Happy Friday,
Years ago, my ex bought a yellow truck, and the weirdest thing happened. We started seeing yellow vehicles everywhere. Weird.
Who knew so many people have yellow vehicles? We’d never noticed them before.
Of course, that’s how the human mind works. You don’t notice what you don’t notice. Until you do. Then you see it everywhere.
Same thing happened on Medium. I was reading a post by one of the top writers.
When I got to the end, I looked at his tags and wondered why the heck he used such awful tags. Those tags aren’t going to help get views, is what I thought. Not that he needs the help, with the size of his following.
But some of us do.
Then I saw someone post to a Facebook group, and there it was again... How can I get more reads, asked the person with terribly unhelpful tags. I know because I clicked.
And then like yellow trucks everywhere, I got obsessed with looking at tags when I read anything. And wow, a lot of people sure mess up using tags.
Not that you can really mess up, because you can tag however you want. More that tags are a tool Medium gives us and a lot of people are using them really poorly.
Doing all the work to write a post and using crappy tags is kind of like creating a website and accidentally making it invisible to Google. Oops! There’s tools that can help, but only if you’re using them. You know?
Medium help files weren’t much help.
Occurred to me that maybe I see things like this, how the pieces fit together, how the tools work best, because my brain lives in analytics mode so much of the time.
So, I dug into the help files to see if I could find a good guide.
I was thinking what an easy post that would be. Talk about tags strategy and link to the help files. Hahah. No such luck. Not much help to be found in the help files.
So I sat down and wrote the help file I couldn’t find.
So much for an easy post. Nope, it was a mini writing marathon instead.
Once I did all the work to explain the smart way to use tags, seemed like it would be nicer to give it to you as a gift than just to post it on Medium.
So here you go. It’s a free gift. For now, anyway.
If you read it, I’d sure appreciate feedback.
Just hit reply and tell me if it was helpful…
You can download it here
Before you go! My newest post…
12 simple types of poetry that will make you a better writer even if you hate poetry
Don’t let the title fool you, there’s some great advice about writing in a way that makes people enjoy reading, from the New York literary agent I wrote about last week.
Have a great weekend.
xo
Linda