5 Content Ideas For Your Medium Publication
This is how you can build an engaged audience
Congratulations on creating your first publication on Medium and offering fellow writers a welcoming home to publish their outstanding articles. What’s your game plan from this point forward?
A publication is much like a garden and your writers are flowers in need of a fertile ground in order to bloom. Unless you take care of them, they will wither and die, whilst your garden becomes a quiet, lonely piece of land.
What needs do writers have? Well, for a start, they require mental stimulation, which will kickstart their creativity and help them avoid the possibility of a mental block. They require feedback, in order to further develop their writing skills. They also need an active audience that will engage with their content — which is something that you, as an editor, can provide for them. Although writers will always come and go, you have higher chances of making them stay if you’re equipped with the right content ideas that will get their creative juices flowing.
As someone with over two years of experience of running a spirituality focused publication on Medium, I can honestly say that the content I plan for my pub is what made it survive for this long. That is why, I gathered a list of 5 ideas you can use to build an engaged audience:
1. Prompts
Depending on your niche, you can choose prompts that fit with the themes of your pub. For example, my publication focuses on spiritual topics, so when I choose prompts I make sure they are relevant for my audience. It could be anything from 1/2 words ones such as “healing journey” and “warrior Goddess”, to longer phrases — don’t be afraid to experiment and discover what is and isn’t well received by your community.
2. Challenges
You can do 15, 30, 50 and even 100 day writing challenges where each day you provide your writers with either a topic or a question for them to reflect and submit articles on. Again, the content must be relevant to the themes of your publication — so if you’re a fiction, poetry etc. focused pub, you obviously wouldn’t be doing challenges related to IT.
3. Tagging games
These games imply that you tag each other and one of you has to continue a story the other one started, or you write something in response to a word they’ve challenged you to write on. So many possibilities and ways of making this creative and fun for everyone!
4. Shout-outs/Weekly Roundups
If you want to encourage and support your writers, you can create weekly/monthly articles where you include selected, outstanding pieces written by your contributors. Make sure you express your gratitude for the content they share in your publication, as it’s their work that makes the publication a lively, empowering place.
5. Welcoming Articles
Welcome your new writers by creating content where you mention their names, thank them for joining you and debrief them on what the publication is all about. This offers contributors the chance connect with each other and get a better understanding of how things work around the platform.
Ultimately, keep in mind that in order for a publication to flourish, you need to invest time and stay on top of the game as far as your creativity is concerned.
Thank you for your time!