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I'm just a dude who likes to talk about nerd stuff and entrepreneurship.
Hello.
And welcome back to day nine
of the Oren Cohen podcast.
Wow.
This is actually progressing into the
30 days that I planned in the beginning.
And it's really amazing to see
this actually gain some momentum.
As I said yesterday, today,
we're talking about medium and
some best practices to publish.
Okay.
So there are five points I want
to make in today's episode.
They are.
Your profile.
Solo posts.
Publications, email and engagement.
So let's start with the first
one, which is your profile.
In the same way that on Twitter
or Instagram, they tell you that
you need to optimize your profile.
For example, Instagram.
Is very, very guilty of this
because you can't put links
anywhere other than your bio.
So they say, okay, you need to
really, really optimize your
profile so that when people click
through a post to your profile.
They know what to do next.
Medium is very similar in that
vein that many times when people
see a post of yours On their feed.
They might click through to your profile.
Not always, but they might
click through to your profile.
And.
You don't just want to have your bio
optimized for them, like to understand.
Instantly who you are and what you do.
But you also want to have
a pinned "about me" post.
And that is a trick.
That I learned from various
creators on medium over the years.
Where you create a post, a regular
post, but you don't make it in
the intention of getting it.
Boosted or distributed.
It's just an about me post you click.
You write.
About "your name" and
then you write everything.
You want people who are visiting your
profile to know about you, whether it
is what you do, your email list, your
courses, your podcast, whatever it
is that you want to share on medium.
Put that in that about me post.
And then through your profile,
you have the ability to check.
that specific post and pin it to your bio.
That feature did not exist
when I started on medium.
But it is definitely very useful.
Something that you want to use
whenever you get the opportunity.
And it is an essential part of optimizing
your profile when people do visit
it and people on medium do visit it.
There is.
A lot more connection on
medium that other platforms.
When people read you.
And they spend a whole time of
reading from start to finish.
They are interested in who wrote to the
post as opposed to searching for something
on Google and just getting the answer
they wanted to their Google query.
Here.
There is a connection
because people find you.
Mostly through the recommendation system.
On their homepage.
And when they click through.
It's because the title enticed
them, they read through they
liked it, or didn't like it.
But if they did like it, they are
interested in who wrote it and seeing
where to find more, where that came from.
And that is where your profile
optimization is very important.
Okay, the next thing is solo posts.
You don't want someone who stumbles upon
your profile to find an empty profile.
There are publications on medium,
which is something we'll talk about
in the next point after this one.
But.
You don't want to start by
publishing for publications.
You want to start by publishing
for you, which means that you
are going to publish solo posts.
And those are posts that you
just publish on your own profile.
If you want to create your own
publication, that's also doable.
I don't see why you would need that
in the beginning when you're just
finding your voice and start writing.
But if you are.
Trying to put your voice out there.
You just need to start writing.
And then afterwards you can
start optimizing for tags for
topics and all that, but that's
irrelevant at the beginning because.
Probably your first a hundred
posts are going to be crap.
But you need to get to a hundred posts.
I think I am standing at about 300 posts
currently on medium because I'm not.
Writing there at the pace that I used to.
And I'm also guilty of not
crossposting to medium.
A lot of my.
Content on my actual geek blog.
So you want to actually start writing
and have maybe at least five posts
that you spent time and sweat on.
And then you can start
writing on publications.
So let's talk about that next.
Okay, so writing for publications.
Medium has a lot of publications
which serve as actual magazines.
One of my favorites is the startup,
which I wrote for many times, it
is a publication with, I think.
The last time I checked
around 700,000 subscribers.
It might be more now because I haven't
been on medium for quite a while.
The funny thing is that
sometimes publications find you.
Which means that Sometimes an editor
for a publication would see that
not all of the posting to queue are
actually good enough to publish.
And they reject some.
They still need to fill in the quota of.
Daily posts.
So what they'll do, they'll actually go to
a different kind of a tag pages on medium.
And then start finding posts
that might be relevant.
From your end, it would seem like
you suddenly got a private message.
On one of your posts, which is a feature
of medium, people can actually highlight.
One of your sentences and then send you
a private message about it on the article
itself, which is good for editing, because
it means like maybe you have a typo there.
So instead of publishing it publicly where
everyone could see that you have a typo.
Only you and the person who made the
private message know that you have a typo,
then you can fix it and also thank them
in the thread of the private message.
What publications sometimes will
do, they'll go into those tag pages,
find people and then leave a private
message that they are interested
in the article and they added you
as a writer for the publication.
And you can just submit it to them.
By actually publishing more solo posts.
What we talked about earlier.
You're giving yourself a higher chance of
getting discovered through publications.
But don't just leave it at that.
Don't just wait until you're invited.
Each publication that respect
itself on medium has opposed to with
submission guidelines and you can
actually take that post, read it.
digest what it means, and then
prepare your article accordingly.
And submit it as a
candidate for publication.
And usually the first time you're
starting to write for a publication,
it will be a little tougher because
you are not a writer for them.
But after you got accepted one time.
You are still a writer for the
publication and sometimes it will
be easier to submit new articles.
So find more publications adhere
to their submission guidelines, and
start publishing more on publications.
Usually the timeframe is
waiting for about a week.
If you don't hear back from a publication
for about a week, you can disregard
the submission and publish it on your
own, unless stated otherwise in their
submission guidelines, if they say we
return all of the submission requests
In about two weeks, then wait the
two weeks adhere to the guidelines.
But after that time has passed.
You're not obligated to
keep the posts in the queue.
And you can actually start posting
it on your own profile or submit
it to a different publication.
The next thing I want
to talk about is email.
Medium is a little bit strange with this.
They didn't have the ability to
curate email addresses from your
readers in the early days, but it
is a feature that they included.
I think about two years ago.
And what you want to do.
Is you want to enable that in
your medium settings, that people
can sign up to your email list?
And you have an actual email list
on medium that you can export.
I, you wouldn't rely on that solely.
I would actually include your own
little snippet at the end that
invites them to join your email list
instead of moving through medium.
But if you don't have an email
hosting provider and you don't want
the headache of setting up one.
But you will need to do at some point.
Then just start with medium and
then you can export your list.
And he import it into one of those
different email hosting providers.
And the final thing that I want to include
in this episode is about engagement.
Sometimes, you'll see
people are responding and
engaging with your articles.
It could be by publishing.
Comments, and it could be by clapping.
Either of these engagements are
super important to follow up with.
What I mean is in the same way
that you want to Comment back
on someone responding to you on
Twitter and make that relationship.
You want to do the same When someone
responds to your article on medium.
You can go to their profile,
start reading their stuff, and
then comment on their stuff.
But I wouldn't just react to engagement.
You can also start engagement
yourself by starting to read more
things in the topics that you write.
In.
For example, if you write about TV
shows, go to the tough DV tag page.
And start reading articles there.
And start responding.
I noticed that.
Sometimes a lot of views for other
stuff come From writing a well
thought out comment on someone else's
post, which is currently trending.
People can find you very easily.
People read the comments.
On medium.
Very religiously.
And by actually being engaging.
And writing and starting a discussion.
Like not just posting
something like good job.
A really great article.
No, engage with the content.
What do you think about what was said?
Answered the question the person who
wrote to the article asked in the body
of the article, Sometimes people would
say, what do you think about nanana?
Comment below.
So comment below do that.
And then in the same way that you comment,
people are more inclined to reciprocate.
And go back to your profile
and read your stuff.
So that's all I wanted to include
in this episode as a general recap.
Optimize your profile.
Enable email collection on your settings.
Have at least a few
solo episodes published.
So people don't come to an empty profile.
Submit to publications when you feel.
An article would benefit
from being in a publication.
And engage, engage, engage.
So those are the things that are
important for a great time on medium.
For a final thing that I want to say.
Don't interact with all of the
making money on medium stuff.
If you notice I did not
talk about money at all.
And a lot of people on medium.
Like to curate engagement by
making posts about how much
they made and all that stuff.
If you want to actually
have a sustainable.
Time on medium, don't interact with
those posts or don't write those posts.
You can read it, but don't Integrate
yourself into that culture of.
Engagement about money-making on medium,
actually focus on value, focus on topics.
Focus on the things you want to
say without regards to money.
And you'll start actually building
a community and an audience.
Which is what you want to do on medium.
When you start writing out, do you want to
find your voice and share it with people?
Thank you so much for listening
or watching this episode.
If you have any questions,
let me know in the comments.
If you want to read in-depth
articles about content creation.
I have a newsletter, which you can
find in the description of the episode.
And I'll see you in the next one.
Bye for now.