A Year On Medium
Tips, tricks, friendships, lessons, and more.
Depending on how you look at it, this is either my 103rd article or my 113th article on Medium.
I started publishing here as a method to keep track of articles I had written somewhere else.
On the 1st of January 2018, though, I published my first proper story meant for Medium.
From that point onwards, I have hit the publish button at a rate of once every 3 days.
It has been equal parts exciting and tiring, and full of lessons and tips that I’ve grateful to have learnt. Here are a few that I hope will be useful for others:
1. Find your writing style
This might be one of the most overused ‘inspirational’ phrases in the realm of writing, but it really does work.
I tried a whole bunch of different styles when I first started writing here; I tried being encouraging and helpful:
I tried embracing my inner fangirl:
I took part in some writing challenges that veered into pure fiction:
(this was the January challenge from The Writing Cooperative that asked us to take the perspective of someone different from us.)
But in the end, what actually worked was just being my sarcastic, sincere self:
This article has over 1,300 claps, but the funny thing is, I hesitated for months to write it, because I thought that it would sound like I was trying to give the definitive experience, instead of my experience, when it came to introverts.
2. Be visually-appealing
Medium is pretty beautiful to write on. The font is pleasing, the amount of white space is perfect, and the mobile app is *Italian chef kiss*-worthy.
However, it doesn’t hurt to use images, and if you want to, gifs as well.
These visual elements really help to break up the wall of text that ends up occurring when you put more than 5 lines in a paragraph. It makes the article seem more than an article rather than, well, a textbook.
If you need images, the Medium+Unsplash collaboration is really useful and easy to navigate, and Giphy is always a safe source for fun gifs.
(related tip: use shorter paragraphs and these lovely text styling choices as well!)
3. Publications are a boon and a bane
When I first started, my aim was to leverage publications to get an audience. There are so many publications here that have thousands (and sometimes hundreds of thousands!) of followers, and many of them accept submissions.
You can start with SMedian, which has a list of publications that you can apply to, or you can just look through publications here on Medium; many of them include instructions for submissions.
I’ve published on The Writing Cooperative, Frame Rated, Mark Growth, Movie Time Guru, The Post-Grad Survival Guide, and more, and it has been amazing to see the encouragement from these editors.
However, sometimes you can start getting into the mindset of writing to get into publications.
I don’t think that’s a great idea.
I believe that you should write whatever interests you, and then, after writing it, see if it would fit a specific audience from a specific publication. If it doesn’t, self-publish it, maybe under the partner program (if possible).
4. Tags and followers matter
Medium is slightly different than the rest of the internet, because it focuses on writing as a content medium. It stands to reason, then, that you’re writing here because you want people to read your content.
It would be idiotic of me, then, to say that tags and followers don’t matter. Of course they do.
Followers and engagement show whether people are resonating with your writing.
You can learn so much about what interests people from the way they interact with your writing; do they love the inspirational quotes you include? If so, you can then decide if you want to include more quotes, or even write an entire article about quotes!
To get people to start reading your content, a good method is to lean on tags. I can’t remember who said this, but at least one of your five tags should be a main tag (i.e. one that’s considered one of the topics within Medium), as that’ll increase the chances of people coming across your article.
(another related tip: engage with other writers’ articles as well, as it’ll bring you to their attention quickly.)
5. Writers are nicer than you think
I have to admit, this was a hard pill to swallow.
I always thought that quotes like this described the writer’s life:
“Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.” — John Green
However, I’ve found out that both accomplished and burgeoning writers can benefit from some group activity and mutual encouragement; through this, I’ve even met my first friend through writing!
I’m still getting used to communicating with other writers, but groups such as the Grow Your Blog movement on Facebook, the Writing Cooperative Slack channel, and the Publishous Twitter account are great places to start for some encouragement and motivation.
6. Write more than you want to
Finally, I wish I could say that you muddle through the first year in order to get to a stage where you only write when you want to, but that would be a false statement.
Sorry.
Medium is a land of infinite great writers.
If you want to stand out, you need to write. Often. And then more than that.
Keep writing, keep tagging, keep making friends, and you might find Medium a lot more viable as a long-term platform. Good luck!
