Navigating Medium in 2024: A Friendly Guide for New Writers and the Tech-Weary
From the basics to the not-so-basics
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Table of Contents
Introduction
The Cardinal Sin of New Writers on Medium
1. Early discouragement on Medium and quitting before you’re started
2. Growth hacking and a strategy that’s crucial to avoid
“Medium Publications,” “Boosts,” and Finding Your Audience
1. Publications
2. Boosts and Medium’s article distribution system
3. Publications participating in the Boost Pilot Program and finding our place on Medium
How to Format Your Articles
1. Copyright, titles and subtitles
2. Quotes
3. Fonts
4. Private notes , editor critiques, and direct messages
Title images and Common Editing Practices
1. Embedding images, videos, and other content
2. Title Image display
3. Alt text, Speechify, and accessibility features
4. Sharing drafts
5. Bibliographies
6. Tagging other Medium authors
Submitting Articles, Choosing Topics, and Selecting Paywall/Email Subscriber Settings
1. Submitting articles
2. Choosing topics
3. Finalizing draft, submitting, and scheduling to publish
Introduction
Beginning to write on Medium can present its fair share of hurdles. Starting on the platform in early 2022, I had quite a learning curve before me in getting comfortable with just the essentials.
Even as someone young enough to fight off “Gen Z” labels, I’ve never exactly been what one might call tech-savvy. Though less of a Luddite than my mom, I’d be hard-pressed to deny mastering new systems and applications is a challenge and that I’ve fallen flat more than once in my attempt to create websites for myself. As long as I walk this earth, I may never even be able to navigate my way through an Excel spreadsheet.
So if ever you feel bogged down in learning the platform, believe me when I say I understand the struggle and that few Medium users won’t sympathize. Upon opening an account, it can present as more overwhelming than other social media apps or websites that people might be more familiar with. But what Medium is trying to offer is far different from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It’s a platform built for writers, and likely the best one the internet has ever known.
The challenges of the beginning months are worth overcoming.
The Cardinal Sins of New Writers on Medium
Early discouragement on Medium and quitting before you’re started
If you get as far as publishing your first article, sometimes you might be discouraged to see that posting a well-written piece is no singular pathway to overnight viral acclaim. You might even find that it doesn’t receive a single clap (users can give each article and comment up to 50). It can be a defeating feeling when our most meticulously edited work lands in the void. Some may even give up completely — as I did when I first attempted writing on here back in 2019.
Growth hacking and a crucial tactic to avoid
One trap that people frequently fall into at this point is believing that whatever they can do to drum up traffic for their profile and content, they should do. Many try to succeed by following boatloads of people at random in the hopes that some may follow back and become faithful readers. It’s a tactic that can work in the short term. Some may follow back, and some may even read an article or three. But it’s no recipe for success in the long term.
In applying the method, you’ll also send a signal to any more astute or serious writers that you’re not approaching this creative endeavor honestly. While hitting “follow” on a few hundred accounts is so easy anyone can do it, there’s a name for the approach, and that name is “growth hacking.” Accounts caught doing it are liable to be banned from Medium.
Counts of our followers and who we follow are publicly visible on each author’s profile. When attentive authors notice a new follower of theirs has followed 30,000 people at random and only has 5,000 supposed supporters themselves, that “follower” and their work can lose some credibility.
“Medium Publications,” “Boosts,” and Finding Your Audience
Publications
Publications are here to help writers sort through much of the noise during these preliminary phases of writing on the platform. They’re essentially communities centered around certain topics or niches. There are publications where people send articles about music, and ones dedicated to politics, sports, fiction, memoirs, photography, film, language, culture, travel, video games, and everything in between. There are also general interest publications, like my own, that post a wider array of material.
Publications come with built-in audiences that can vary dramatically in size. And there are benefits to using both large publications and small publications. In a publication with limited followers and contributors, your article will be displayed more prominently. And people from within the community that the article is published to will begin to discover your work.
But receiving those first views is still unlikely to open up a fast track to fame. It’s true that there can be an element of reciprocity at play on Medium, and that discovering a few of those first like-minded spirits on the platform can be critical — people whose work we enjoy.
Boosts and Medium’s article distribution system
Depending on the publication used, and the level of excellence of work on display, there are ways to circumvent much of the tedium and aggravation of the early days on this platform. If specific publication owners or editors see your work, they can nominate your article to Medium staff members, called “curators.”
If a “nominator” like myself or Robin Wilding 💎 sends in an article and a curator generally agrees with our evaluation of it, it’s selected for what Medium calls “a Boost,” whereby chosen articles will receive not only a boost in pay, but as many as an extra 200,000 eyes on the article if the right conditions are met. More commonly, they’ll receive closer to 1,000 additional views than they ordinarily would.
There’s also an algorithmic component to the trajectory of selected stories. Having a piece chosen is no guarantee of viral success. Even if it’s marketed to a wider audience, it may not always hit the mark with those readers. The curators have a challenging task before them in attempting to arbitrate quality across this entire platform. They can’t be easily expected to read the room when it contains millions of people with different interests, cultures, and tastes. But when selected articles tap into a certain zeitgeist, current event, or fraught political moment, there’s a higher probability that the piece will be seen by the masses.
My most popular story to date was written on the subject of AI, and at a time when the world was unsure exactly what the technological leap forward meant. Many still weren’t aware of the transition taking place and found a helpful — if slightly sobering — primer in my article on the subject.
Publications can be all the difference between whether an author and their writing are discovered or whether they struggle to find their audience. Pieces can always be found on their own through Medium’s built-in distribution system, especially as writers begin to grow a following. But with the transition toward the “Boost Pilot Program” that began last year, the difference a publication can make has become more critical than it once was.
Publications participating in the Boost Pilot Program and finding our place on Medium
One of the most useful ways to see the publications at which authors will have the greatest chance at receiving a Boost is reviewing this list on the Medium help page and considering those publications that most align with their interests and areas of expertise.
Once you’ve gone through the application process for the respective publication(s) that you’ve found, submitting the piece is as simple as finishing the draft, running it through an application like Grammarly or a comparable service to double-check for any errors, clicking the three dots at the upper right of the screen (a couple of icons to the left of your profile picture). Then, you hit “add to publication.” From there, you should be able to review a list of the publications to which you’ve been added as a contributor and decide on the home at which your prospective draft would most belong.
How to Format Your Articles
Copyright, Titles, and subtitles
While some of the standards around how we edit our pieces are subjective, on Medium there’s a specific approach that’s generally taken, and that’s as follows: (optional kicker), title, subtitle, title image with accreditation in caption, body. While Medium allows authors to use open source images in articles, like those found on Unsplash and Freepik, many images online may disobey copyright law and should be excluded.
The title, format, and kicker can all be accomplished through highlighting the desired text and pressing either the big T or little t, for the title and subtitle/kicker respectively.
Quoting
The same menu allows you to differentiate between different types of quotes within an article by clicking the quote icon (one from the far right).
These are often used as previews of a passage coming later in the piece. They can also be used as a means to help frame an article before an author launches into the body by providing a pertinent quote.
Whereas this formatting style is more typically used to distinguish larger quotes that might come from another source. They can also be used for incorporating extended exchanges of dialogue, poem stanzas, or even verses of songs.
Fonts
Choosing to embolden or italicize certain passages can also subtly alter their function within an article. Different typography styles, font variations, and text presentations can denote different things.
Within the body of an article, highlighted text from within the aforementioned menu will offer an expanded array of now-ungrayed options that allow for the additional fonts, as well as drop caps (enlarged first letters signifying new sections or the beginning of an article’s body). They can be effective for opening a piece’s body or beginning a new section.
Private notes and direct messages
While Medium unfortunately does not offer a direct message feature as of the time of this writing, the closest we have is the private notes system, which unfortunately only operates on the desktop version of the app.
To make use of it, click the furthest icon to the right from the menu above (the message icon with the lock inside of it). It allows readers and editors to leave private notes for other authors. As long as an author has them turned on, people should be able to leave notes on any draft or article.
These are useful if there’s something we’d like to say in private rather than commenting on an article publicly, or if editors have a note on a specific passage worth editing or reconsidering.
Title images and Common Editing Practices
Embedding images, videos, and other content
Hitting the plus icon that appears when you move to a new blank line allows you a few options for photo embeds, including an image of our own, an open-source one, or a video respectively. The same menu allows us to include embeds, code blocks, and section breaks.
Title Image display
With title images, it’s wisest to include one that displays horizontally, or as close as we can manage to a 16:9 aspect ratio. Taller images work, but won’t display as well for readers who preview the articles on their home page. If it’s a more vertically oriented title photo you’d prefer to use for the piece, you can select the part of the image you feel is most important for readers to see in a preview (as the rest will be cut out), hovering your cursor over it, and hitting the “option” or “alt” key on your keyboard.
Clicking on the image will also allow us to change the size that it displays, given it’s a certain aspect ratio to begin with. There are 3 size options for the horizontal display.
Alt text, Speechify, and accessibility features
Clicking on the image will also give us the ability to add an “alt text,” an audio aid for any visually impaired readers who might come across the piece. Medium’s integrated Speechify feature, however, negates much of the need for this additional aid.
This can be accessed through pressing the “play” button found at the top of articles and draft links, and can be an especially effective means for catching errors while editing.
Sharing drafts
Draft links can be found by clicking the three dots in the upper right of your screen as the draft is being edited, clicking “share draft link,” and visiting the URL that emerges.
Bibliographies
Bibliographies are not typically included at the end of articles. Instead, applicable research will generally be hyperlinked into the text as follows: example link that leads you directly and unhelpfully back to this same article.
Explicitly stated introductions, conclusions, and announcements such as “in this article, I will…,” or “this piece aims to…,” are generally considered unwelcome.
Sometimes at the end of an article, people will include links to their other work or a call to action regarding how to support the author in other ways. Within the article, hyperlinks are more common and less obtrusive. Once the piece has concluded, authors are more likely to include what’s called a box link. These can lead either to other articles or to profile pages, as follows:
Ben Ulansey - Medium
Read writing from Ben Ulansey on Medium. Writer, musician, dog whisperer, video game enthusiast and amateur lucid…medium.com
To get these to appear in this format, copy and paste the desired link and press return. To get it to appear as a hyperlink within the text, highlight the desired text, and click on the chain-link icon three from the left, then paste in the desired link.
Tagging other Medium authors
To tag or credit another author, simply press the “@” and begin typing their name. Done correctly, its color should change: Ben Ulansey. Doing so will also give the tagged author a notification. To credit or reference another writer without them being directly notified, you can include the name within a hyperlink instead.
Submitting Articles, Choosing Topics, and Selecting Paywall/Email Subscriber Settings
Submitting articles
Once you’ve finished polishing your article, select a publication, and click “submit.” You’ll then be given a choice of topics to choose from, as well as an option regarding whether or not to paywall the article (if you’re in the Medium Partner Program) and send a notice to email subscribers.
There are a couple of ways of thinking about what topics to select.
Choosing topics
When using more heavily used tags like “Humor,” “Fiction,” or “Politics,” those people who soar in their genre can expand their audience more than they might when applying a more niche tag. They run the risk of being buried among a greater number of articles and competitors, but those who excel in the bigger subjects grow more than they might by becoming top writers within competitive topics.
Inversely, if you’re the first, second, or tenth to write an article on a niche subject like Katamari Damacy, then each curious reader who searches for an article on that subject will be led directly toward your article. The risk of being buried by 10,000 other people covering a subject like technology is virtually non-existent — lest the exclusive topic should suddenly undergo a surge in popularity.
Often, I’ll use a couple of each. The “Medium” tag has 100k stories written for it, while the “Medium 101” Tag only has roughly 100. The others fall somewhere in between.
Finalizing drafts, submitting, and scheduling to publish
Once you’ve selected your final topic, chosen whether to paywall the story and sent a notification to your email subscribers, double-checked that everything in the article preview is as it should be, you’re ready to send your article off into the world. Or perhaps less climactically — to another editor or publication owner who can offer further suggestions, make a few tweaks, decline the piece if it isn’t a good fit, or publish as is.
Some publications may try to keep to a schedule and arrange for your article to be published at a specific time on a specific day, while others aim to publish each draft shortly after it’s submitted. Additionally, if you’d prefer to self-publish, you have the option to pick the time and date at which you’d like for your piece to go public.
While there’s plenty more to know about Medium, and still subjects like SEO, advanced settings, and navigating paywalls that I haven’t even addressed, I hope this guideline can serve as a helpful resource for anyone trying to reach a place of proficiency on this wonderful — if slightly complicated — website.