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The Gentle Art of Titles
Attracting community through a message in a bottle
After two months of heavy Medium use, I thought I’d weigh in on a fraught topic: titling.
Most users of Medium are writers. It’s a writing site, after all. The algorithm in its inexhaustible wisdom finds you articles and offers them up when you open Medium to your homepage.
If you interact with articles by reading them, commenting on them, or liking them, the almighty algorithm finds more like those with which you’ve interacted. It offers up those you’ve followed, but reluctantly.
So if you’re new to Medium, and trying to figure out how it works (and how to format and title articles that attract more users) you click on a lot of titles that claim to know secrets about Medium itself.
Suddenly your brand-new Medium feed is filled with articles about those secrets. Maybe you write some yourself, and then your enthusiasm peters out and you stop coming. Writing is hard work, after all.
And titling is the hardest work of all. How do you attract clicks, but stay true to your premise? You want a specific Medium user, after all: the subscriber who will spend the most time with your article.
Who are the subscribers with their precious clicks and reads? Users who are trying to find information about Medium…
