Medium is a social publishing platform where writers and readers can post and browse stories about countless different topics and ideas. Everyone can contribute stories to Medium, and it seems everyone does — from White House staff posting the State of the Union addresses to business executives posting stories like this. Clearly, there is a space for everyone on Medium.
Founded in 2012 by Evan Williams, the platform has made huge strides in growing to where it is today. Their unique take on publishing allowed them to catapult into becoming one of the largest publishing platforms today, with 100 million monthly active users.
If you’re still on the fence about getting started on Medium and publishing some stories of your own, we’ll tell you how easy it is to set up a profile of your own and start posting.
Creating a profile
Getting started on Medium is fortunately a pretty easy process, and we’ll walk you through exactly what you need to do:
On Medium.com, there is a “Get Started” button in the top right corner that you can click to be directed to the signup page. You will be asked to sign up using your Google, Facebook, or email account.
Once you have done that, you’ll be asked to select three or more interests from a variety of different topics. These include things such as Programming, Self Improvement, Writing, Machine Learning, Design, Blockchain, Books, Marketing, Apple, Fitness, Equality, and plenty more.
Navigating Medium
After you have created your account, you will be greeted by your personalized Medium homepage. It includes a selection of curated articles based on the interests you picked along with more general articles as well in the mix.
On the right hand of your screen you will find a column containing useful widgets for things such as staff-picked articles, recommended topics to add to your interests, recommended people to follow, and your reading list for when you have bookmarked stories you want to come back to.
Publishing on Medium
If you’re interested in publishing a story of your own on Medium, then keep reading.
On the top right of your screen on the homepage, there will be an icon saying “Write” that you can click on to go to the new story creation page. Here, you can paste in or start writing the story you want to share.
Once you’re ready to publish, hit the green “publish” button and add up to five topics about your story so that readers may have an easier time finding it, and so your story will also be visible in those topics. Following that, you can publish it now or schedule the publishing for later on a date and time of your choosing.
A little-known fact about Medium is how users can earn money from the articles they publish directly. There are a few requirements that you have to meet in order to be eligible to get paid for your articles published on Medium, and they are covered in more detail in this article by thewritelife.com.You now know how to create a profile and get your stories published on the platform. If you’re still struggling to use Medium, then we recommend checking out this beginner’s guide on Medium from Hubspot that covers some things we did not.
