There Are 1,385,000 New Articles Posted on Medium Every Month

7 tips to get seen in that crowd.

Happy Friday,

Note — this one is long. I had no idea the volume of content that goes up on Medium daily. So I wrote about it. If you’d rather read this on Medium, it’s here.

Earlier this week, I read a post about Medium statistics and how much people earn. But in the article, I came across this line…

— There are 1,385,000 new articles posted on Medium every month

What the…?

Seriously? Wow.

1,385,000 posts every month? That’s 47,000 posts every day. 1,958 every hour.

And you wonder why there’s a curation queue? Omg, the poor curators! Can you even imagine having to wade through that amount of content to pick the shiny bright ones from the stinking piles of hot steaming garbage?

How do you even get seen?

Let’s be honest. A lot of it is crap…

Sorry to be so blunt. There’s a lot of content that goes up that no one is ever going to read. I don’t know if people are using content spinners or robots to churn out content but there’s a lot of bad content.

I and NOT talking about decent writers who haven’t found their audience yet.

I’m talking about content that’s not actually even readable.

There’s a writer “out there” who pastes in excerpts from public domain works taken off Gutenberg. It never gets any reads. He keeps doing it.

I’m sure there’s a reason people do stuff like that, but I don’t have the mental hijinks to understand why. I shake my head and move on. Don’t even ask me how I know about those people. If you know, don’t say it out loud. I don’t like finger waggy.

Also? A lot of short reads.

There’s a guy who pumps out half a dozen haiku every day. He likes them. I’m not sure volume makes up for lack of read time. Those 5 line verses aren’t really a one minute read. It’s just that Medium doesn’t log read time under a minute.

Here’s the thing. Now that Medium brought in “short form content” we might as well use some of that to stay in the feed. But if all you DO is short form? I’m not sure that’s going to go so well.

Point is, most of the competition — isn’t. Know what I mean? It’s just not. But still. 47,000 posts per day. It’s a lot going into the publication feeds.

How do you even get seen?

We writers aren’t writing for ourselves.

I mean, I know we “say” we are. But no. It only starts there, in that we choose what we want to write about. But after that — once we hit publish ?

No one wants to publish to the sound of crickets.

If we really didn’t care if anyone read our writing, we’d be writing in a paper notebook. Or on our computer. For ourselves. Hitting publish means we want readers.

So I started thinking about it. Really. How do people get seen?

7 ways to up the odds of getting seen…

It made me think about how to stand out. So I came up with a few ideas. If you have more, things that worked for you, please feel welcome to add them in the comments.

1. Frequency really helps

Here’s the thing. All those 47,000 posts every day aren’t in one giant feed. What a nightmare that would be.

But no. They’re going up in publication feeds. And they’re going into the feeds of your followers. So that gives you a couple of shots at getting seen.

You can up the odds of visibility through frequency. Tim Denning posted 66 posts in the past month. Many of the top writers post every day.

Some people think that sounds crazy. And it kind of does. But think about it. If you have a job, doesn’t your boss expect you to show up and do some work every day? Yeah. Mine too.

It might mean you do some writing on the weekend. Might mean you need to come up with a system that works for you. But frequency helps.

If you can’t write daily, at least be consistent. Tell your readers when you post. Tell them you’ll be there every Monday and Friday, or whatever.

Caveat — because there’s always one of those. Writing a big volume of crap won’t help. It will do the opposite. People will unfollow and dismiss. Doesn’t matter if a buffet is all you can eat if nothing there is worth eating.

2. You’ve got to be interesting, dammit.

I wish I could say it’s about good writing. But it’s really not. In books, yes. On Medium, not so much. Lots of the top writers aren’t excellent writers. But they’re interesting.

It’s not about excellent writing. It’s about excellent topics. You can write about your sister in law’s baby shower, but really, how many people are going to be interested?

The internet isn’t really our diary. Unless our life is really that juicy. The people writing personal experience posts know how to spin it into a story with an actual take away for the reader.

Because it’s not about you. Or me. It’s about the reader.
Unless you’re Kim Kardashian. Then nevermind.

But if you’re not a celebrity with millions of snoopy McGee fans that want to know the minutiae of your life? You’re going to have to grab their interest with the topics you pick to write about.

Caveat — don’t lean on meta posts. People don’t go to Business Insider to read articles about how to succeed on Business Insider. That meta thing is big on Medium, and I get it. Like bringing candy to the playground. But it won’t ever get curated, and the curated articles tend to live longer. In my experience.

3. Your title has to kick. serious. butt.

So many writers have lame, lame titles. So weak. If you can figure out how to write great titles, you’re halfway home.

First of all, don’t use titles that read like they belong on a book cover. Think newspaper headlines. Roughly half the people who click the title will read the entire article. So work on titles. The more clicks you get, the more reads.

Also? You have 100 characters with title and subtitle combined. Use them. You can check the character count at: https://charactercounttool.com/

If you really suck at titles, you need to come up with something that work to help you do better. Here’s one idea. Go grab a list of the titles in the popular reads. Then modify them for your topic.

For example, the #3 article right now is:
The Overwhelming Racism Of COVID Coverage

Make that into a formula. Like so…
The Overwhelming ___________ of __________

You can do the same using titles off news feeds. Or newspapers. Or magazines, or even other content sites.

Here’s another idea. Do what I did. If you’re reading a post and you see a line marked “top highlight” see if you can use that as a title and dig deeper into it. But give credit where it is due, for heaven’s sakes. Writers need to give credit when due.

As your titles get better, your views will increase.

4. You need to open strong.

It sucks when you nail the title— but once the reader clicks, you lose them. Poof. Instantly. Because the opening was weak and boring. I’ve done that, too.

Stephen King once said he can spend months or even years figuring out the opening for a new book. If you’re writing online, it’s even more important. Everyone says headline, headline, headline — but a weak opening can undo all the work you put into crafting the best headline.

The best openings often start with a person the reader can relate to, or a fact they didn’t know and want to know more about.

I was not sorry when my brother died.

That’s the first sentence in Nervous Conditions. You can’t read a sentence like that and not read the next one. See what I mean?

Start strong.

Caveat — use formatting. Please. It doesn’t matter how strong your opening is if you don’t use the enter key (ever) and your writing is a wall of text. People bail on that. Too hard to read.

5. You’ve got to be smarter about publications

I wrote an entire post about this so I won’t drone on again.

Here’s the reader’s digest version. People click on familiar faces.

If you’re jumping around looking for the magic publication that will give you a whack of views — that’s the recipe for failure. Because you’re not posting to any one publication often enough to become a familiar face.

Think about going to a concert or place with 20,000 people in the audience. You’re not going to recognize someone you’ve only seen once. But magically, you can scan the crowd and spot your co-worker. Familiar faces stand out from the crowd.

Same concept. You need to build familiarity with an audience.

6. Comment. Lots.

How many comments can you write in the time it would take you to write another article? A lot, I bet. Comments are a great way to make an impression on people. When you do that, they often check out your work.

But don’t be trite. Don’t post junk like “nice post.” You’ll just be ignored. Have conversations. Add something to a discussion.

Also? Don’t be a jerk, running around disagreeing with all the people who have different opinions. That will make an impression on people, for sure, but probably not the impression you were hoping to make.

(Side note — my readers aren’t among those people, I am happy to say.)

Also? Don’t paste links to your stories into other people’s comments. That comes across as kind of tacky. People see right through it. Might as well just put on your invisibility cloak, because that’s what the end result will be.

Think of Medium as a place for conversations.

If people like what you have to say in comments, if you come across as helpful or insightful or clever or you make them laugh, they WILL come check out your work.

That’s a promise. Most of my new readers find me from comments I’ve left. I wouldn’t tell you to do something if I didn’t first see that it can work.

7. You need to build your own list!

If you’re not building a list, most people will never see your posts. They can’t. It’s not humanly possible. 47,000 posts per day.

I mean, how many people do YOU follow? Do you see all their posts? No.

Reader loyalty is part of the new algorithm, here. You know that, right? When readers “loyally” read your writing, that increases your earnings.

By calculating a share of member reading time, we support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers. [more info here]

Doesn’t matter how much your readers love your writing, if you don’t show up in their feed and you’re not curated, you might as well be invisible.

It can be a fancy list with opt in and such if you want. But even a digest of your posts sent once a week for people who like your work is helpful. For you and them. I hate when I “miss” posts by my favorite writers.

If you have your own publication, you can send newsletters. But if you’re publishing to other publications — start a list. In the beginning, it will be a lot of work for little result. Count on that. (Ask me how I know)

But as it grows? You’ll start to see that when you send out that digest, you get a real nice bump in traffic. It’s enough to make you truly appreciate those readers. Which is kind of the point, know what I mean?

And it doesn’t even have to cost money. Here’s 5 places to build a list free.

Is it worth the bother?

That’s what I’ve heard people ask. There’s so much competition here, is it even worth the bother to try to get some visibility.

2 years ago, Medium was getting 90 million unique visitors per month.

Today? Medium gets around 416 million visits per month. You know anywhere else that draws that many readers? I mean — instagram has a ton of traffic. FB, too.

But here, they’re all self identified readers.
What more could a writer ask for?

Yes, it’s hard work. Hard, hard work. You’re going to have to work your buns off. Learn to write more compelling essays. Create stronger titles.

That which is “easy” and that which is “worth it” are seldom the same.

The numbers boggle my mind. 47,000 posts a day is a lot of competition. A lot. Staggering. But still — 416 million visits per month.

Even a small piece of that pie would taste so lovely. Right?

---

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

---

My new publication…

I’ve created my own publication because the profile pages are a gong show. If you’re on Medium, I hope you’ll follow. :)

https://medium.com/linda-caroll

---

Here’s what I wrote this week:

• Dear Medium, Can You Please Fix the Beta Before It Goes Live?

• There Are Only 3 Things A Writer Must Do Every Morning

• There’s No Such Thing As Toxic Positivity. It’s an oxymoron

• The Oppressed Must Save the World. They're the only ones who can.

• Not Fit to Breed? Forced Sterilization Is Not New In America.

---

If you enjoyed this, please click the heart. Substack hearts are like claps on Medium, they don’t pay, but they make me happy anyway. :)

Also? If you’re reading via email, clicking the title will let you leave a comment.

:)
Linda