Last Saturday, I decided to try something new.

I got it into my head that I wanted to try for Top Writer Status in at least one Medium category.

Why?

I hear (read) it’s more a vanity label than it is anything else.

Still, I thought:

Why not?

Why not at least try? It couldn’t hurt, and it might help.

The importance of tags

When I first started on Medium (over a year ago — yes, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit it took me that long to learn some important things about this platform), I was tagging my stories any old way I felt like doing. I wasn’t strategic about it at all.

I would write something, and then I would fill up my allotted list of five tags with whatever I thought was relevant to the story, whether hundreds of thousands of stories on Medium were also using that tag, or whether just a few stories were using that tag. If no one else was using a tag that I thought was relevant to my story, I didn’t bother with that one.

I knew enough to not set myself up for being that much of a lone wolf.

From what I can tell (from reading and experimenting with things myself), you WANT to use the tags that are used most frequently if you want to become a top writer.

When I first started out, I was looking at it from a keyword competition perspective. Like, if 100,000 stories on Medium are using that same tag, that’s bad. That’s too much competition.

Yes, it is still a lot of competition. But it’s not bad…at least not when it comes to obtaining Top Writer status.

In fact, there are only a certain number of tags for which you CAN obtain Top Writer status. You can find those here:

I decided to get more strategic

I realized that maybe I had just been tagging my stories all wrong. So, I set out to change that.

I began with my published stories (of which there aren’t all that many; I’ve got to step up my writing/publishing game too if I want to achieve Top Writer status). I made as many of those five allotted tags as I could the Top Writer-specific tags (as long as I could keep things relevant; I don’t want to be a tag spammer).

Then, I started wondering about comments. Medium treats comments as stories, and it allows you to add tags to those comments. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t always added tags to my comments.

I was afraid of what it would look like to the author of the original story if they saw me adding a bunch of tags to my comment on their post. Would they think I was trying to take advantage of them and their web space?

Maybe I am, but I didn’t want them to KNOW that…or think badly of me for doing it.

But now I’m a woman on a mission to achieve Top Writer status, no matter what it takes or how it might look to other people. So, what about those tags? Could I tag my comments strategically toward Top Writer status?

According to this story, I absolutely can!

The results of a week of strategic tagging

I started re-tagging everything last Saturday. I finished all my published stories. I’m still going through all my published comments (there are about four times as many of those).

I still have not achieved Top Writer status in anything.

Medium profile screenshot; Source: Me

However, I noticed something very interesting happening with my stats and some other Medium engagement measures.

Screenshot of my story views over two weeks; Source: Me

The week of my experiment, my stories were viewed 464 times. That’s an average of 66 views per day.

Compare that to the previous week: 265 views, for an average of 38 views per day. That’s pretty much how my view stats had been for months as long as I stayed active on the site — publishing new stories myself and commenting on others’.

I experienced some other benefits too. I gained several new followers. I wish I had made notice of my follower count when I started this experiment. I think it was just under 400. Now it’s 446. That’s about 50 followers in a week, or seven per day.

I didn’t reach my goal, but I did learn some things

I’m still not a Top Writer, but I am getting more noticed across Medium. That in itself made this experiment and the effort I put into it worth it for me.

More people are seeing my stories, reading them, and enjoying them. That’s pretty awesome!

The biggest takeaways from this experiment for me were:

Tagging stories and comments with the Top Writer-specific tags connects you to more people.

If you take some time to foster these new connections, you’ll definitely reap some benefits in terms of views, reads, claps, and money.

Other people have said it before, and they’re right: Medium is a social media platform. If you actually take the time to be social on the site, you’re going to be successful. If you just post your stories and don’t interact with anyone else, you will not be.

Have I made a lot more money this past week? I don’t know for certain. I’ll have to wait until Wednesday to find that out. But I’m satisfied enough with the results of my experiment to know that I’m on the right track here.