Checklist for publishing a story to Medium.

Here’s a quick list of things you need to do before you submit your story for review on any of our publications.

Here’s a checklist to publish articles on Medium. We use this checklist to review stories for all of our publications. Our publications include — CloudBoost, Fyipe, HackerBay, HackerBay University, HackerBay Labs, HackerBay Ventures, Flow, and more.

We invite anyone to publish stories to any of our publications.

If you wish to contribute. Please send an email to hello@hackerbay.io with your Medium username, story link (this can be a draft), and the name of the medium publications you want to publish to. We’ll add you as a writer and have your article reviewed, edited and published!

Here’s what all this means for you as a writer:

• We won’t plaster your story with advertisements, or put it behind a paywall (or “email wall” or anything — no weird tricks).
• You can include links to your own blog or service, and even affiliate links, as long as it’s done tastefully and transparently.
• Your stories are yours. We don’t lay any claim to them. You can cross-post them wherever you want. Other newspapers and websites may even approach you about syndicating them or translating them. That’s fine with us. We just ask that — since we invest a lot of time in editing and promoting your stories — you don’t remove them from our Medium publication once we’ve published them.

Educate your readers

Educate your readers and teach them something new. Cut all the fluff. Get to the point — fast. Do not waste their time. This is the only reason they’re spending time on your story.

Write original content

Do not read 10 other articles and write your story along the same lines. World needs original content and if you cannot do that — Do not start writing it. Only write blogs on topic that you already know and have experience in.

Check for grammar and spellings

There’s a free tool that can help you do this. Make sure you do this before submitting your blog for review.

Tags

Tag example on a Medium article.

It’s important you tag all of your stories. Medium allows 5 tag per story. Use all of them. Please make sure you select 2 high influence tags (there should be a number when you select a tag, more the better) and 2 low-influence tags (less number of tags). The idea is your story will be the first one to show up when people search for low influence tags on a longer term basis, and high influence tags works better to get followers short term.

Images

• Pick a cover image: Cover images are a must for all stories. Stories without cover images get 5 times less traction than the one’s that do. Pick a decent cover image. It should align with your story, be engaging to look at and should tempt someone to click on your story.
• Never pick highly used images: They’re not attractive and often boring.

Highly used cover image.

You can change that image to this for example:

A new cover Image. More attractive and more engaging.

• Stock photography: Give your story some love by picking a beautiful, free picture from Unsplash.
• Captions: Please add captions to all of your images. It helps SEO your story.

Title

• Don’t use clickbait: “You won’t believe this one ridiculously effective headline dark pattern”
• Don’t use listicles: “11 outrageous headlines that will compel people to read your Medium story”. Sometimes listicles make sense, a lot of times — they don’t.
• Length: Make sure your title is neither too short nor too long. Ideal length is between 5–9 words,
• Distill your entire story to one headline. Make sure your article resonates with it. Do not deviate from your headline in your story.
• Make sure your headline is 80 characters or fewer. Otherwise, the title will get truncated in news feeds when people share your article on Facebook and Twitter.
• Analyse your headline: Here’s a tool that lets your analyse your headline. People click on emotional content. More emotional, the better.

Links

Always have links in the same line. I’ve linked to HackerBay’s website in this example. Never link like this — http://hackerbay.io.

Quotes

• Highlight important sentences and quotes. Quotes from other famous famous people add credibility.

Code

When you’re posting code. Use the Medium Code Block to write content. You can also embed JSFiddle or CodePen. Do not write code as text.

Post on Social Media

When we publish your story. Please post your story to your Twitter, Facebook and Facebook feed. It helps get visibility.

Conclusion

We’re looking forward to reading your submissions. I hope we can help you further improve your stories, and reach a much wider audience.