Great Things I Have Accidentally Learned About Writing For The Medium Platform

Medium is a fickle mistress, one that does not give up all of her secrets on the first night love making. She has to be explored and stoked, until she eventually gave me glimpses of what I could do and what I could not.

First of all, many of the the articles in this forum are locked behind a paywall. This enables content creators to actually receive small chunks of change per number of view and claps for each of their articles. Unfortunately, many of these articles had much of the information that I needed in order to start to make some movement in getting to know my newest obsession. I put it off for weeks, hopeful that my writing skills alone were going to be enough to draw a crowd and bring in some nice passive income.

However, as I said Medium is a fickle mistress. She must be stroked and caressed in just the right manner. You have to play by her rules if you intend on making any kind of mark. Pun intended.

Formatting

Firstly, I like how much of the formatting work is already done for you. Medium’s platform has a consistency in form that I have only seen mirrored to any degree on the Vocal Platform. One thing of note that I thought was rather important deals with the beginning title formatting. Should you accidentally skip your Subtitle and go ahead and upload a picture, you can easily go back up to your main title, hit enter and type in your subtitle. However, at this point, you will have to reformat your text so that it is in the appropriate subtitle format, otherwise your subtitle will just look like the rest of your text. You can do so by selecting the text with a quick scroll and highlight and when you release the button, you will see a small quick menu which contains buttons for Bold, Italics, Creating Hyperlinks and Font Sizes. Changing the font type to that of Subtitle is just as easy as clicking on the smaller letter T in that menu. You will know that you have done so correctly when you click on the Subtitle and you will now see a line marker coming down the side of the main title and you will see both the words Title and Subtitle in the sidebar.

Followers

You also should look through your follower list fairly often, I would say once a week. The reason being is that new followers to your contents are often kind of just stuck in anywhere when you look through your list. I am not sure what rhyme or reason Medium follows, but I don’t believe new followers are organized in single file in the order that they came into your room. If you are intending to do follow-backs on all of your followers, the best practice is to just look through your list to make sure you don’t have any stragglers you haven’t followed back shuffling about.

Following Other Writers

I started off like we all have to, with zero followers. I attempted to reach out to social media, but none of my immediate friends on Facebook had ever heard of Medium or Vocal with the exception of one. I even tried to appeal to my #WritingCommunity friends on Twitter to come help me out. However, I got little in response to my pleads for follow-ship. What did start working was looking at writers who were already established on Medium. Did you know that you have access to a list of each and every one of their followers? More importantly, on the desktop version of the platform, you can even type into their search box and find specific writers that may cater to your specific writing genre. For example, I write poetry. In that list, I found dozens of people who list poet as a part of their profile description. It was only then a matter of clicking on who I thought would be interested in my work and waiting for the follow-backs to come through.

However, this method is a bit tedious. At first, I was just clicking on every name I could possibly click on without any rhyme or reason. What I noticed was that the follows would start steadily trickling in, but my ratios were way off. I approximate I only received about 10 to 13 percent follow-backs using this method. I think that being a bit more nit-picky about who I follow might bear more fruit.

The next thing I tried out was quite by accident. Did you know that you can gain access to the list of people who have clapped on an article by clicking on that number at the bottom of the article? By only clicking on the number, not the hands, you will be presented a list of all of those who have clapped for that article in addition to how many times. The upshot of this is that you now have access to names of creators who are indeed willing to clap for outstanding content. These are the people we are looking for! So, every once in a while, I include these as follows for myself in the hopes of a followback as well. All in all, it is very good information to have and be able to act upon in the future. These are people who have already demonstrated the capacity for reciprocity.

What Do Those Green Crescents Around My Profile Pic Mean?

More importantly, I think that there is a better way of organically reaching more writers that would be more apt to responding and following my content. I actually started doing what I believe I was meant to do in the first place. I got myself a membership. Sure, I started off getting my introductory month for free, but this enabled me to get my little green crescents to appear and hug my profile pic. Why is this significant? What possible importance could this possibly have? At first glance, I thought that these were featured content writers. I was mistaken, and perhaps you might have been as well. The green crescents identify you as a paying member on this platform. This is important because many content creators will choose not to follow you back if you are not a paying member. In fact, they will completely overlook you. That was my Ah-Ha! moment. Where previously, I was being looked and passed over by other content creator members, I was now having my follows reciprocated. This is likely because claps are indeed part of the currency that makes up this platform, and currency is meant to be exchanged.

Reciprocation and Just Good Ole Manners

Reciprocation is a very simple process, however it can be a time consuming one. My advice? Take at the very least an hour or so out of your writing day to read some of your fellow content creators articles, and give them the number of claps you feel their work has earned. Be fair. There are no rules as to how many claps you should give a work. At the very least, understand that 50 is the maximum amount of claps you can give any piece of work. For me, 50 claps should be reserved for those pieces that deserve a standing ovation. They are the crème de la crème. The best of the best.

If you took the time to read an article, but it didn’t necessarily suit your fancy, give 1 clap at the very least to show support for the author’s attempt. If the work is at the very least entertaining, I would clap anywhere from 10–15 times. If I learned something in the article that might help me in my own personal life, or at the very least my professional writing life, I might throw down 20. If the article is well researched and cited as well, I would offer 25 or so. For 30–40, the work needs to hit well on many levels. It should be well written, grammar and spellchecked for errors. It should be entertaining, informative or otherwise appealing to my as a reader. Lastly, it should leave me feeling that the author is speaking from personal experience and is writing from a vulnerable yet relatable place. A 50 should hit all of these and after reading such eloquence, I should feel the urge to immediately clap out loud. I know that there is no true scale for giving claps on articles, but this is the best that I can up with as a sort of general Rubric for awarding each article I read.

Getting Back To Reciprocity

I have noted that creators who I have gone back and read some of their content and gave them claps to, have come back to articles that I have published recently and given their applause feedback on those as well. This seems to be an excellent way to garner some reoccurring claps for the long run. However, how can we build even better relationships with other content creators so that they keep coming back for more? I recently commented on one particular creator’s article. The article in question had a couple of grammar faux pas that took some of the luster away from what would otherwise have been a fantastic article. When I wrote the comment, I was careful to build up the author first by explaining what I liked about the article and only then did drop the grammar bombs on her. The response I got back was one of appreciation. The take-away from this is that we should look for and make opportunity to communicate with other writers, especially those who traipse through the same wheelhouses as we do. In this manner, we can start to support one another and create interactions that will make them remember us when our next publication crosses their path.

A Note About Creating Link Boxes at the End of Any Article

I discovered a bit of trouble when trying to copy and paste links for my other articles to be placed at the end of the new article that I was trying to publish. When I copied the link, I would go and right click where I wanted the link to go and then choose paste. However, when I tried it this way, the link would shoot all the way back up to the top and become inserted into the title. I’m not sure why it does this, but it did the same thing consistently each and every time I attempted it. My solution was pretty simple. Instead of using the drop menu paste, I would position the cursor on the line where I wanted the link box to show up, and then on my Mac I would use the keys Command-V to paste the link. Once the link was placed, the link box still wasn’t there quite yet, but the regular link was put exactly where I wanted it to finally be. Then it was just a matter of hitting enter. After hitting enter, you need only wait approximately 4 to 5 seconds and the link box will generate right in your draft. If you do not hit enter, it will only show the plain link.

Giving Claps

The claps system is a great way to spread your enthusiasm for other creators work here on Medium. I had read in other articles many content creator’s guesses as to how their algorithm work. It is another Mistress Medium secret that I have yet to crack. However, many suspect that the number of claps given by other creators are definitely included in the pay process. Although the claps are link to play, there has been talk that the percentage of pay is affected by the amount each creator has clapped for content in each given month. This seems to make sense since many creators are full members of Medium, paying in their $5.00 a month, and those claps, if we are equating them to the money that is being put into the pot, must be spread to all of the content creators that particular member has clapped for that month. To me it sounds fair, as long as that member is not using a blanket amount of claps, say 50, for each and every piece of content he/she/they reads.

I discovered something quite by accident which took me by surprise. I had read in another article some information concerning claps and they used the number of claps, 100, in one of their example. However, I had noticed that on any given one of my articles, I had only received 50 as my highest clap amount. Then, I read an article that I thought was written particularly well, and I wanted to really shower it with applause. I clicked on my mouse in a fury and was surprised to find out that the highest number of claps I could give any one article was indeed 50. Even after clicking on it a few extra times, the number 50 simple just stayed there. I suppose Medium may have recently added this 50 clap ceiling in an attempt to maintain the fairness. Let’s say that if I converted 50 claps into pennies, that would mean that any given member-reader could at the very least clap for 10 articles, if he/she/they really wanted to. This is accounting for the $5 each member must pay per month to be a member. Again, this is just conjecture, but you can see how this would definitely help square the field up a bit, and not allow for too much in the way of one member using up all of their applause for only one article, in an attempt to garner full applause reciprocated from another content creator. One and done. As I said, I think that this is a very fair platform, and a wonderful way of getting all creators to get more involved as readers in this community as well.

The Stats Data

It doesn’t help to keep looking at your stats on a day to day basis. While in the short-run this may feel thrilling, watching your numbers go up, it isn’t based on real time statistics. Often the data can be 1 to 2 days off from real time numbers depending on when they choose to update. I would suggest perhaps looking at your data every 3 days or perhaps even once a week on a specified day, to give you a somewhat accurate count on how your reads and applause are accumulating.

I hope that each of you have found something of interest in this article. Please feel free to highlight some of the information that really piqued your interest and I am looking forward to any comments or corrections you may have concerning the information I have shared. Learning this new platform has been a wonderful experience, and I can not wait to see what new discoveries await me as I continue my bid for becoming the world’s most ubiquitous writer.

Your wordsmith,

Matthew Leo

© 2020 Matthew Leo

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