How To Get Curated on Medium
What I learned from a 65% curation rate.
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I started writing on Medium two months ago, and by trial-and-error and a good deal of experimenting, have managed to increase my curation rate to almost 70%, and had several of the coveted trifecta (articles curated in three or more categories). I’m no expert to the mysteries of Medium, but I wanted to share a few of the tricks and tips I surmised from my own experience.
1. Use Open Source images, and credit them
This is the simplest change I made to my articles, which radically boosted my curation rate. In the beginning, I usually used creative commons pictures from Flickr, and didn’t credit them. Which isn’t very nice for my fellow creatives who take the pictures, and are generous enough to share them, and is rightly punished by Medium. So when I started using Unsplash and Pixabay, and crediting images thanks to their handy copy and paste caption feature, I noticed a sudden boost in curation.
2. Find original story ideas
My two most recent stories to have achieved the sought after Trifecta status were ones where I had tried to look at the world through a different angle, looking at getting into Drug Dealing as a rational economic decision for young men from underprivileged backgrounds, and how the forest is a feminist issue:
Original story ideas are more likely to be noticed by Medium’s curators, plus they often lie at the intersection of several different subject matters, making them more likely to be picked up in several tags.
One exercise I use for finding original story ideas is the Mix-and-Match technique. I use flashcards with different themes written on them — random words of all…
