It goes without saying that if you want to make money on Medium, you need to establish and continually grow your readership. This can prove to be daunting given the size of the community on Medium.

Getting your stories noticed and gaining followers is something that takes skill, patience, knowledge of the market you’re attempting to tap into, and adaptability. Before this frightens you away, you should know that most of this will be gained through a fair amount of trial and error.

When you publish a story, your aim should be to get the maximum amount of exposure possible. This involves selecting the right tags, promoting stories on social media and other forms of mass communication, and deciding where to publish it.

Historically, having your story curated by Medium was an important avenue of getting your stories widely distributed among members. While my stats continue to show that curation does garner more viewership in the long run, curated stories seem to be suffering from dwindling views. This is likely the result of Medium shifting its business model away from curation and focusing more on publications — specifically their own in-house publications — in a bid to increase subscriber rates.

Posting Stories in Publications

While curation remains a source of free promotion, Publications are increasingly the best way to reach a larger audience. While Medium now has their own publications, there is some controversy among regular writers about whether they are truly being made available to the Medium community.

While I don’t discourage anyone from trying to get their stories published by Medium publications, the reality is that third party publications remain the most viable way to have their stories posted in a publication — particularly for new writers.

There are a great number of third-party publications open to Medium writers, and they cover virtually any topic you can imagine. Smedian keeps a list of nearly every third-party publication accepting writers.

As you increase your own number of followers, you should also consider creating your own publication. For example, I have my own blog which I use to post more miscellaneous stories, and I have created a publication that anyone can join called Top 3:

Since joining Medium, I’ve written for six third-party publications. They include: The Partnered Pen, Live Your Life On Purpose, The Ascent, The Writing Cooperative, Th-Ink Queerly, The Startup, and Noteworthy — The Journal Blog.

All of these publications are phenomenal and they all have an amazing group of writers and editors. Indeed, I believe the editors of publications across the platform are the unsung heroes of Medium!

I believe that all of the publications I contribute to are always looking to expand their roster. If you write stories that fall into the topics that these publications cover, I would strongly encourage you to try and join. Most have a straight forward submission process.

While each publication has a different number of followers, they do draw in more views than I could’ve achieved on my own. They have also helped me reach more Medium members. I have noticed that each time I post a new story in a publication, I gain anywhere from 5 to 25 new followers in the span of several days.

If you’re committed to increasing your views and followers on Medium, posting your stories on publications is a must.