Ask Medium

Tips and Tricks from Medium’s User Happiness Team

Here on the User Happiness Team, we know there are a lot of questions folks have about how to get the most out of Medium, their accounts, the day-to-day of writing and reading online, and more. So last week, the team took to Twitter to field a few of those — and we thought we’d share a few popular ones here on our blog as well. Now, we know Medium people are curious people, so we’ll be doing features like this on the regular. You can also follow us on Twitter @MediumSupport and send us your questions whenever they pop up using #askmedium.

How do I grow my readership? Some of my stories receive more reads and engagement than others. Am I doing something wrong?

There are a few things you can do to help your story find an audience:

• Make sure you have a strong title and an interesting featured image.
• Be sure to tag your post properly.
• Once you publish, share your post on your personal social channels, and with friends and family.
• Find your community on Medium by following other writers you like and applauding for posts you like.

Find more writing tips here.

Signing in to Medium is confusing because there are so many options. I think I might have created 2 accounts by accident!

Many people have accidentally created two Medium accounts without knowing it. We know this can cause a lot of confusion. We recommend always signing in the same way you signed up. So, if you signed up with your email address, you should sign in with email; if you signed up with Twitter, you should sign in with Twitter. If you suspect you may have two accounts, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help you sort it out.

How do payouts work for writers in the Partner Program?

As a member, your $5 monthly membership gives you unlimited access to stories for members and also lets you directly support the writers you love. So how is payment determined? Throughout the course of a given month, you read and clap for different member stories (you can tell they’re for members by the snazzy little star on the top left corner of a post). Some you liked, and some you loved. At the end of each month, your $5 is proportionally distributed to all the authors whose work you enjoyed — and we determine this based on a combination of your claps, reading time, and other measures.

That’s all for now. We’ll be back in a couple weeks with more answers to common questions. In the meantime, you can always shoot your questions to us on Twitter using #askmedium whenever something comes up.