Get Better Reach on Medium
How to position yourself in medium and what to include in your writing
I have been writing in Medium for about 3 years. Since the arrival of publications in medium and were a trend, I got the opportunity of joining a data science-related publication as an editorial associate. During that time I was able to gain a significant amount of following and reach through their publication and few other publications.
However, owing to the exorbitant number of publishers the reach from a reputed publication is next to none. However, this is nothing to worry about for passionate writers. Also, the personal followers will always be able to read the content you write without having to swim through all that’s there in a publication. Unless they decide to feature your article (This might not be easy, or even be expensive).
Let Medium Curators Pick You!
With the arrival of the Medium partner program, you can get paid for what you write. The payments are computed per reading time for an article. Also, the payments are computed only from the readers who are members.
Medium Curators pick articles that fall under a set of predetermined rules and standards. In laymen’s terms, if you write original, ethical, valid, and useful content you’re likely to be selected by curators. Read more on curation below;
Be sure that you get proper reach and not to get drown in a publication with thousands of articles. Most likely the publications will either show their best articles and have your article in stock for the number of articles per month count. Which isn’t worth any appreciation.
Watch Your Stats
You can always see how your articles are performing.
These are some stats for an article I wrote few days back. It is clear that most of the traffic is coming from external referrals, i.e. RSS Feeds, Google Searches, etc.
Address where you have more chances and improve the ones lagging. For example, I have very poor reach on twitter.
It’s All About Your Networking
Blogging is an interesting way of building your network. Write articles that don’t have clickbait titles, yet have interesting titles. This ensures that you get indexed in google and pop up in common search terms. So next time the interviewer googling your name not only will see the linked in page, but you are also a blogger. Interesting!
Choosing Articles
There is a multitude of options you’ve got. Yet the medium has become a pit for Data Science related articles. So I might suggest you writing something along that line.
- Pick a proper title, that someone is likely to google
- Be complete and add original images
- Tutorials are a good starting point
- Adding codes, live examples, case studies could help you get organic followers
- Avoid boasting and click-baiting, let people search you
- Use a grammar tool like Grammarly. It is not rare for you to get backlashed for wrong English (if that's what you’re writing in)
- Cite others work, give accreditation and be polite with your opinions
Few more tips that I found helpful for being a writer in Medium
- Include a catchy image — This helps the people to get dragged towards your article unconsciously.
- Use free image sources — Unsplash, Pixabay, and Draw.IO to draw your own figures.
Explore your chances of getting a promotion👇
- Create your own publication, or use one that is not too congested.
- Consider getting features with a good article or go for a paid promotion/featuring.
- I found a few articles that suggest you delete and re-post articles. Though it might sound a bit underwhelming, it might really make sense. But be sure not to publish the same content multiple times. It kills your chances of being curated.
- Follow circles — There are followers who engage with your content. Sometimes followers even give nice comments along with improvements. Be kind, be nice, and consider following them back. That’s organic networking.
- For starters — Consider writing tutorials or a series of tutorials. In writing tutorials be sure to write complete articles that users don’t need to go back to your previous article. However, link the previous article and next articles so that users can read more from you.
- Make sure to write regularly. This helps to grow your reach slowly, yet steadily. This is why a tutorial series might be a good thing. You are very likely to get indexed over google terms too.
I believe this will help budding writers to go above and beyond. Happy reading. Cheers!
