10 Tips on How to Write Great Medium Content
The checklist that helped me reach over 200K views on Medium
10 best practices on how to write quality articles on Medium that generate enormous traffic and click-through rate, earn you money, and rank higher on Google.
How did my Medium articles perform so far?
I have been publishing on Medium since 2018, and so far, I have published twenty-two articles, and the community loved the following articles.
My medium stories generated over 200K views (in total), and the most I have earned from a single article (published on Aug 17, 2020) has been over 750 US dollars, with over 300 hours of member read time and counting.
Let’s get started with the list of tips and things to keep in mind when publishing on Medium.
1. Join the Medium Partner Program
When Medium introduced Paywall, I was furious. I switched to an alternative free platform; however, after I published a few articles there, I realized the value Medium offered for both readers and writers in exchange for $5 a month.
In my opinion, the benefits of joining the Medium Partner Program outweighs the $5 a month membership for both writers and readers.
2. Make a list of topics to write about
The first and foremost step is the ideation phase that involves
- Brainstorm topics and make a list, as well as note any idea that crosses your mind
Following the ideation phase, review each topic
- Find out what is available on the internet, and decide whether to write about the topic or not
3. Research, Write, Refine and Repeat
Start with dumping all the information that you wish to include in the story and then proceed with refining the content. Where necessary, complement the story with multimedia content such as images, videos, and audio.
A story with multimedia content and external references are easy to read, understand, more resourceful. A multimedia-rich story helps search engines such as Google understand the story's context and do a better job ranking it.
4. Pick a relevant cover image
The cover image is the first piece of visual content that the reader sees, so don’t forget to make a good first impression by choosing a cover image related to your story.
A picture is worth a thousand words — Frederick R. Barnard
5. Write SEO-friendly story title and description
The title is the first thing that a reader notices, and search engines, use the title, description, and content of the story for ranking.
It’s important to come up with a title that is both human and search engine friendly.
I personally use https://capitalizemytitle.com/headline-analyzer, and it gives a headline a score for Readability, SEO, and Sentiment, as shown below.
As per Medium, the recommended length for the Title and Description are 57 and 156 characters long.
6. Simplify! Aim for less than 7 mins of “Read Time”
It turns out stories with 6–7 minutes get 20% more recommends on Medium. Consider dividing it into multiple parts if you cannot restrict a story to less than 7 minutes.
Check out this great article, “How to write a great medium post based on data.”
7. Medium uses tags to serve Readers relevant content
In Medium, a story can be tagged with up-to five tags that would help Medium categorize and distribute the story to the appropriate audience.
Check out this article “The 20 Most Popular Medium Tags In 2020,” on how tagging works in Medium.
By appropriately tagging your Medium story, you can help Medium curators distribute your story to the right audience who would spend time reading your content.
8. Consider publishing in a publication for greater reach and traffic
There are thousands of publications on Medium, and you have to be a writer to publish. Even then, a majority of publications have a review process in place and only select quality stories.
A story accepted and published in a publication will get distributed to the publication’s followers via email, as well as the publication’s homepage. Some publications go the further mile to distribute your work on varieties of other channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, and so on.
Check out a list of Medium’s top publications.
9. Monday — Friday is a great time to publish a Medium story
Based on my experience so far, Monday through Friday are days when my Medium stories get a lot more views than the weekend, and some publications only post on weekdays for this exact reason.
10. Final touches before publishing a Medium story
Before you publish a story, there are a few other stuff that we need to do
As shown in the screenshot to the left side, a few finishing touches need to be applied before a story is published. For example,
- Add tags to the Medium story.
- Change display title/subtitle.
- Change featured image
- Customize the story URL
- Add an SEO title and description.
The URL customization, SEO title, and description are done via the “More Settings.”
Conclusion
Thank you for reading, and I hope that you find this story helpful. Please share your feedback in the comments section below and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and follow for more relevant stories.
