How to Get Published on Medium Step by Step
This (Steem)LeoFinance community has been so supportive of me that I thought it'd be nice to share some of my success "off the blockchain" so to speak, when it comes to writing about this stuff in places other than Steem/Hive. Thanks to @khaleelkazi and his percolating community of finance nerds, misfits and the tragically curious, I've developed the highly useful habit of typing up a daily journal (of sorts) revolving around my general thoughts about finance and blockchain technology.
If you do that for long enough, I guess, you'll start to get people who want to publish your stuff in other venues. Thus, I present to you a "refined" old post that seemed especially topical for the current COVID-19 volatility situation at hand. So I submitted "On Investment Risk & Investor Psychology" to the Data Driven Investor, a Medium publication with the highly LEO-esque tagline "from confusion to clarity not insanity."
And they published it! Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
If you're interested in doing something similar, here's my process:
Find something you're proud of having written. It doesn't have to have gotten a lot of votes or anything, although the feedback (in addition to helping you improve the piece) certainly helps you know that it's worth the effort. For this particular piece, I chose this post.
Copy and paste into Medium. Now there's an interesting debate here on whether or not you should just wholesale copy and paste, then publish again without any alteration. The logic here is simply, "Be everywhere." LeoFinance is only a small (but growing) community with 1,256 total subscribers, only 323 of which are active. Unless you were explicitly paid to post exclusively on a particular site, like the Seeking Alpha contract works, then feel free to try and leverage all the work you do when you write something by putting it in as many different places as you can handle and simultaneously expand in all directions. You never know where you're going to "hit."
Polish up that writing a bit. No matter how awesome a piece of writing is, once you've spent some time away from it, you probably have some great instincts as to where and what you could do to improve it simply just by reading it again. Sometimes you need to get the scissors out and trim away the fat. Sometimes you'll need to add whole sections to make it relevant for your new intended audience. This step will also make you feel less guilty about repurposing content. Like a good hip-hop song, the minute you change one lyric or change a couple chords, you've made a new piece. Run with that and see where it takes you.
Build up your profile on Medium. The previous 3 steps assume that you have started your own profile already. I don't mean that here. What I mean is make sure everything is tight! Build up that profile! Make a nice profile pic. Work on your description of yourself. Most importantly, you're gonna have to publish a few pieces yourself before any respectable publication will add you as a Writer.
Do your research and contact some publications. Before you can submit anything to these publications, they have to first accept you as a Writer. That doesn't mean that they will accept all your writing. It's not a blog. But it does usually mean that they kind of see potential in you and want to give you a chance to submit work to them. If you're lucky, they will invite you to publish your piece with them, but that probably means it's not a top-50 publication. That's fine and good. Remember the first step - Be everywhere. But if you want to get in to the good publications, you'll have to do some research on what are the top ones currently. Then go to that page and see how you can apply to become a contributor. If they like your e-mail or sample or whatever is their process, then they will tag your Medium profile as a member of their Staff. Here are the ones I've been accepted to so far:
Once you've gotten this far, it's just a matter of going through the process, steps 1 through 5, until you've found enough publications that you can work with because not all of your posts will be accepted for publication. And that's ok. Everything you put there on your Medium profile is a step forward in the right direction. And whenever you DO get something published, remember your @theycallmedan rules - Broadcast & Amplify across all the social media channels you have at your disposal.
Just like I'm doing here. 😃
*To read the Medium article that inspired this post, please go here and clap it up!