What Is A Medium Publication, Exactly?
I’ve written about this before, but I believe “publications” are the greatest thing that Medium has ever created.
But there’s still a lot of confusion. What is a Medium publication exactly?
What benefits does it give us as writers to publish there? How do we get in? There’s lots of questions to answer, so let’s start with the most obvious one..
What Is A Medium Publication?
A Medium publication is a “blog” that’s hosted on Medium itself. Here’s my friend Steve Campbell’s called The Ascent.
Like your own personal profile, Medium users can choose to “follow” these publications and get stories from them on their homepage, in daily digest emails, and recommended to them elsewhere on the platform.
Medium publications have a homepage themselves, a special URL unique to them, and a band of writers that the editor and the editor only can approve or deny entry into the publication.
After these writers are “allowed” in, they can submit stories to these publications whenever they choose—then the editor can choose to publish them or not.
Some pubs have hundreds of thousands of followers while others only have hundreds—but one thing’s for sure: there’s a lot of diversity in Medium publications, and they help writers get a lot more exposure.
Why Should You Publish On A Medium Publication?
The one thing you need to understand when contemplating what A Medium Publication is is WHY you should leverage them. Think of it in terms of Twitter..
If Kim Kardashian retweeted your tweet on Twitter, what would happen?
Because of Kim’s millions of followers, that tweet would probably go mildly viral, right?
The same thing happens with Medium publications. When you publish for big publications with 300,000+ followers, you get a WAVE of traffic all of a sudden because so many people can potentially get your article on their homepage now.
The above post was published on The Mission, one of Medium’s biggest publications.
You’re literally leveraging their audience to get more views—that’s why the editors of the biggest publications are exceedingly selective of who they let in.
How Can You Start Writing For The Biggest Publications?
I mention how to do this in other articles and I even go over it shortly in my own Medium email course, so I’ll leave this section mostly blank.
Other Fire Tips For Leveraging Medium Publications
Make sure to publish at all different kinds of pubs. Just because one has 1,000 followers doesn’t mean it’s not going to be worth your while. Some of my favorite publications on Medium that get the most engagement are the smaller ones.
Also, make sure to get a schedule going. Don’t submit 13 stories to a publication in one given week, make sure to space it out so you aren’t overloading the editor. I’d say never go past 4 contributed stories per week.
I personally go Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
One more thing: publish new stories! Don’t submit old stories to publications that have already been published. This isn’t going to do anything to get you more views or help you leverage the audiences of these publications properly.
Want to build an audience of your own on Medium? I have a free 5-day email course called “Your First 1,000 Followers” that will teach you how I did it! Sign up for it right here to start making money with the Medium Partner Program!