The secrets of writing on Medium
My 18th weekly blog, telling insights from my writing journey on Medium
It was a cold afternoon in October 2020, at the peak of the covid lockdown. I was sitting at home, feeling anxious about my future as a recent graduate. I was thinking to myself that my career ended before it started, how the lockdown was the new reality. The despair was all-consuming and I knew I had to do something to keep my mind sane! I don’t know what clicked precisely but I began to write what would become my first post on Medium.
Looking back after 3 and half years, writing has helped me in more ways than I can count. I learned plenty of things and some of those are specific to Medium. In this post, I would like to share everything I have learned by posting content on Medium.
I have over ~50,000 views and ~27,000 reads on Medium. My viewership has grown significantly over the past 6 months recording a 33% increase in both views and reads.
SEO is KING
Looking at the above image it becomes obvious that the majority of views come from search engine websites. More than 50% of the views came from Google and other search engines. If your goal is that your content gets read by as many people as possible, learning the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) will help you get more views.
Medium has a high credibility score on search engines, content posted there has an easier time getting ranked compared to your average site. My niche was data science and analytics. The best-performing content was which had high chances of getting ranked.
The less competition and more searches your content has the more views you would likely get. SEO is a broad topic, beyond the scope of this post but just applying the basics with your content on Medium would get you thousands of views.
Remember to feed the algo
Here are some of the things to know about algorithms, they are often fed quantitative data and use that as signals for quality or relevance.
The precise algorithm that recommends on Medium is proprietory but as users, it is not impossible to see what signals the algorithms ‘probably’ use for promoting content. Things such as claps, unique clappers, read time, search tags, publication, how many followers read (especially if members reads) and comments on posts are all signals that are probably used by Medium to recommend content on the platform.
There are some things you can do to feed the algorithm. You have to share it with your network and ask people to react to the content. No matter how good your content is, the algorithm won’t recommend it unless it gets adequate signals. Feeding the algorithm is not exclusive to Medium, but you won’t get anywhere without it.
One excellent way to feed the algorithm is to bring outside traffic, I rely on Reddit for most of my outside traffic.
Choose a good niche(s)
A niche is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. In the context of Medium, it means a sub-category of content you write about. Once, you start growing a following it becomes harder and harder to switch niches, so choose wisely. Without a niche you’re unlikely to build a large following as most of your followers expect you to deliver content similar to what they followed you for, they might unfollow if they are not interested in some of your content.
Here are some key aspects to keep in mind while choosing a niche:
Total size of the pie: There needs to be people willing or interested in what you write. For example, if you write about programming you should choose Python than ALGOL. Since Python has a larger interest
Competition: You should not be dissuaded by competition but you should evaluate if your content is differentiated enough that you could create your readership.
Expertise: I write about technical subjects related to data science, analytics, and programming. I have been programming since I was a teen, I have worked in the data space for over 4 years, and I have the expertise to write good content on the subject. It is hard to make good content without any background.
You can and should have more than one niche but they should be complimentary. You can’t have content about Python and cooking but you can have content about Python and SQL. In practice, you should experiment with content, and try delving into related but complimentary topics but always remember that if you deviate too much you might sacrifice your current readership.
Conclusion
These are my secrets about writing on Medium, if you enjoy this content please do subscribe! Feel free to share anything I might have missed.
This post was originally posted on Substack, where I write about my experiences running a startup. Any lessons I learned while working on my different projects.
