Essential Reading For New Medium Writers - Part 1

Set yourself up for success

Photo by Min An: On Pexels

Intro

I will get to the point without any fluff and provide as much value as I can. If you are new to Medium these are the things you need to know, to make your life easier and bring you closer to success. And even if you are here for a while you might still find some of these things very useful.

Enough of this, let’s get straight to the point.

1. The Partner Program

If you have just begun writing on Medium you will want to get into the partner program as soon as possible. The main requirements to join the partner program are:

• Have published at least one story on Medium

• Have at least 100 followers on Medium

• Live in an eligible country

As for the first one, it should be quite easy. If you are planning to be a writer, publishing one story shouldn’t be that difficult. However, if you are worried about being good enough I have some advice for you — just go for it. Perfection is a myth anyway. And you need to start from somewhere. You will get better with time and practice.

Now, as for the followers. You will want to gain followers as fast as possible, but don’t fall into the trap of trying to get followers for the sake of it. It will just slow things down. Let me explain.

Medium pays money for the time that paying Medium members read your stories. Not views, not anything else. More on this later.

And if you try to get followers using follow-for-follow, fake accounts, or some other ungenuine methods it will only make things worse for you in the long run. You need readers. The algorithm pushes stories that are being read and engaged with. And followers that don’t care about your writing or even worse fake followers will just make it worse for you in the eyes of the algorithm by reducing your views vs reads ratio.

There are better ways to gain followers.

2. Write, Read, Interact and Repeat

To gain traction you need to write and publish. And do it at least somewhat consistently. You don’t need to publish every day. Find what works for you. What I found to work the best for me is publishing at least 3 times a week. If you can do more — great! If you can do it once or twice a week, it should still do it in the long run. Just don’t sacrifice quality for quantity.

Read other writers, learn, improve and support them. You can certainly learn a lot here. There are tons of great, skilled entrepreneurs, and people with excellent niche knowledge, you can also find some amazing entertainment too.

You will grow your following this way. Interact, comment, clap (did you know that you can clap up to 50 times for one post? Yeah, claps ain’t like “likes”), ask questions and build relationships. Be genuine and you will find your crowd in no time.

And when you do this for a couple of weeks people will just randomly start following you. Some of them will just be doing it as follow-for-follow. But some will actually care about what you have to say. And that’s what's important.

More tips on gaining followers in part 2!

3. Set Yourself Up for Success

There are some things you will want to do as soon as you begin to make your profile look more professional.

Choose a good photo. What works best is an actual photo of yourself. preferably a high-quality portrait. If you really don’t want to show your face. You can do something similar to what I have done. Or even use a stock photo of someone else. ( I would advise against this. But you can still do it. Just make sure of the licensing for the photo you choose). But showing your personality and true identity usually works best.

You can find all these settings here.

The next step is writing a short bio. The bio will show up next to your stories. Here’s how it looks.

Screenshot by Author

Keep it simple, don’t overthink it. You can always change it later. But let your personality shine. You can also include a link to your website, your digital products, social media, or whatever else you wish to share.

You should also work on your about page where you can write a longer introduction. Be creative, readers who will get there probably already like your writing. Think of what else you can add to surprise them.

Another thing everyone will see when they visit your profile is a list of all your stories. And you can decide which stories they will see first by pinning them to your profile. And as we all know. First impressions have a huge impact.

You can do so by visiting your profile, clicking on the 3 dots next to the story of your choosing, and then clicking on pin story. See below:

Screenshot by author

4. Include links In Your Stories

This one is actually really important. To be successful as a writer you need to think as a marketer. And you need to market yourself. And Medium has a great linking system, copy a link into the Medium text editor hit enter, and see for yourself.

There are several ways to market yourself by using links on Medium. And you should use all of them.

A. Link to your mailing list.

Medium users can subscribe to get your stories sent directly to their e-mail. They can do it by pressing the button next to the “follow” below your bio. See below:

screenshot by Author

But the thing is, a lot of the readers don’t know that they can do it. Or they simply forget about it. And as a marketer, you need to remind them about this possibility. Here’s how to do it:

First, you will need the link. https://medium.com/@Yourusername/subscribe

Replace the “Yourusername” part with your actual username and you got your link.

Now you need to craft a simple message with a call to action. I usually use something like this. You can come up with something similar. See below.

If you enjoy reading my work Sign up Here to get all of my future posts directly to your inbox.

I usually end my stories with a message that includes this. You will see it at the bottom of this story. Using this strategy significantly increased the number of people who signed up to receive my stories in their e-mail.

And this is really important, as it’s very easy to get lost in the sea of content. But an e-mail is a great reminder of your existence. And that’s just scratching the surface of what a mailing list can do.

If you are not already doing this. I would advise you to update all of your existing stories to include your link after you finish reading.

B. Crosslink Your Stories

Include links to your old stories in your newer ones. This way you can increase your read time, help some older stories regain traction and provide more value to your readers.

Here’s an example link to my story on mailing lists:

How Medium Pros Grow Their Mailing Lists

You can also create lists of articles and link to those. Here’s one that might be useful to you:

Essential Reading for Aspiring Writers
12 stories

C. Include Your referral link

After you are accepted into the partner program, you can also earn by referring new members to Medium. If someone signs up for membership using your link, you will get half of their subscription fee for the lifetime of the subscription. It’s really nice to have this kind of passive income.

I also include this link in the ending note of most of my stories. Here’s how to find the link.

https://medium.com/@Yourusername/membership

Replace the “Yourusername” part with your actual username and you got your link.

You can also include affiliate links to other products or services. Just make sure that the reader is aware those are affiliate links.

5. Getting Paid

I have already written an in-depth article on this topic, so go check it out. Some valuable information there:

Everything You Need to Know About How Medium Pays Its Writers

To Be Continued

This article has already gotten quite long and packed with information, so I decided to split it into two parts.

In the next part I will focus on:

• Writing

• Formatting

• Tools

• Images

• Promotion

• Publications

• Curation

I will post it next week and link it here as soon as it’s up!

One last thing

If you enjoyed reading my work consider subscribing to get e-mails about my future writing on Medium - Sign up Here, or tipping me on Ko-Fi.