The Ultimate 7-Step Guide to Mastering Marketing on Medium
The Medium publishing platform is one of the most emerging platforms today. Founded in August 2012 by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, Medium has grown tremendously to over 180 million monthly visitors as of this year. The new kid on the block isn’t as new anymore but continues to grow rapidly.
Medium is set to be a game-changer in the future. And, that’s why it’s so important that businesses realize the immense potential of the platform and capitalize on it while it’s still young and nascent enough to offer new businesses the edge of starting early. I have stressed the importance of starting early on emerging platforms to earn disproportionate benefits in one of my earlier blogs as well.
Whether it’s Medium’s clean minimalistic design, high-quality credible content, or the insanely high exposure to readers that worked for it, we can say with certainty that Medium is here to stay.
Learning about Medium has been so overwhelming that I’m in the process of importing all posts from this website to Medium as well. Yes, SameerSells is now on Medium, also. Go ahead, and follow us. I talk about the massive benefits of importing one’s existing blog posts to the Medium platform in the latter part of this article. Stay tuned.
So, here I talk about my top marketing strategies to grow on Medium, based on my observations and experience with the platform. These strategies are game-changers if you are looking to up your game on Medium.
1. CHOOSING SAME TAGS AS TOP STORIES IN YOUR CATEGORY
Tags are extremely important for discoverability and categorization on Medium. Medium allows the use of up to 5 tags with each story we post. You must use these limited tags really well in order to be discovered.
One great way to optimize the use of the tags is to use the same tags as top stories in your niche. This is destined to work for you because it worked to make the top stories, the top stories after all.
Head over to the search bar, and search for the most relevant keyword to your niche, for instance, “business”. Top articles in this category. Focus on the right side of the screen which shows the most used tags in this niche. Use these.
2. ENGAGE WITH PEOPLE INTERESTED IN THE SAME NICHE AS YOURS
When people engage with your content (clap/comment/highlight), this shows they are interested in what you write. Now, they may not always follow you in such cases, but you can engage with their content instead in a number of ways like follow/comment/clap/highlight so that they notice you and likely follow you. Plus, engagements in the form of replies to their comments on your posts help your post do better.
In general as well, when you engage with people in the same niche as yours, it helps you get noticed. And, there’s a chance they will follow you since they are interested in this niche. There are a number of ways of doing this.
– Mass following strategy and the 1:10 principle:
Go to an influencer’s profile in your niche, say Gary Vaynerchuk in Business. Go to this person/publication’s list of followers. Follow these people. When you follow 10 people, roughly 1 follows you back.
You can follow about 100–200 people in a day without being prompted by Medium that you are inhibited to follow any more people for the next 24 hours. And, you can be assured that Medium will never block your account for something like this, but only prompt.
– Mass comment strategy:
There are no restrictions on commenting set by Medium. You can literally comment your way through any number, at any rate. What you can do is prepare a general comment that you can do on all posts in your niche. Keep this comment as generic as possible.
Once your comment is ready, you can mass spam on as many articles as you possibly can. You’re likely to earn followers via this method of discovery if you have some solid content on your Medium profile.
–Individual comment strategy (marking and engaging):
You can do more customized responses to people’s stories by highlighting a part of their posts and/or commenting on this highlighted part as a public note. When you follow this person now, you have a much higher chance of a follow back, since you have made an effort to create personal engagement. Roughly speaking, 1 in every 2 people you follow this way are likely to follow you back.
These strategies will especially push you up through an initial stage when you’re struggling with a minimal following and can’t really implement much of the other strategies that follow later in the article which need you to show some credibility in terms of your following. Thus, this strategy can help you get off the floor with an initial take-off, and once you’re at a decent number of followers, you can go after the more effective strategies.
And although some of these strategies might come across as spammy, they work. So, if you’re ready to put in the extra time, you can see the extra results.
3. CALL TO ACTION (CTA) AT THE END OF YOUR ARTICLES
Asking readers to clap and share at the end of your article isn’t really enough. A person might end up giving you a clap or so if they enjoy your article, but almost always they won’t share it with their network.
You should offer a Call To Action (CTA) at the end of your article which people can go for. This can be a link to another one of your articles which is similar to that one. This works particularly if you have a long piece of writing split into a series of multiple articles. You can direct your readers to the next part of the article in the series via a CTA at the end.
Not only that, but you can also use have a CTA asking readers to, say, follow you on a certain social media like Twitter. This can help with your social media following as well.
Other than CTAs, you can collect email addresses from readers signing them up for your newsletter, or offer some reward in return for providing their email address (an e-book, an online course, tips for growth). As such, Medium does not have a built-in feature to collect email addresses. You can use a third-party website to do the same. Upscribe is one such free tool.
4. PUBLISHING YOUR ARTICLES WITH TOP MEDIUM MAGAZINES
This is probably the biggest way you can grow massively on Medium. Publications are a great way to get more of your people to discover your content. You can check out toppub.xyz for a list of top publications on Medium which have the highest following.
Once you choose a publication you would wish to write for, you can contact them talking about this. Make sure to have a good Medium profile beforehand with some solid quality articles so to up the chances of your application getting accepted. You might want to target pages with medium popularity instead of big ones, to begin with.
When you write on your Medium profile, you get discovered mainly only by your followers. But, when you write for a publication, you get discovered also by the followers of the publication so to boost your following. Good writing that gets discovered in a publication that is targeted to your niche content is definitely a brilliant way to build your audience.
An example of such an article that I would also recommend as supplementary reading on Medium Marketing — The Advanced Guide To Medium Marketing.
5. STARTING YOUR OWN PUBLICATION ON MEDIUM
If you’re serious about blogging, start a publication on Medium from the start. Setting up a publication on Medium is effortless. Invite popular authors in your niche to contribute to your publication, or ask them to let one of their existing articles be a part of your publication.
If your niche gets a lot of news and updates regularly (like Technology or Politics), things sound even better. You’ll be able to generate content more regularly for your publication.
Medium also allows you to send newsletter-style emails to all your publication readers and followers. Sending regular medium letters is a powerful strategy.
Additionally, you can also create a Typeform and keep the link in your publication somewhere for aspiring contributors to effortlessly contact you via this form, since Medium has no form of messaging.
6. IMPORTING YOUR BLOG/WEBSITE’S ARTICLES ON MEDIUM
If you already have a website or a blog where you have content, this is some amazing news for you. Medium allows you to import your articles from elsewhere onto your Medium account. It’s an effortless one-click process doing so.
On importing your articles, you might want to adjust the formatting and/or check whether the images got correctly imported. After editing, you can publish your article on Medium.
Importantly, you can note that Google doesn’t penalize you for repurposing content in this manner on account of duplication. It’s completely legitimate for you to do so.
I highly, highly recommend you do this. Top bloggers and websites like Buffer, Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel have done it for themselves and have vouched for the amazing results. Medium can bring you a 1000% increase in views when you compare it with your website’s views, largely by virtue of its algorithm, and emerging platform status.
You can leverage these views to redirect your viewers back to your website thus boosting your website traffic as well, among other things. The possibilities to leverage these large views are endless.
7. MORE ACTIONABLE MICRO TIPS TO GROW ON MEDIUM
#Timing of posting: Saturday mornings make for the best time to post your articles on Medium. You have a higher chance of landing as one of Medium Staff’s handpicked articles.
#Building social media following: Insert CTA ‘Follow me on Twitter/Facebook” images in your articles to increase your social media following as well, while you’re at it.
#Creative comments: Write genuine and creative comments on popular Medium stories. That way, the author is likely to respond to you and helps you with the chance of being a top comment thus appearing as the only comment right below the Medium article, and getting a good exposure.
#Micro-stats: Based on observations and studies, it has been seen that 7-minute posts, with 400-words and 42-character headlines on average work the best. You might want to optimize your articles accordingly.
#Embed media: Medium allows you to embed tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, etc. content into your posts. Make the most of it, as this might help boost your social media following while also offering a richer and interesting look to your articles.
#Link back to your website: Do this in as many places as you can (your bio, articles, CTA).
#First impression: Use pleasing images, customized titles, and subtitles for your articles as this helps form the first impression on your potential readers. It’s important to make it a good one.
#Recommend great articles: which are relevant to your industry. Your followers will come across your recommendations on their feeds. Take advantage to position yourself as an influential voice in the field by recommending really interesting content.
With the growth that Medium has seen, it goes without saying that it’s only set to become bigger. Now would be the right time to jump on this bandwagon for a good ride you won’t regret. I only wish you luck and success on your journey!
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