I’ve always been a “rule follower” while most of my creative friends lean toward breaking rules. I read a book when I first started blogging that covered 29 rules for blogging, and each one had a caveat. There is one rule for succeeding on Medium that I smashed to smithereens on my WordPress blog. I have no images on any of my posts. I’m vision-impaired, and I didn’t want to “waste time” with images that I could spend on writing. When I came to Medium, I had quite a learning curve. I’m so committed to Medium that I plan to invest in the pro version of Canva. For working with images, I need ALL the help I can get!

The hardest part about writing for a publication would be to find one that is still active, seeking new writers, and has a growing following. J. J. Pryor provided this list of 43 publications along with a breakdown of their size and prestige on Medium.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/43-active-publications-on-medium-in-2020-8a03c1e5b7c9

Now I know two that I can target at the start of my Medium journey. Before I’d even consider submitting anything, I’ll read a LOT of their articles, maybe even all of them. How better to know what their readers want and what the editors are looking for?

I’ve imported some of my blog posts and published them after some editing and, of course, adding an image or two. I’ve also written two stories just for Medium I;d like to write daily far more often than I have been. I just don’t need to publish everything I write. Just because I’ve written something, it doesn’t mean anyone else wants to read it. Most of the time, even I don’t want to read it! I want to publish quality content here, not just short fluff pieces for the sake of publishing something any given day.

I am writing detailed comments almost daily. I aim for 15 per week. I gained 35 followers in the 5 weeks I’ve been on Medium. I just don’t know if they were “popular” posts. They were posts whose titles intrigued me and the content attracted me to respond. I don’t know if my comments are too long sometimes and I should “promote” them into their own stories.

I like the idea of tagging people to let them know I mentioned them in an a story. I’ll tag J. J. Pryor on this response if I figure out how tagging works. I only want to follow people and pubs that I want to see in my feed. I need to be careful about “information overwhelm” and I have a low tolerance for digital clutter.

I don’t know if I would bother re-writing an article just to have it “featured”. I imagine after a year, I might review my stories to see how I could improve them. Not only will there have been some time-distance since I wrote them, hopefully my writing skill will have significantly increased.