I've started linking to member's stories in my stories. I've already been writing many long (100-300 words) responses to other stories. I'm considering a strategy where I combine my responses to articles of a similar theme into one story. It's more work, but less repetition.

There are a couple of story settings where you can change your title and description to enhance SEO. I plan to look into "long-tail keywords" and to be attentive to keywords in my title or sub-title. I avoided SEO for a long time, thinking it was too complicated. I wasn't ready then to devote time and energy to learning about it. I'm more ready now.

I'm still very new to Medium, so I've only submitted to Writer's Blokke and An Idea. This week, I went through about 200 of my saved articles and made a list of publications to look into. I printed their submission guidelines and made a spreadsheet. The columns included the title, whether they accepted self-published stories, and the topics they want. The "Status" column shows whether they have accepted me as a writer or if I've applied or submitted anything to them. So far I have 15 on my list. I got brave today and submitted a piece to P.S. I Love You.

I haven't created a publication yet, but I plan to. I like what Todd Brison did with his. None of his stories have images, and they're very short. Even Ev's blog has no images. Maybe a blog on Medium is just a publication full of "stories" that break the "you MUST have an image" rule. :)