• Creating our content for the masses
• What do I mean by building an audience?
• Leveraging larger platforms and publications
• Syndicating with other platforms
• Contributing to other publications
• Sharing on content curation platforms
• Other notable places

Creating our content for the masses

Every content creator has been there – you just wrote an article that you're super excited about and think it's going to be a massive hit. But you quickly find that overnight success never came when you wake up hoping to find thousands of likes on the tweet only to find none.

But that might not have anything to do with your article. It could absolutely be groundbreaking, but unfortunately there's not many people around to see it.

Social networks don't tend to prioritize their feeds based on how good your article is, but how much interaction and engagement that post received. While that kind of makes sense, that doesn't play well for people just starting out.

So how do we expand that reach? While the obvious route is to buy your way to the top with ads, I'm going to focus on more natural ways we can build our audience.

What do I mean by building an audience?

Your favorite web developers or social media influencers didn't start with 100,000 followers – most of them worked really hard to get where they are. That process is what building an audience is all about.

By creating content, you're working to find others who enjoy your take or get inspired by it. Ideally, those same people will follow you on their favorite platform with the hope that your next piece will inspire them just the same.

Your audience is those people who followed you or are actively engaging with the content you create. The ones who are supporting you by giving a thumbs up to your new video. The ones who subscribe to your newsletter because they're eager to see the awesome work you did that week.

By working hard on your content, being consistent, and finding your voice, you'll naturally build that audience. But to build that audience, people first need to see it. So how can we get it in front of people?

Leveraging larger platforms and publications

While your new blog might not have anyone subscribed to your RSS feed, there are platforms out there with large audiences that are actively looking for more authors.

By leveraging these audiences, you're helping to get your foot in the door. While you might need to give up a little bit of ownership of the article by writing it somewhere that's not your own blog, you're providing a means for more people to read your content and find out who you are.

This process can take many forms, but I'm going to focus on a few things:

• Syndicating with other platforms
• Contributing to other publications
• Sharing on content curation platforms

Syndicating with other platforms

Syndicating your content can be one of the more effective means of getting access to a larger network while holding on to a lot of the benefits of hosting your own content.

Not all platforms are the same, but most of the ones I'm going to go over allow you to provide a canonical link to your own website. What this does is allow you to publish your work on different platforms all while the "SEO juice" ultimately flows back to your own blog.

While it's important from an SEO perspective, it's also generally a good way to keep your content hosted on your own website where you know you'll maintain it for the foreseeable future. If one of those platforms ends up closing down, you still have all of your content safe at home.

So what are some platforms that we can syndicate with and how can you set it up?

Dev.to

Dev.to is the choice platform for developers who want to share their knowledge and open up conversation to the larger tech community. They provide an incredibly welcoming and safe space where developers experienced and new can publish their work.

The great part about it is that everyone seems to get a bit of a fair chance at getting their work out to the world. While they have similar features to other networks where you can follow your favorite authors, newer authors still show up in the content feed giving you a chance to be seen.

To syndicate on dev.to, you'll want to set up the canonical link in the post configuration. When editing the content, you'll want to look for the settings icon, where you'll then be provided with an input where you can add the original URL for your post.

Adding a canonical URL to a dev.to post

Medium

Medium has suffered a lot of criticism lately due to its aggressive tactics and monetization strategies, but it's still an effective platform for newcomers who don't have an audience to get in front of.

Medium's large network of users and content curation makes it a great platform for expanding your reach. But it doesn't stop at posting there.

To be effective with your Medium posts, you want to look to get published with an existing Medium publication. Better Programming is one of the larger developer publications that are always looking for new authors to contribute.

Submitting to a Medium publication will help you take advantage of not only Medium's network, but that publication's network that gives you a better chance of getting selected by Medium's curation team and landing in someone's newsletter inbox.

Adding a canonical link to your Medium posts is a bit trickier though. To do this, you must "import" your story rather than copy and pasting it in. The good news, is Medium also tries to import all of the content, ideally making it a bit easier to add (remember to review all of the formatting!).

On your Stories page, you can find the Import button.

Importing a story on Medium

Once it's imported, you won't really be able to see much, but once you preview the page, you can view the source and find the canonical link added.

Canonical link in Medium post source

Contributing to other publications

While you might have to give up ownership of your content, writing for other publications or writing as a "guest post" is a great way to get started and gain some ground where you might not have had any before.

Depending on the publisher, you might not ever get the opportunity to post it on your own website, but you're trading that for the privilege to get your work out to potentially millions of people instead of the 10 unique visitors from the month of May.

This can even open up the door to more opportunities. This helps give your name recognition and authority that can help in your job search or simply another chance to write for the same publisher or a different bigger one.

The good news – is there's an endless supply of big name publishers that you can submit your work to. Here are a few you can get started with:

• freeCodeCamp News
• Smashing Magazine
• CSS-Tricks
• Sitepoint
• Tuts+
• Web Designer Depot
• DZone
• Pluralsight Guides (See "Teach" in footer)

Each of these publications have different processes of getting published. So be patient and keep working hard at your content.

Note: know of another publisher that offers writing opportunities? Let me know and I'll add them above!

Sharing on content curation platforms

It would be great if we all had a massive Twitter following where we could post about our new blog, but that's typically not the case. So while you should absolutely set up a social media profile and get your content out there, I'll focus on other platforms here.

Reddit

Though there are certainly rules about self-promotion depending on the subreddit, Reddit's a massive community of real people who are curious and eager to learn about something new.

Learn about the different tech or webdev subreddits that are out there. Start getting involved with other people's posts. Develop a relationship with the people there and show why your content has value.

Hacker News

Hacker News is tough. It's hard to get noticed and on the front page. And even when you get on the front page, there's a good chance you'll get a lot of criticism you never expected to get.

But if you can have thick skin and learn to take the heat should you get noticed, Hacker News can be an incredible way to broadcast to the world. People have turned into overnight successes by ending up on the front page of Hacker News whether they're the ones who posted it there or not.

More platforms

While those are two of the big ones, there are a ton more. Here are a few more to get you started:

• Echo JS
• RubyFlow
• Golang News
• Web Designer News

Other notable places

Chat-based Communities

There are a ton of communities using platforms like Slack or Discord that are incredibly supportive in helping each other grow. While you shouldn't simply spam your content, try to start a conversation around it. Talk about why the topic is important to you or how your tutorial can help others in their code journey.

Newsletters

This is something a lot of people regret not starting earlier – myself included. It's not too much effort to start a newsletter with a platform that has a free tier and keep it in your back pocket until you see some growth. No one's going to judge you for waiting a few months to put out content, but once you begin to grow your audience, they'll be excited to see all of your new work.

Other people's newsletters

You don't have to have your own newsletter to get into someone's inbox, there are already a ton of newsletter curators doing a lot of hard work to find great content around the web, but if they don't see it, how can they include it?

Most newsletter publications love to receive submissions. This helps their publication grow and include content from people who might not have a good opportunity on their own.

While you can Google around and find a newsletter that makes sense for you, here are a few that I follow along with that I know would love to see your work:

• All Cooperpress Publications including Javascript Weekly, Serverless Status, and a bunch more
• Web Tools Weekly
• CSS Weekly

Building your "brand"

"Brand" is a funny word and can come sometimes come with negative connotations. But really as an author, your goal should be to build a presence that you carry with you consistently through all of your different outlets of work.

For instance, when possible, try to always use the same username when creating author profiles. You can find me mostly anywhere at @colbyfayock – it makes it easy for people to find me on a new network.

Also try to use the same picture. While it's definitely fun to customize your different profiles depending on who's there, the benefit of using the same picture is people will come to recognize you by that picture. They'll instantly be able to remember they saw your blog post when they see your tweet come through their feed.

Be patient, your time will come

You're not going to find an overnight success without spending a lot of money, so be patient. Content development is hard, it takes time to both build an audience and figure out your voice.

But chances are, if this is your first article you've ever written, maybe that first publisher you sent it to wasn't interested in it.

THAT'S OKAY! Don't give up! Send it to another publisher and try the original one for your next article. When I first started out, it took a few articles before I got accepted as an author to freeCodeCamp's Medium publication.

The more you write, the more you'll learn about what's effective. It's not a sprint – be patient and just keep up the hard work.

Overcoming the fear of sharing your work

Most of these things aren't easy to do. The idea that you might have to face critical feedback of your work is absolutely scary!

But overcoming this fear is an important step of the process. I personally struggled with this when I began writing, but the more you put yourself our there, the less scary it becomes and you'll quickly notice there aren't as many bad people out there looking to say bad things about your work.

Instead, you're opening yourself up to an opportunity to learn and grow. Though not everyone's the same, the tech community can be overwhelmingly welcoming and supportive. The more you share and put yourself out there, the more receptive people will be to wanting to hear what you have to say.

How do you share your work?

Let me know on Twitter!

Want to skip ahead of the “what” and “why”? Jump to the “how”!

What we’re going to create

Blog post table of contents

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to use freeCodeCamp.org's content manager for visual and demonstration purposes. freeCodeCamp/news uses the blogging platform Ghost at the time of writing this, but this method can really apply to any article you write.

Why is this helpful?

Providing a table of contents helps improve the experience that the people reading your article will have.

It gives readers a preview of the article

Jumping into an article, at least a lengthy one, can be a big time commitment. No one wants to spend 20 minutes of their morning only to figure out a post they dove into hasn’t actually answered their questions. Or that it's a rehash of something they’re already an expert on (although differing perspectives can still be helpful).

By providing this preview, you can help people get a sense of what to expect as they start to read. It allows them to prioritize their time with the other list of articles they have to read.

It provides anchor points to jump down to specific content

Similar to providing a preview, maybe someone wants to read a specific portion of the page. Maybe it’s because they can skip the first few bits of a tutorial or they are coming in from a link a coworker shared in Slack.

The point is, people can use the table of contents to jump down to the parts that are more important to them.

Bonus: it helps you as an author

Providing a table of contents might not help for many practical reasons, but it's an additional tool for you to prioritize and understand the content of your post. It serves as a high level outline that you can refer to when making sure the flow of your story actually makes sense.

What it doesn’t do

Unfortunately, this is a manual process. This table of contents isn’t going to magically update any time you tweak your content. So make sure to be vigilant during the editing process and update any broken links or add and remove any changes before you publish.

How can we add a table of contents?

Content headers and anchor links

The key to this solution is to utilize the built in id attributes applied to content headers in the HTML when building a post page. Using these attributes allows us to create an anchor link that will jump the browser’s scroll position down to the location of the element with that id.

A basic example of the HTML looks like this:

<ul>
  <li><a href=“#my-id”>Link to My ID</a></li>
</ul>
<article>
  <p>Super long content</p>
  <h2 id=“my-id”>Important Thing</h2>
  <p>Important content</p>
</article>

In the above, we can see our article contains some basic content (imagine it's much longer than the above) with an h2 that follows with our important content.

By providing our h2 with the id attribute, we can now create a link by setting the href to the pattern of #[id] that will jump to that element in the page.

Now, when creating this in our blogging platform, we don’t necessarily need to worry about writing this HTML. But we do need to understand how to find the id in order to create our links.

Finding our header ID

We can use our browser’s developer tools (Chrome, Firefox) to pretty easily find our precious id attributes to create our links.

Using your favorite browser, find the headline that you’d like to use, right-click the text, and then select “Inspect” (or “Inspect Element”) from the bottom of the context menu.

Using Chrome to inspect a page's HTML

From there, you’ll notice that a panel pops up from either the bottom of the page or to the side. The placement of this panel doesn’t matter too much – it’s just a user setting. But we can now see the HTML of the page we’re looking at with our header element highlighted.

Previewing a page's HTML using Chrome developer tools

After finding our header in the HTML, find the id attribute. Double click the contents of it, and copy the value which we’ll use in a little bit.

Selecting the id attribute using Chrome developer tools

Creating a link to our header

Since we’re going to create a table of contents, let’s open our post’s editor page and scroll to the top of the page.

The first thing we want to do is start a list, which we can do by typing an asterisk * followed by a space when starting a new content section.

Adding a new list using Markdown in Ghost

Next, write what you want your link to say. Most commonly in table of contents, the link is exactly the same text as the header itself.

After it says what you want, highlight the entire line, and a little context menu will appear above your selection.

Opening the rich text formatting menu

Select the little link icon and the context menu will turn into a text field. Type into the text field a hashtag # followed by the contents of the id attribute that you found on your header above.

Adding or editing a link

Hit the Enter key and success! We have a link.

List with link

Repeat the steps above and create 1 link for each top level header that you'd like to link to.

Don’t feel like you need to go overboard, though. Typically you’ll see blog posts include only the top level headers of the page, so don’t feel like you need to include every sub header. Ultimately – do what you’re comfortable with.

Testing and previewing your table of contents

Once we’re done adding all of our links, we can preview or view our post and test that our links work.

Previewing or viewing post in Ghost on freecodecamp.org/news

After opening your preview or page, scroll to your table of contents or link and click it to test.

Using a table of contents

Success!

More tools for authoring

A table of contents is just one way to help readers enjoy your hard work. What other tools do you use that are important to your workflow? Are there any others you’ve seen but maybe not sure how to implement on your own?

Share with us on Twitter at @colbyfayock and @freecodecamp!

• ? Follow Me On Twitter

• ?️ Subscribe To My Youtube

• ✉️ Sign Up For My Newsletter

You can see how to create a table of contents with the help of JavaScript and browser DevTools here.

Yeah, the title, I know… but I had to try it at least once in my life ??

For many of us, Medium is the go-to platform for writing and publishing content online. It provides an extremely slick writing experience and, to be honest, I can’t imagine using anything else anymore…

I have been using Medium for years and I was always curious about the total reach of my articles

Unfortunately, Medium stats can be described only as very basic or, to be frank, utterly lacking in the feature department. Even simple stuff like a summary row with a total count of the views and reads at the bottom of the table is missing.

The only solution is to add the numbers manually which is a boring, error-prone process. It gets progressively more tedious with the increasing number of articles, so you basically get punished for being a productive writer…

But hey, there is hope…

…at least for the people using Google Chrome and Opera with this amazing Opera addon and then installing standard Chrome extension.

Introducing Medium Enhanced Stats

What is in it for You? ????

To put it briefly, there are four main features of Medium Enhanced Stats:

1. Total reach indicator
2. Bar chart article markers
3. Stats table summary row and extra information
4. Support for users and publications
5. ? An Easter Egg to be found, if you’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves and explore the source ???

Add Medium Enhanced Stats to your Google Chrome now! Yes, it’s 100% FREE!

Or to Opera with this amazing Install Chrome Extensions addon.

Total reach indicator

Total reach is a sum of all the views of your articles and responses.

Instead of being a plain number, indicator contains a next milestone and a progress bar which shows how much you have already accomplished.

Milestone is calculated as a next 10x “round” number.

For example, people with a reach under 1K will achieve their 1K milestone pretty quick, but it will probably take more time to move from 1M to 10M…

Then again, I would be very happy if you proved my assumption wrong ?

I would like to thank Johann Gyger for his help with debugging the extension popup! ??????

Bar chart article markers

Have you ever caught yourself wondering what was the cause of that pronounced views bump 3 months ago? Me too! Luckily the newest feature of Medium Enhanced Stats set out to solve just that…

Check out article markers in the bar chart and discover effect of their publishing on the overall performance…

Medium’s original bar chart is now enhanced with the article markers. It also works for responses and can handle displaying multiple articles per day.

Markers can handle also multiple articles per day and the marker size reflects amount of articles… Yes, bigger IS better ?

Summary row and extra information

This was the initial feature of the extension, and was basically the way it all started out: having a simple summary row which displays the sum of the values per column.

You know, Excel sum ∑ stuff…

As it turned out, the retrieved data also contains the amount of claps per article. This is nowadays a much more useful metric, since Medium switched to displaying claps also in the UI of the articles themselves.

Summary row is exactly what it sound it is ? Besides that, there is also an additional claps column for every article…

Support for users and publications

In the beginning, Medium Enhanced Stats could only display stats for a single currently logged in author. Feedback from the first users came pretty fast: they were asking for the ability to do the same for their publications.

Just installed a new chrome extension http://goo.gl/XBvNFu by @tomastrajan. Very convenient. It says I’ve reached more than 1 million people! And it now encourages me to aim for 10 millions :). Great work, @tomastrajan! Can it show stats for a publication? — Max NgWizard K

Ask and you shall be given!

Click on the user avatar and select from available users and publications

Technical background for my fellow developers

Medium Enhanced Stats is a Chrome Extension. Chrome Extensions are great for enriching existing websites with custom functionality, because we have the possibility to inject custom scripts in a safe way.

Custom script can access and leverage all the visible and invisible data available on the original page. More so, because they now belong to the original site, they can also make requests on its behalf. And let me tell you, it is much easier to calculate totals from JSON data than to scrape an HTML table.

I am planning to write another post which will get much more into details of how to implement Chrome extensions so stay tuned…

FUN FACT — Medium Enhanced Stats retrieves and show total stats, right? Well, it’s almost total: you might need to worry if you’ve published more than 100k articles, which is currently the limit of the paging request ?

Before I forget, Medium Enhanced Stats is also fully open sourced on GitHub, so feel free to check it out. There is virtually no documentation available yet, but I will definitely add more in the future to enable community-driven efforts!

Future

Since its inception, the extension has already gone through a couple of major iterations and improvements.

Currently, there is a plan to try to visualise articles which are the major contributors to views each day. It can get rather tricky in situations with lots of articles with small individual contributions. It will be important to strike a good balance to make it useful instead of distracting.

Another opportunity worth exploring is adding a way to download and share a stylized total reach indicator with author’s name, Medium username, and other social media handles. This could be useful because authors would gain an easy way to communicate their contribution as a proxy of their trustworthiness for new members of their communities.

This is the end!

I hope you will try Medium Enhanced Stats out and let me know about your experience and possible enhancement ideas!

Please, help spread this article to a wider audience with your ? ? ? and follow me on ?️ Twitter to get notified about my newest blog posts ?

And never forget, the future is bright.

_Obviously the bright future (? by S[asha • Stories)](https://unsplash.com/@sanfrancisco" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

If you made it this far, feel free to check out some of my other articles about frontend software development…

How To Stay Up To Date With Releases Of Popular Frameworks
_Introducing Release Butler — A Twitter Bot That Helps You To Stay Up To Date With Releases Of Popular Frontend…_medium.comHow To Build Responsive Layouts With Bootstrap 4 and Angular 6 ?
E_very web app is assumed to be responsive, period.m_edium.com How To Speed Up Continuous Integration Build With New NPM CI And package-lock.json
_While very controversial, the new npm release 5.7.0 brings some amazing features which will have noticeable positive…_medium.com

Don’t forget ! ?

freeCodeCamp is now the largest technology publication on Medium. And as its sole editor, I get way more high-quality story submissions than I have time to edit and publish.

This means that I’m the biggest bottleneck — between all the developers, designers, and data scientists writing these amazing stories — and a growing audience that’s eager to read them.

Even though freeCodeCamp.org reaches millions of people each month through Medium, YouTube, and our coding platform, we’re a small donor-supported nonprofit. We lack the resources to hire professional editors.

This said, a lack of resources hasn’t stopped us in other areas. We have thousands of volunteers running local study groups, contributing to open source projects, and moderating forums and chatrooms.

If you have experience editing a newspaper, academic journal, magazine, or blog, and are able to contribute a few hours of your time each week to this publication, we should talk. ? Read our publication guide, then reach out to me.

You’ll learn a ton about technology in the process, and help a community that has published 1,000+ free (and ad-free) articles. And together, we’ll be able to maintain our current high standards while publishing a lot more stories for everyone to read.

You can read more about our move on this forum thread, which includes instructions for how you can apply to become an author, read this style guide.

What follows is for historical purposes if you're curious.

Our open source community runs Medium’s largest technical publication. If you write about development, design, or data science — and are looking for an audience — this is a good place to get published.

Our stats from the past 90 days. They’re high enough to break the CSS on the Y axis of Medium’s charts.

freeCodeCamp is an open source community with thousands of contributors, mentors, teachers, and event organizers.

More than a million people learn to code using freeCodeCamp each month, and thousands of us have worked through the 1,200-hour curriculum and gotten their first developer jobs.

We’re a nonprofit. You can help us pay for servers and other costs by becoming a supporter.

Here’s what all this means for you as a writer:

• We won’t plaster your story with advertisements, or put it behind a paywall (or “email wall” or anything — no weird tricks).
• You can include links to your own blog or service, and even affiliate links, as long as it’s done tastefully and transparently.
• Your stories are yours. We don’t lay any claim to them. You can cross-post them wherever you want. Other newspapers and websites may even approach you about syndicating them or translating them. That’s fine with us. We just ask that — since we invest a lot of time in editing and promoting your stories — you don’t remove them from our Medium publication once we’ve published them.

Our editors have experience running newspapers and editing technical publications. We’ll read your submission, and if we think it’s promising, we’ll give you candid feedback as to how you can improve it. Then we’ll perform final editing on your story, publish it, then help you publicize it.

Since we launched this Medium publication 18 months ago:

• we’ve published about 1,000 stories
• that have received an average of 23,000 views
• with a median of 6,500 views (that is, half of these stories have received at least 6,500 views)

So if you’re writing about technology, we can help you reach a much larger audience.

Table of Contents

• How we evaluate, edit, and publish stories
• A quick primer for writing well on Medium
• A good headline makes all the difference
• Arrest with images
• Build momentum with a strong lead
• Establish credibility
• Write smart
• Attribute your sources
• Showcase your code
• Make links look natural
• Embed media
• Explain abbreviations
• Look and style
• Add 5 tags
• Publicize your stories on social media
• Final advice

How we evaluate, edit, and publish stories

Note: I’ve hidden the submission instructions, the secret word, and the email address in the text below so that you’ll read all of this. ?

We receive 100+ submissions each week, and are protective of our readers’ time. We seek to only publish stories that are:

• well written
• about interesting topics that people haven’t already written about too much
• relevant to our audience of developers, designers, and data scientists.

If we think your story is a good fit, we’ll add you as a writer to the freeCodeCamp publication and send you an acceptance letter with further instructions.

Then we’ll put your story in the queue to be edited and published. (Here’s our editor handbook if you’re curious about this process). This process may take a while, so we thank you in advance for your patience. You’ll be able to view edits in Medium’s revision history. You will still have full control of your article if you need to make updates.

If we don’t think your story is a good fit for the freeCodeCamp publication, we will send you an email letting you know this. No worries. It won’t negatively affect your ability to get subsequent stories published here.

Note that all our editors have other responsibilities within the open source community, so it may take several days for us to reply to you. But as long as you follow the submission instructions hidden below, we will reply to you.

A quick primer for writing well on Medium

As a writer, you fight a war against indifference. You have to get people to care enough to click through to your story. You have to convince them to take a chance on you.

You have only two weapons against the relentless scroll of news feeds: a headline and an image.

Here’s what a story looks like in Medium’s news feed:

Here’s what it looks like on Facebook:

And here’s what it looks like on Twitter:

Your headline and opening image are the only things people have to judge your story on. Before they can even read your story’s first paragraph, they must answer a question. It’s the same question that we all ask ourselves every day: is this going to be worth my time?

Your first job as a writer is to choose a headline and image that will make people answer “yes.”

A good headline makes all the difference

Your headline is the most important part of your story. Spend time refining it.

Don’t use clickbait: “You won’t believe this one ridiculously effective headline dark pattern”

Don’t use listicles: “11 outrageous headlines that will compel people to read your Medium story”

Do tell the truth: “Clever but matter-of-fact headline about an interesting topic”

How long should your headline be? HubSpot analyzed 6,000 blog posts and found that stories with 8 to 14-word headlines get more social media shares.

This said, make sure your headline is 80 characters or fewer. Otherwise, the title will get truncated in news feeds when people share your article on Facebook and Twitter.

Another consideration is how emotional a headline is. The more emotional (positive or negative) a headline is, the more likely people will click it.

Here’s a tool that helps you balance the length and sentiment of your headlines.

A screenshot of the tool’s analysis of one of my headlines. Your mileage may vary.

Headlines are traditionally written in “title case.” The Associated Press says to “capitalize the first letter of every word except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer.”

On Medium, I often throw title case out the window and just write headlines like a normal sentence. I even include punctuation as necessary. This format is more conversational, and easier to read.

Don’t break stories into parts. Labels like “part 1” scare people off, because who knows when you’ll get around to writing part 2. And if people encounter “part 2” and they haven’t read part 1, there’s a good chance they just won’t bother reading either. So it’s much better to just publish a single in-depth story.

Arrest with images

The second most important aspect of your story is its featured image.

Medium will automatically make the first image in your article its featured image. This means your article’s og-image meta property will be this image. This image will serve as your story’s ambassador everywhere: social media news feeds, Reddit, Google News — even RSS readers.

You can manually force Medium to treat a specific image as your article’s featured image. While in edit mode, click the image, then:

• Mac: ⌘ + Opt + 8
• PC: Ctrl + Alt + 8

Start considering images early in the writing process. And never publish without at least one image. Otherwise your story will be all but invisible in news feeds.

You should break up long stories with images. To paraphrase Mary Poppins, a spoonful of images helps the text go down.

Medium offers four different image widths. Note that these will all look the same on mobile.

Most of the time, you’ll want to stick with column width:

If you have a chart that is hard to read when it’s small, go bigger:

And if you’re really proud of an image, or if it’s chock full of interesting data, go full-bleed:

… and then there’s side straddle. Don’t use this size at all, because it makes the text less comfortable to read.

It’s also awkward when you’re done talking about the photo and your text is still pushed to the side.

Yeah. I’m still stuck over here.

Always include a high-resolution image at the top of a story under your headline. This has the following benefits:

1. When people share your story on Facebook and Twitter, it will be more prominent in news feeds, making people more likely to click on it.
2. It will look better in Medium’s own news feeds.
3. Humans are visual creatures, and click on images.

Build momentum with a strong lead

Once your reader clicks through to your story, the trial begins. They’re looking for any excuse to jump back to their news feed. Reading requires a lot more effort than scrolling through cat photos.

Don’t waste time with intros or updates like “This was published on my blog at [blog URL]” or “Update: this has been posted on Hacker News.” You can put these things at the bottom of your story.

Instead, start making points and telling your story immediately.

Establish credibility

Figure out a way to establish your credibility within the first few paragraphs. If you’re a top expert in your field, say so. Don’t assume that people are going to take the time to google you.

“Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any achievement or distinction that makes people take you more seriously will help give your readers the impression that “this person knows what they’re talking about.”

Reinforce your credibility throughout your story. Support your arguments with data. Use inline links to (non-paywalled) research.

This isn’t the New England Journal of Medicine. This is Medium. So don’t use footnotes.

Write smart

Good writing is hard. Like any skill, it takes practice. There are no shortcuts to becoming a strong writer.

Do yourself a favor: write what you know.

Have you ever heard the term “writers block?” Writer’s block happens when you don’t know enough about a topic to write about it.

If you have trouble coming up with at least 5 minutes worth of things to say on a topic — or if your story devolves into a list of bullet points — you don’t know enough about it.

The antidote is research. Learning. Going out into the field.

Don’t publish anything you’re not proud of. Medium isn’t a numbers game. It’s a social contract. People follow you. In turn, you show respect for their scarce time.

Good Medium stories don’t come naturally. For every minute of story length, expect to spend at least an hour writing, re-writing, and editing your story.

Attribute your sources

The simplest way to attribute an image is to put the words “Image credit” below an image, and link this text to its original source.

If you’re looking for images you can safely use without permission, check out Pexels, Unsplash, or search Google for images labeled for re-use.

A Google image search query with the “Labeled for reuse” option selected.

Plagiarism — misrepresenting someone else’s writing as your own — is a serious offense in college, and it’s just as serious on Medium. Always attribute quotes to the people who originally said them. If it’s a multi-line quote, you should use Medium’s pull quotes:

“When you have wit of your own, it’s a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.”
― Criss Jami

You should only use Medium’s pull quotes as a way to highlight actual quotes — not to style your own text.

Showcase your code

Where possible, code should be in text form rather than images. This makes the code more accessible to screen readers, and easier for people to copy and paste.

Medium has a hidden shortcut that will turn text plain text like this:

if (developer === true) {

follow(this.mediumPublication);

}

…into a formatted code block:

if (developer === true) {

  follow(this.mediumPublication);

}

To accomplish this, select the text, then push:

• Windows: Control + Alt + 6
• Mac: Command + Option + 6
• Linux: Control + Alt + 6

You can also start a code block with triple back-ticks. If you type three backticks (```) on a new line, Medium will switch into code input mode.

To highlight code inline, select it, then press the backtick key. This way, you can format text as code freeCodeCamp()right in the middle of a sentence.

You can even embed runnable apps right into Medium. Just in case these don’t render properly in Medium’s mobile apps, I recommend including links below each of the embeds as a fallback.

Paste a CodePen.io URL into Medium, then hit enter:

View my CodePen here.

You can also do this with JSFiddle.net:

View my JSFiddle here.

Sometimes people start lines of code with a $ if they’re terminal commands. Don’t do this. It will confuse beginners and makes it harder to copy and paste commands. Instead, just say something like “Enter the following commands in your terminal.”

Make links look natural

Figure out a way to work a link into a sentence. One thing I do not recommend doing is putting a link on its own line and pressing enter. This will create a nice looking preview card, like this:

How to stand on the shoulders of giants
_Conquer Not Invented Here Syndrome, then do something new._medium.freecodecamp.com

… but readers often assume these are ads, and don’t even look at them.

The only time I would recommend using this is at the end of your story, if you want to link to further reading.

Underlining text makes it harder to read, so only hyperlink a few words.

Don’t paste URLs directly, like this: ❌ https://www.freecodecamp.com ❌

Instead link to sites like freeCodeCamp mid sentence, like I just did here.

Embed media

You can embed Tweets, YouTube videos, and other media by pasting their URLs into Medium on a new line, then pressing enter.

Use these sparingly, since they may distract your reader from finishing your story.

Explain abbreviations

Don’t use an abbreviation unless the abbreviation is more widely understood than what it stands for. For example, HTTP is more widely recognized than Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

If an abbreviation isn’t already widely understood, and you’re going to refer to it more than a few times, you can define it as an abbreviation by doing this:

“Let’s break the code down into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).”

Here I also linked to the Wikipedia article, for readers’ convenience. Don’t assume people will read these external links, though. You still need to define concepts or illustrate them through example.

Avoid defining an abbreviation in your opening paragraphs, as it slows your reader down and makes them less likely to continue reading.

Here’s the very short list of technology abbreviation that you don’t need to define: API, AJAX, BIOS, CPU, CSS, HTML, HTTPS, JSON, LAN, RAM, REST, USB, WWW, XML. For everything else, you should spell it out.

Always spell out short multi-part words like JavaScript and front-end. Don’t shorten them. The brevity isn’t worth the possible confusion.

Look and style

If you want to emphasize something, use bold, but use it sparingly. Italics are harder to read. Don’t bold hyperlinks — the line underneath them already provides enough emphasis.

Don’t use drop caps. They look elegant in old books, but silly on the web.

Some old-school-cool print dropcaps

Only use one exclamation point at a time, typically only after exclamations like: Golly gee! Hot dog!

Put commas and periods inside quotes, except when it might confuse a reader (like with variable names or book titles).

In some parts of the world, people put spaces before colons or question marks, like this : example. Don’t do this.

Use English instead of Latin:

• Use “for example” instead of “E.G.”
• Use “that is” instead of “I.E.”
• Use “note that” instead of “N.B.”
• Instead of ending lists with “etc.” start them with “like”: “Elvis eats food like bread, peanut butter, and bananas.”

According to Google Books, semicolons have been dying a slow death. Let’s put them out of their misery. Just use a period instead, and break clauses into separate sentences.

Use the Oxford Comma when possible. It makes things easier, clearer, and prettier to read.

Use the Hemingway App. There’s nothing magical about this simple tool, but it will automatically detect widely agreed-upon style issues:

• passive voice
• unnecessary adverbs
• words that have more common equivalents

The Hemingway App will assign a “grade level” for your writing. Even technical stories can pull off a grade level of 6. And they should aspire to.

Most humans are not native English speakers, and the ones who are don’t usually sit around reading Chaucer all day. They want their information accessible and to the point.

Err on the side of breaking long sentences and paragraphs down into shorter ones.

Despite what you may have learned in English composition class, people prefer short paragraphs to “walls of text.”

There’s nothing wrong with single-sentence paragraphs.

Err on the side of creating new paragraphs.

Use contractions. They’ll make your prose seem more conversational. That’s always a plus.

Keep your tense consistent throughout. If you’re talking about something that occurred in past, use past tense.

Also, front-end development (adjective form with a dash) is when you’re working on the front end (noun form with no dash). The same goes with the back end, full stack, and many other compound terms.

Add 5 tags

Medium allows you to add up to five tags to your story. Use them.

People follow specific topics on Medium. The most popular ones are #tech, #life-lessons, #travel, #design, and #startup.

People who follow the tags you use may see your story in their news feed. Tags also make it easier for people to stumble upon your story in search results.

And now that you’ve read this far, here’s how to submit your story to the freeCodeCamp publication: send an email to submit at freecodecamp org. Include the URL for your story on Medium (preferably an unpublished draft) and the word “bananas” so that we’ll know that you have read all this. Only send one story URL per email. There’s no need to add anything further to your email — we just read the stories and judge them based on their own merits.

Publicize your stories on social media

You can share your story on Twitter, Facebook groups, and relevant Subreddits. If you have a mailing list, you can blast it out to your subscribers, too.

You can view your story’s stats in real time. Ask for feedback from your friends and followers. Incorporate this feedback into your story.

Don’t do anything sketchy to promote your story. You will most likely be caught. Sites like Hacker News and Reddit are very good at detecting abnormal voting behavior. This will reflect poorly not just on you, but the entire freeCodeCamp community as well.

Final advice

Remember that when you publish on Medium, you’re asking thousands of people to give you several minutes of their lives. Don’t take your readers for granted.

Before you publish a story, I recommend you sleep, wake up, then proof-read it again.

If you aren’t a native English speaker and are writing in English, ask a native speaker to proof-read your story before submitting it to a publication.

We’re looking forward to reading your submissions. I hope we can help you further improve your stories, and reach a much wider audience.

Rich Site Summary (RSS) was developed way back in 1999 as a way to quickly subscribe to blogs and newspapers, back before tools like Twitter feeds made it so easy to find and read articles.

Over the last 17 years, RSS has largely faded from popular usage, but developers never stopped working on it. Today, if you want to streamline your information diet, RSS offers tons of advanced tools that make consuming content a breeze.

You can either actively discover content or passively stumble upon it.

Lets say you decide you want to learn to code. You go to Google and search “learn to code for free.” You find Free Code Camp on the first page of the Google results, sign up, and start progressing through its coding challenges. This is called active discovery.

Now lets say you were just browsing Facebook and you see one of your friends talking about Free Code Camp. This is called passive discovery. You click on the link, bookmark it, then move on with your Facebook-ing, only to never get around to visiting the site again.

My bookmarks. Don’t end up like me.

These examples demonstrate why even if you stumble upon something relevant in social media, you can still end up wasting time. If you don’t have time then and there, you will most likely open a tab or bookmark it. You’ll never get back to, because if you’re busy now, you’re likely to be just as busy later. Contrast this with a google search, which you’ll only do at the exact moment that you need something.

Enter the RSS feed reader

You know how you get a notification when a friend tags on Facebook? Well, you can get the exact same sort of notification from an RSS feed reader when a friend publishes a new article on their blog. Here’s the RSS feed reader Chrome extension that I use on my desktop.

My frequently visited blogs

This will add a nice little icon on your chrome extensions bar, and every time you are on a blog where a feed exists, there will be a little “+” sign so you can “subscribe” to it.

Let’s say you are looking to form better habits, and you find a nice blog about habits like James Clear’s blog. Now, thanks to this Chrome extension, you can just click the + sign and it will add that blog to your feed.

From this point on, whenever James Clear writes an article, you will have a pending notification on that bar until you mark it as read or — better yet — go and read it.

Free Code Camp’s latest articles

Notice how I have subscribed to Free Code Camp’s Medium articles? That’s right — you can even subscribe to your favorite Medium publications, all in one place. This means you won’t have to open Medium and scroll through your its news feed just to find posts from your favorite publications.

Subscribing to blogs in this way saves you massive amounts of time, because you are targeting what you want to read. You can even see the titles, so you never have to open the website only to find out that you’re not interested its newest content.

Using folders and the Dribbble Trick

And that’s not all! You can even make folders, then combine your thematically similar blogs to better manage them. This often helps me when I am trying to focus one particular topic, and looking for inspiration.

Do you use Dribbble for inspiration? Me too! And I follow a lot of designers there. With RSS, you can create folders for Dribbble feeds for individuals designers, so you’ll be the first to know whenever your favorite designers post new content.

People I follow on Dribbble and their new Dribbble shots (the green notifications boxes)

You can do the same for Material UP inspiration.

The Chrome extension comes packed with lots of other useful features, like the ability to star certain blogs combine them, and even subscribe to podcasts.

And if you prefer emails to notifications, you can configure this extension to send you emails about particular blogs, and at designated times of your day when you’re likely free to read them.

You should stop passively surfing.

According to a CNN report, teens spend up to nine hours a day on social media, and check their news feeds up to 100 times a day.

Now, if I didn’t know any better, I would assume that adults are not like teens, and place a higher value on their time. They wouldn’t end spend their days constantly checking social media.

But the reality is, as adults, we end up spending a lot of our time checking our social media instead of actively searching for content that is immediately relevant to us.

When we say we are “surfing the web,” what we are really doing is stumbling upon links which have nice clickbait headlines, only to later realize that the content didn’t teach us anything new. Nor was it relevant to whatever task we were trying to accomplish at the time.

We often find ourselves scrolling through our Facebook news feeds, clicking links our friends have shared, worried that if we don’t do this we may “miss out” on something.

But in all reality, little of this content is essential. Productivity enthusiasts are quick to point out that this “fear of missing out” is misplaced, and that most such content won’t make any real difference in our lives.

The problem with email lists.

The biggest reason for the decline in popularity of the RSS feeds has been that websites have shifted to manually sending you email newsletters with links to their recent blog posts.

It’s nice to stumble upon a website and be able to stay up-to-date by simply giving them an email address. But if they are not the subtle type, and start bombarding me with emails every day, I am going to feel overloaded at first, then eventually unsubscribe.

As you can see, getting 10 promotional emails a day isn’t exactly the most fun way to consume blog content. I have my own designated time to read these posts, and if I don’t get to them because I’m working, I will most likely never get back to them.

With RSS, I have a list of all the blogs that I’ve subscribed to, along with how many new articles each has posted since I last checked them. And I can just leave them as unread for now, then approach them later in a more systematic way.

This way, instead of dealing with random emails that pop up in the middle of my workday, or in the middle of the night when I am trying to sleep, all the content I want to read goes to the same place, and I can get to it at my leisure.

Thanks for reading. I hope this article — and RSS feed readers — can help you be more productive. Again, here’s the free Chrome extension I use for RSS. If you enjoyed this article, make sure to press that green heart to show your support.

Medium’s algorithms put you on a level playing field. Your stories can dominate news feeds. You can crack Medium’s Top Stories list. You can beat out professional writers and celebrities.

I’ll show you how.

But why should you care what some software developer has to say about writing?

A screenshot of my Medium stats page.

Because over the past 30 days, I’ve averaged 12,000 views per day on my Medium stories. Medium’s readers have recommended my stories 13,000 times. And I’m the editor of one of Medium’s largest publications.

In short, I know what writing works here on Medium.

But good writing won’t help you if you can’t get people’s attention.

Weapons of mass attraction

As a writer, you fight a war against indifference. You have to force people to care enough to click through to your story. You have to convince them to take a chance on you.

You have only two weapons against the relentless scroll of news feeds: a headline and an image.

Here’s what a story looks like in Medium’s news feed:

Here’s what it looks like on Facebook:

And here’s what it looks like on Twitter:

Your headline and opening image are the only things people have to judge your story on. Before they can even read your story’s first paragraph, they must answer a question. It’s the same question that we all ask ourselves every day: is this going to be worth my time?

Your first job as a writer is to choose a headline and image that will make people answer “yes.”

Headlines: part art, part science

Your headline is the most important part of your story. Spend time refining it.

BuzzFeed built a publishing empire on the back of compelling headlines. Here’s a a lexical analysis of 60,000 BuzzFeed headlines, and what works best for them.

I am not saying you should use BuzzFeed-like headlines. But you should be aware of them. They’re filled with hyperbole and fear-of-missing-out. Think about what their effectiveness says about human psychology and the nature news feeds.

Here are some types of headlines that work well on Medium:

• grand pronouncements like “X is over”, “X is broken”, or “X is bull**”
• Headlines that use negative words like “stop”, “never”, and “don’t ever __ again”
• The “I _ and it was _” pattern (for example: “I ate pizza for breakfast and it was glorious”)

How long should your headline be? HubSpot analyzed 6,000 blog posts and found that stories with 8 to 14-word headlines get more social media shares.

Another consideration is how emotional a headline is. The more emotional (positive or negative) a headline is, the more likely people will click it.

Here’s a tool that helps you balance the length and sentiment of your headlines.

A screenshot of the tool’s analysis of this story’s headline. Your mileage my vary.

Headlines are traditionally written in “title case.” The Associated Press says to “capitalize the first letter of every word except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer.”

On Medium, I often throw title case out the window and just write headlines like a normal sentence. I even include punctuation as necessary. This format is more conversational, and easier to read.

Arresting Images

The second most important aspect of your story is its opening image.

Medium assigns your opening image the og-image meta property. This means that your opening image will serve as your story’s ambassador everywhere: social media news feeds, Reddit, Google News — even RSS readers.

For this story, I chose an image of Emma Stone portraying an aspiring journalist at her typewriter in the 1960s. It’s from the popular 2011 period movie “The Help.”

A stock photo of someone sitting at their laptop would have looked too generic. Our news feeds are already filled with these pictures.

If you do want to use stock photos, though, there are a ton of free creative commons-licensed stock photos you can use in your stories.

I recommend keeping photos thematically consistent throughout your story. Here’s another image of Emma Stone’s character writing. This helps to break up long stretches of text.

On one story, I used only images from The Dark Knight trilogy:

Salary Negotiation: how not to set a bunch of money on fire
_Pop quiz, hot shot._medium.freecodecamp.com

And I only used images of Peggy Olsen from Mad Men for another:

Getting a raise comes down to one thing: Leverage.
_Maybe you’ve been at your job for a while, and your salary hasn’t kept pace with your city’s cost of living._medium.freecodecamp.com

These stories don’t mention The Dark Knight or Mad Men in their text. The images are there to visually reinforce each story’s message, while lending them flavor.

A spoonful of images helps the text go down.

Another popular technique is to emblazon your story’s headline across your opening image. My friend Kristyna did this on the most-recommended story ever on Medium:

The 37 Best Websites To Learn Something New
_There is absolutely no excuse for you not to master a new skill, expand your knowledge, or eventually boost your career…_entrepreneurs.maqtoob.com

Start considering images early in the writing process. And never publish without at least one image. Otherwise your story will be all but invisible in news feeds.

Build momentum with a strong lead

Once your reader clicks through to your story, the trial begins. They are looking for any excuse to jump back to their news feed. Reading requires a lot more effort than scrolling through cat photos.

Don’t waste time with intros or updates — start making points and telling your story immediately.

Establish credibility

Figure out a way to establish your credibility within the first few paragraphs. If you are a top expert in your field, say so. Don’t assume that people are going to take the time to google you.

“Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Are you writing about health as a non-physician? Are you writing about personal finance as a non-millionaire? You’ll need to overcome any skepticism readers may have about your credibility.

I established my credibility as a writer earlier by posting my recent Medium stats. You’ll need to find an achievement you can trumpet. Something that gives your readers the impression that “this person knows what they’re talking about.”

Reinforce your credibility throughout your story. Support your arguments with data. Use inline links to (non-paywalled) research.

This isn’t the New England Journal of Medicine. This is Medium. So don’t use footnotes.

Write smart

Good writing is hard. Like any skill, it takes practice. There are no shortcuts to becoming a strong writer.

Do yourself a favor: write what you know.

Have you ever heard the term “writers block?” Writer’s block happens when you don’t know enough about a topic to write about it. The antidote is research. Learning. Going out into the field.

Don’t publish anything you’re not proud of. Medium isn’t a numbers game. It’s a social contract. People follow you. In turn, you show respect for their scarce time.

Good Medium stories don’t come naturally. For every minute of story length, expect to spend at least an hour writing, re-writing, and editing your story.

Speaking of story length…

Medium readers prefer longer stories.

Medium’s data scientists found that 7 minutes is the optimal length for a Medium story.

In practice, a story should be as long as it needs to be, and no longer.

If you can’t come up with at least 5 minutes worth of thoughts, rethink the premise of your story.

One exception to this is stories that are mostly images, embeds, or code.

Write at a sixth-grade level

Just because many of your readers went to college does not mean they enjoy reading at a college level. And many of them will be non-native English speakers.

Paste your story into the Hemingway Editor. This will highlight dense sentences, adverbs, passive voice, and other style issues. It will also assign a grade level to your overall writing.

Despite what you may have learned in English composition class, people prefer short paragraphs to “walls of text.”

There’s nothing wrong with single-sentence paragraphs.

Err on the side of creating new paragraphs.

Add 5 tags

Medium allows you to add up to five tags to your story. Use them.

People follow specific topics on Medium. The most popular ones are #tech, #life-lessons, #travel, #design, and #startup.

People who follow the tags you use may see your article in their news feed. Tags also make it easier for people to stumble upon your story in search results.

Promote your stories on social media

Once you hit publish, your story will begin to “decay” in Medium’s recommendation engine. As time passes, it will show up in fewer news feeds. The only way to counteract this decay is to get more views and recommends.

The first few hours are critical. Be sure to get a few recommends on your story immediately. These will serve as a proof of concept.

Peer pressure is powerful. Humans are much more likely to click that recommend heart if others humans have already done so.

Share your story on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can view your story’s stats in real time. Ask for feedback from your friends and followers. Incorporate this feedback into your story.

Once people have recommended your story, share it on relevant Reddit subreddits and Facebook groups.

If you have a mailing list, you can blast it out to your subscribers, too.

Submit your story to a large, specialized publication.

Another way to reach a much larger audience is by syndicating your story in one of Medium’s publications. These are communities of writers and editors who specialize in writing about a few key topics, such as health or education.

For example, Free Code Camp’s Medium publication (for which I’m an editor) focuses on development, design, and data science. It has more than 50,000 followers.

When a publication syndicates your story, it will show up in the news feeds of its followers. Publications can also feature your story on their landing pages.

Find out who the editors of these publications are and pitch your story to them.

Ask people to recommend and share.

Medium is still quite new. Most people don’t understand how its recommend and follow mechanisms work.

Here’s my final tip for expanding your readership here on Medium: include instructions and a custom GIF image at the bottom of your stories. This will show people how to recommend your story and follow you.

I only write about programming and technology. If you follow me on Twitter I won’t waste your time. ?