Skyrocket Your Views: Mastering Medium’s Content Craft!

Photo by Fausto Sandoval on Unsplash

Before my writing journey on Medium, I had written blog articles for proxy websites, cybersecurity, and geolocation APIs to market their products. I have also written some technical tutorials for software engineering courses. However, I didn’t work directly with these clients, as all communication occurred via the freelancing contractor based in my home country.

This contractor was busy, so there wasn’t sufficient time for her to provide feedback on my writing except when the client provided some revisions. Also, I was an expert on only some of the above topics, such as cybersecurity. So, initially, I looked at competitor blogs and changed the wording and structure for other topics.

Enter Medium, and it was a different story altogether.

They say you can write anything on Medium, which is 100% true. However, you need to write stories on topics with a substantial following to generate more followers and increase views and readership for your stories.

Once I entered Medium, I experimented with writing stories in tech niches, history, climate change, travel, and life lessons. But, most of it was hardly generating any views and reads. Some were getting single-figure reads and views. Even the article with the highest number of views(347) had only 83 reads. I asked myself what’s going on?

Then, I realized that in order to have more views, you need to entice your readers to click on your content. So, first of all, you need magical spellbinding headlines that grab attention, like how a magic wand spellbinds your wishes instantly. Is there enough ordinary stuff already on Medium for the same topic written by myriad authors?

1-Practice Writing Catchy Headlines To Hook Readers

Before you publish your story, Write at least 50 variations of the headline:

When you plan your draft, have an idea of the topic that you’ll write. Then, write the article first, after which you can write up to 50 headline variations of the same article. See which headlines generate more views by publishing your articles with several headings.

If you’re serious about your writing, you must practice outside your usual writing hours. This includes rewriting existing headings that you’ll find on billboards, websites for prominent brands, and blog article titles on websites such as Medium or Blogger. I plan to cover a more in-depth article on this sometime soon.

2-Craft A killer Intro

After crafting a catchy headline, your next job is to write a killer introduction of 70–110 words. Remember that the intro aims to explain why your readers should read your article about the same topic among oceans of generic resources on the web. In other words, in the intro, you need to highlight what key points you have addressed in your article that solve a reader’s problem.

Lastly, ensure that no pluff is included in the intro that would drive away the readers.

3-Body of the Article

Now that you have hooked your reader with a catchy headline and a compelling intro. So, the reader has decided to stay on and read your article. Wa la! Everything looks great, but hang on. Still, you have a fair amount of work to do. Because if the body of your article sucks, then the reader will leave, and it will impact your reading time negatively.

Therefore, below is a heads-up of how you must approach the body of the article.

• Ensure that your content is readable: The higher the readability score, the easier it will be to read your content. Therefore, using short sentences makes sense to get a high readable score using online tools like Grammarly or Yoast SEO Real-time Content Analysis. This implies that you shouldn’t have more than 20 words in your sentences.
• Your article Should have a clear flow. This implies that each paragraph should connect to another with transition words. Furthermore, when transitioning from one section to another, the last paragraph of the previous section should briefly imply what the next section is about.
• Every Sentence should pique curiosity: In addition to having transition words, you must make the reader curious about what happens next after reading each sentence. This ploy is analogous to how movies are made. Because viewers wouldn’t view a film if they knew the end of the story.
• Use passive voice least as possible: You must write in the active voice for most of the article instead of the passive voice. In some circumstances, it makes sense to use passive voice, but ensure it doesn’t exceed 10% of the entire article. Ensure that your content is structured according to headings and subheadings
• Format your article neatly: When you have large walls of text throughout your article, readers will find it boring and look elsewhere in this vast ocean of articles. Instead, it would help if you used various formatting options like bullet points, numbered lists, and bold text, making some paragraphs stand out with the Medium editor’s options.
• Images: Use images, such as cool infographics, to make the content more interesting to the readers. Furthermore, free familiar license images will be available if graphic design is not your bread and butter.
• SEO: This is worth discussing in a separate article, as there is an ongoing debate about whether it’s worth investing as much time in optimizing Medium articles as you would for your blog. But for now, use free keyword discovery tools such as this to discover keywords relevant to your niche.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this article to this point. I’m sure you will find it useful, and I appreciate your claps and engagement with comments.

You can certainly do more to generate views on Medium, and I’ll cover these in a series of separate articles. Stay tuned for more articles!