4 Easy Strategies to Promote Your Medium Articles

It’s never too early to take yourself seriously.

Whether you began writing for fun, for work, or for additional income, your audience will grow faster if you implement deliberate strategies to promote your work.

The goal is always to focus on writing new content, but consider promoting your articles as a way to get your helpful and insightful content to people who will be positively impacted.

During my time on Medium, these are the four strategies that have had the most profound impact on growing my viewership. Don’t wait and learn these lessons the hard way, read on to save yourself time and accelerate growth.

Find a Publication

Publishing your work through a publication is the single-most important step to promote your writing on Medium. If you’re lucky, you may have an editor reach out to you, but don’t count on it. The sheer quantity of new writers and content puts you at a disadvantage, so you need to go out and get what’s yours.

Find publications that will be a good fit for your writing. This isn’t as easy as sorting by followers/viewers. In fact, getting published by a giant publication can be doing you a disservice, as you’ll get washed away in all their contributors.

A good-fitting publication will have similar topics and a positive community (check the responses of other published posts). This goes towards developing your niche.

Find out who the editors are of your target publications and proactively reach out to them. Here’s a template to get you started.

Dear [publication name],
I've been writing on Medium for [x] months and the experience has been very positive. I’d like to take my writing to the next level and think I’d be an asset to [publication name].

I enjoy writing about [x], [y], and [z]. My experiences [add context] allow for a unique perspective that readers will appreciate. Here’s a link to one of my recent posts: [insert link]. I’d love to post my next article through you or even republish the above article under your name.

Thanks for your time and excited to hear back,

[your name]

Calibrate Your Tags

After having a publication promoting your writing, getting curated on Medium is the next biggest gamechanger that will amplify your visibility.

Curation is done through content tags. Tags can be tricky because you’re only allowed five for each article. It’s critical that you choose carefully.

I use these three strategies to constantly calibrate my content tags.

1. Check the activity of your current tags. It’s a common misconception, but tags aren’t about describing your work. There may be a tag that perfectly describes your work, but if nobody visits that tag then you’re just wasting ammo. Look at the frequency of articles and general interaction. When typing in your tags, check the number in parenthesis to get an idea of the more popular tags and follow along.
2. Review your readers’ interests. After you receive enough traffic on an article, Medium’s stats page will tell you the top interests of your readers and the saturation of each tag. Use this information to identify unknown tags and assess the overall fit with your readers’ interests.
3. Ask your publication’s editors. It’s so simple, but your editors will know which tags trend best. Remember, their job is to grow the viewership of the publication so they’ll be your biggest advocates.

Link to Previous Articles

If you treat your articles as a one-and-done experience, then so will the internet. Always look for opportunities to link back to previous writings and try to get more than one article read from each viewer.

Without linking to your previous work, you’ll see about 90% of your Medium notifications focus on the most recent article, a handful will be new subscribers, and there will be rare claps for old content. By continually referring back to your work, you’ll start seeing a new trend.

Approximately 65% of my notifications are for my most recent article. But what I see very frequently is claps for the new article, claps for a linked article, then a new follower.

Readers are less likely to subscribe if they think all you have to offer is one article. They won’t even look at who wrote it. But once you demonstrate multiple articles, then your likelihood of getting a new follower increases tremendously.

Promote on Social Media

This is a controversial one, but it’s never too early to start promoting yourself on social media. The most important thing to remember is that your focus must stay on writing new content and not farming social media engagement.

I spend no more than a one-hour block every other week on social media. Here’s how I do it.

• Use a tool like Buffer to schedule posts. In my 6 Must-Have Accounts When Starting a Blog article, I recommend Buffer as a free tool for scheduling social media posts. Buffer has a stupidly easy interface that lets you schedule social media posts for future posting.
• Use friend links when sharing on social media. The last thing you want to happen is for somebody to interact with your social media post and be rewarded with a paywall. Consider yourself a marketer for Medium by posting a friend link, and hopefully converting a new paid member. Don’t worry about losing out on royalties. If the person who reads the article is already a Medium member, then they will still count towards your earnings.
• Do not repeat your headline. Please do not waste valuable characters, your headline will be in the thumbnail when you link your articles. Instead, use your characters for describing the benefits of reading the post.
• Don’t forget the tags. Just like all other content platforms, tags are the gatekeepers to increasing visibility for your work. Tags will help you get picked up by sharing bots and put you in front of readers who follow specific tags.

Don’t expect overnight results, and remember to keep your focus on creating new content. But you’ll begin to notice higher views, changes in reader interactions, and longer residual royalties by strategically promoting your content.