Heres what I learned

I’m not sure 30 days of daily posting is enough time to clearly understand how to best utilize Medium. There’s a lot of people who post regularly but not daily and it works for them, but then there’s people who post three times a day, and that works for them. All I can do is share my takeaways with you.

Publications are great

Seriously, and I know you’ve heard it before, it’s the first thing we all hear when we start posting on Medium. It’s really important to get onto a publication.

Find a publication in your niche and work out how to become a writer for them. Sometimes it’s as easy as filling out a form, other times you may have to email or tweet the editor, or in the case of the big publications you might just have to wait until your work is noticed which is a massive pain.

Publications = views and followers.

I don’t understand curation

Obviously to get curated it’s really important to tag your articles appropriately, but I also have a feeling that the frequency and amount you’re posting has an impact on how often you get curated. It could be just a basic statistical one — the more you post, the higher your chances. But perhaps the curators preference those who are actively engaging with the site in a productive manner.

Also, the first article I had curated was also among the first I had picked up by a publication. This was the case for a majority of the articles that I had curated — they were in publications.

I’m not saying you have to have your work in a publication or post something every day for it to get curated, but it does seem to help.

Quality over quantity is probably best

I had days where I had absolutely nothing to post and couldn’t think of a single thing to write about. On those days I spent thirty minutes writing up something really forced and random, and that I wasn’t passionate about, and it definitely showed. These articles got the least traction, they didn’t get curated, and publications ignored them.

The most valuable lesson I learned from 30 days of posting on Medium is that quality wins overall. I know there are people out there who claim to spend less than an hour drafting up an article and getting it out to people, but that doesn’t work for me. I really have to think about what I want to say and experience some creative input before I can even think about creative output.