium algorithms worked a certain way. Or you can remain flexible, go with the new program, and adjust.

Nothing stays the same. Ever. Get used to it and embrace change.

So far, the changes on Medium have benefited me. When I first started, only a select few writers were eligible to get paid. Then suddenly this changed and everybody could get paid. I was thrilled to earn $12!

There have been a lot of other changes, but a recent one that caused a lot of consternation was the change from claps to read time as the means of determining payment. I thought this was a much fairer way of evaluating reader engagement. Instead of claps for claps (I’ll clap for your article if you’ll clap for mine), people got paid when others actually read their work.

Isn’t that what we want people to do? Read our work? I don’t want my success as a writer to depend on winning a popularity contest through reciprocal claps. I want my work to resonate.

Curation: the “C” word

Curation is another source of consternation. I didn’t know it existed when I joined Medium. But suddenly it was a major topic of conversation. Did you get that little email telling you your article had been selected by the editors for Distribution? Or did you check your Stats and read those dreaded words, Not distributed in topics.

When curation became more important as a means of getting our work in front of people, there were a lot of complaints.

Writers wrote about long-term curation droughts (referring to this as curation jail). There were curse-laden rants about inferior work getting curated. People talked about curation as if it were the holy grail of achievement. Some writers seemed to think curators had some sinister, underlying agenda.

I doubt there is anything sinister or secretive about the curation process. We can read what the curators want, then try to write that way, or we can continue to write the way we want to write.

Either way, we get to publish our work here. If it’s good enough, readers will find us.

Some excellent writers never get curated. Why? I don’t know. Curators are going to be subjective because they are people. Creativity is always subjective. It’s not like a math problem with a right or wrong answer.

You can foam at the mouth and lament over not getting curated, you can try to write more within the stated curation guidelines, or you can be happy with being able to publish anything you want on the platform.

Either way, it’s a win!

Don’t stress

The final thing I want to mention is, don’t get caught up in a cycle of writing and reading that stresses you out. Enjoy the fun aspects of being here. Take a break now and then if you need to. You won’t lose out.

Writing on Medium provides you with an opportunity to improve your writing and engage with other writers. Your work is being read, and you might even write something that goes viral. You never know! It could be your next article!

Life is a balancing act, and so is writing on Medium. Remember to be kind to other writers, be kind to yourself, and enjoy the process. Happy writing!