[Day 9] 5 Best Practices to Writing on Medium

Hello. And welcome back to day nine of the Oren Cohen podcast. Wow. This is actually progressing into the 30 days that I planned in the beginning. And it's really amazing to see this actually gain some momentum. As I said yesterday, today, we're talking about medium and some best practices to publish. Okay. So there are five points I want to make in today's episode. They are. Your profile. Solo posts. Publications, email and engagement. So let's start with the first one, which is your profile.

In the same way that on Twitter or Instagram, they tell you that you need to optimize your profile. For example, Instagram. Is very, very guilty of this because you can't put links anywhere other than your bio. So they say, okay, you need to really, really optimize your profile so that when people click through a post to your profile. They know what to do next. Medium is very similar in that vein that many times when people see a post of yours On their feed.

They might click through to your profile. Not always, but they might click through to your profile. And. You don't just want to have your bio optimized for them, like to understand. Instantly who you are and what you do. But you also want to have a pinned "about me" post. And that is a trick. That I learned from various creators on medium over the years. Where you create a post, a regular post, but you don't make it in the intention of getting it. Boosted or distributed.

It's just an about me post you click. You write. About "your name" and then you write everything. You want people who are visiting your profile to know about you, whether it is what you do, your email list, your courses, your podcast, whatever it is that you want to share on medium. Put that in that about me post. And then through your profile, you have the ability to check. that specific post and pin it to your bio. That feature did not exist when I started on medium.

But it is definitely very useful. Something that you want to use whenever you get the opportunity. And it is an essential part of optimizing your profile when people do visit it and people on medium do visit it. There is. A lot more connection on medium that other platforms. When people read you. And they spend a whole time of reading from start to finish.

They are interested in who wrote to the post as opposed to searching for something on Google and just getting the answer they wanted to their Google query. Here. There is a connection because people find you. Mostly through the recommendation system. On their homepage. And when they click through. It's because the title enticed them, they read through they liked it, or didn't like it.

But if they did like it, they are interested in who wrote it and seeing where to find more, where that came from. And that is where your profile optimization is very important. Okay, the next thing is solo posts. You don't want someone who stumbles upon your profile to find an empty profile. There are publications on medium, which is something we'll talk about in the next point after this one. But. You don't want to start by publishing for publications.

You want to start by publishing for you, which means that you are going to publish solo posts. And those are posts that you just publish on your own profile. If you want to create your own publication, that's also doable. I don't see why you would need that in the beginning when you're just finding your voice and start writing. But if you are. Trying to put your voice out there. You just need to start writing.

And then afterwards you can start optimizing for tags for topics and all that, but that's irrelevant at the beginning because. Probably your first a hundred posts are going to be crap. But you need to get to a hundred posts. I think I am standing at about 300 posts currently on medium because I'm not. Writing there at the pace that I used to. And I'm also guilty of not crossposting to medium. A lot of my. Content on my actual geek blog.

So you want to actually start writing and have maybe at least five posts that you spent time and sweat on. And then you can start writing on publications. So let's talk about that next. Okay, so writing for publications. Medium has a lot of publications which serve as actual magazines. One of my favorites is the startup, which I wrote for many times, it is a publication with, I think. The last time I checked around 700,000 subscribers.

It might be more now because I haven't been on medium for quite a while. The funny thing is that sometimes publications find you. Which means that Sometimes an editor for a publication would see that not all of the posting to queue are actually good enough to publish. And they reject some. They still need to fill in the quota of. Daily posts. So what they'll do, they'll actually go to a different kind of a tag pages on medium. And then start finding posts that might be relevant.

From your end, it would seem like you suddenly got a private message. On one of your posts, which is a feature of medium, people can actually highlight. One of your sentences and then send you a private message about it on the article itself, which is good for editing, because it means like maybe you have a typo there. So instead of publishing it publicly where everyone could see that you have a typo.

Only you and the person who made the private message know that you have a typo, then you can fix it and also thank them in the thread of the private message. What publications sometimes will do, they'll go into those tag pages, find people and then leave a private message that they are interested in the article and they added you as a writer for the publication. And you can just submit it to them. By actually publishing more solo posts. What we talked about earlier.

You're giving yourself a higher chance of getting discovered through publications. But don't just leave it at that. Don't just wait until you're invited. Each publication that respect itself on medium has opposed to with submission guidelines and you can actually take that post, read it. digest what it means, and then prepare your article accordingly. And submit it as a candidate for publication.

And usually the first time you're starting to write for a publication, it will be a little tougher because you are not a writer for them. But after you got accepted one time. You are still a writer for the publication and sometimes it will be easier to submit new articles. So find more publications adhere to their submission guidelines, and start publishing more on publications. Usually the timeframe is waiting for about a week.

If you don't hear back from a publication for about a week, you can disregard the submission and publish it on your own, unless stated otherwise in their submission guidelines, if they say we return all of the submission requests In about two weeks, then wait the two weeks adhere to the guidelines. But after that time has passed. You're not obligated to keep the posts in the queue. And you can actually start posting it on your own profile or submit it to a different publication.

The next thing I want to talk about is email. Medium is a little bit strange with this. They didn't have the ability to curate email addresses from your readers in the early days, but it is a feature that they included. I think about two years ago. And what you want to do. Is you want to enable that in your medium settings, that people can sign up to your email list? And you have an actual email list on medium that you can export. I, you wouldn't rely on that solely.

I would actually include your own little snippet at the end that invites them to join your email list instead of moving through medium. But if you don't have an email hosting provider and you don't want the headache of setting up one. But you will need to do at some point. Then just start with medium and then you can export your list. And he import it into one of those different email hosting providers. And the final thing that I want to include in this episode is about engagement.

Sometimes, you'll see people are responding and engaging with your articles. It could be by publishing. Comments, and it could be by clapping. Either of these engagements are super important to follow up with. What I mean is in the same way that you want to Comment back on someone responding to you on Twitter and make that relationship. You want to do the same When someone responds to your article on medium. You can go to their profile, start reading their stuff, and then comment on their stuff.

But I wouldn't just react to engagement. You can also start engagement yourself by starting to read more things in the topics that you write. In. For example, if you write about TV shows, go to the tough DV tag page. And start reading articles there. And start responding. I noticed that. Sometimes a lot of views for other stuff come From writing a well thought out comment on someone else's post, which is currently trending. People can find you very easily. People read the comments. On medium.

Very religiously. And by actually being engaging. And writing and starting a discussion. Like not just posting something like good job. A really great article. No, engage with the content. What do you think about what was said? Answered the question the person who wrote to the article asked in the body of the article, Sometimes people would say, what do you think about nanana? Comment below. So comment below do that.

And then in the same way that you comment, people are more inclined to reciprocate. And go back to your profile and read your stuff. So that's all I wanted to include in this episode as a general recap. Optimize your profile. Enable email collection on your settings. Have at least a few solo episodes published. So people don't come to an empty profile. Submit to publications when you feel. An article would benefit from being in a publication. And engage, engage, engage.

So those are the things that are important for a great time on medium. For a final thing that I want to say. Don't interact with all of the making money on medium stuff. If you notice I did not talk about money at all. And a lot of people on medium. Like to curate engagement by making posts about how much they made and all that stuff. If you want to actually have a sustainable. Time on medium, don't interact with those posts or don't write those posts.

You can read it, but don't Integrate yourself into that culture of. Engagement about money-making on medium, actually focus on value, focus on topics. Focus on the things you want to say without regards to money. And you'll start actually building a community and an audience. Which is what you want to do on medium. When you start writing out, do you want to find your voice and share it with people? Thank you so much for listening or watching this episode.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. If you want to read in-depth articles about content creation. I have a newsletter, which you can find in the description of the episode. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.