I have a Medium account – you can find it and follow it here: https://heathersmithau.medium.com/

Honestly, I’m still trying to figure it out.

The purpose of this post, it to keep track of my learnings, so it shall be active and updated periodically. I have a paid Medium membership, but you can subscribe for free. You might be interested in signing up yourself, so you get to see the type of content that is published there.

My goals with Medium are:

  • To understand the platform.
  • Attract different eyeballs
  • Signups for the Cloud Stories podcast and the Accounting Apps newsletter

Update at late October I supposedly have 1.2 followers – that’s almost doubles in a month, so not sure how reliable it is. Ha and it’s now November and it is back down to 697.

I copy & paste articles from my blog to Medium – it takes about 90 seconds – all images neatly lay themselves out with a simple copy and paste. I can add five hashtags. I still wonder how should I optimally choose hashtags?

Publishing on another Medium publications

I published this article on my own Medium site here. THEN a guy from this blog: https://medium.com/dev-genius contacted me with the message “I read your story, and I like it a lot, if you want to publish it under DevGenius publication in order to have more exposure, please let me know and I will add you as a writer!” I AGREED. Extended reach aligns to my goals. I don’t understand what the implications are – but I said yes and will monitor.

Click here for the instructions he sent across to add my blog to his publication (which is a subcategory on Medium). It took about 90 seconds to add the post. It’s added as a draft post, and then he seems to have the power to edit and finally post it.

Currently, I do not know how many people follow that ‘blog’, but I can see it here: https://medium.com/dev-genius/about  all the other writers – and there are a lot – who write for this subcategory. Also, I can see the subcategory has been running since 2018. Many of the articles have a lot of claps – up to 500 – which would be amazeballs! 24 hours later he publishes the blog post—changes one image. I think the link to my podcast has been removed – not a big issue for me. The article now has 50 claps. I can see it has been viewed 23 times and read twice. I don’t understand how it can have 50 claps, and only been viewed 23 times.

Claim your Medium URL

Unexpectedly they changed the URL methodology, so I had to jump in and claim a new URL. Here’s an article I wrote about how to Claim your Medium URL.

Medium Newsletters

My next foray is to understand Medium newsletters. Click through here to read about them.

Virtual Assistant Access

Weirdly Medium does not use passwords, instead it only wants you to access using social media, and if you access using an email address – you’re sent a magical link – there is no options for passwords. What I did to get around this is I created a new Twitter account, linked it to Medium, and gave the VA full access to the Twitter account?!?!

Further Reading

How to Use Medium: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing, Publishing & Promoting on the Platform