Starting to write on Medium can be a great way to share your thoughts and ideas with a wider audience. What makes Medium a great platform is its community. You can build an audience that is genuinely curious about your content and is providing you with valuable feedback.
When deciding whether you should start writing on Medium, ask yourself, do you want to start immediately publishing content that others will read or you would give yourself time to build a writing habit and start publishing later?
In the end, it depends on what you want to achieve. If you are writing for yourself only, Medium is not a good platform for you long-term. But if you plan to start publishing for an audience ever in the future, expose yourself to the world sooner.
Another thing to consider is, whether you want to create, maintain and nurture a blog through which you’ll interact with other writers, or simply you want to write. Again, if it’s the first case, Medium is a great place to be. Otherwise, some simpler alternatives will make your life a bit easier.
Create an Account 🔗
Everything starts by creating an Account. Nothing scientific in this step, you know the drill, just have in mind to create an account with an email address that you regularly check. Medium is heavy on communication and not only about your account but also digests with lots of helpful articles that you can use to grow further.
So make sure your account is legit.
Choose a topic 🔗
Then, choose a topic that you are passionate about and that you believe others will be interested in reading about. This could be anything from personal development and self-improvement to technology and startup culture.
By doing so, you niche down your content. You announce it to a limited number of readers that will find it engaging and useful. Writing about Tennis and Volcanoes on the same blog might not be a good idea.
Research and curate your content 🔗
The Iceberg Theory is a writing style coined by American author Ernest Hemingway, in which the meaning of a story is implied or suggested, rather than explicitly stated. According to Hemingway, an author should only reveal the surface events of a story, while keeping the underlying meaning or symbolism hidden, like an iceberg with most of its mass underwater.
Simply said, do your research before you write. Do not try to educate people on questions that you cannot answer yourself later. Doing that creates an unauthentic profile of yourself. You don’t want to do that, especially when you only started building your credibility and authenticity.
Read articles and blog posts by other writers on Medium, and take note of the types of content that are popular and well-received by readers. This will help you to curate your content and ensure that it is relevant and interesting to your audience.
Conversational Tone 🔗
Apply a conversational tone. Medium is a platform where readers come to engage with content and ideas, so it’s crucial that your writing is informal and easy to read. Avoid using jargon or complex language; instead, focus on writing in a way that is clear and accessible to all readers.
Make your content representative 🔗
Format your content in a way that is easy for the reader to read it. Make sure you press more on ‘Enter’ and less on ‘Space’. Meaning: give your content a proper paragraph structure so that the sections and points you want to make are separate one from another.
A must is to add images and other media to your articles. This seemingly aesthetics-only hack can help to break up the text and make it more visually appealing. This can also help to capture the attention of readers and make your content more shareable.
Very important! Make sure the images you use are royalty-free (like the ones found on Unsplash), and you mention the original author of the image. This will position you as a writer that cares for other content creators and gives credit where credit is due, and also minimize the hassle of potential copyright infringement conflicts.
Share It! 🔗
After you finish writing your post, share it on your social media platforms, and also in relevant Medium publications, communities and groups. Share it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. By sharing your article obnoxiously, you increase the chance for it to get noticed by search engines so that it gets displayed as a result when somebody is searching for the topic you wrote about.
Write 🔗
If you want to become a baker, you need to bake. If you want to become a writer, you need to write.
Writing on Medium is an ongoing process, so don’t expect to get many readers immediately. The more you write and engage with other writers on the platform, the more readers you will attract.
The alternative to Medium is writing in a space that is not exposed to others straight away and does not necessarily have a community behind it.
Like Writings for example. There you can write, organize your writing and decide when and how you want it to get published. Read more about it here.
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