Copywriting For Medium Tutorial
How To Format Your Article To Make Medium Happy
Julie Rane has become a go-to specialist in copywriting tips for Medium.
Here is a good starter tutorial for article writing on Medium with the proper formatting.
UPDATED FOR 2021: How to Write a Story in Medium
15,554 views
Dec 29, 2020
15.1K subscribers
Copywriting For Medium Tutorial
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
00:00
let’s talk about the medium editor it’s
00:01
been a hot minute since i made this
00:03
video i made
00:03
the previous video to this like a year
00:05
and a half ago so i’m excited to jump in
00:08
and show you
00:09
the very best practices for using the
00:10
medium editor now
00:12
the focus on this is to create a story
00:15
and publish it on medium with their best
00:16
practices
00:17
there is a lot you can do in the editor
00:19
but we’re going to keep it simple here
00:21
because
00:22
ultimately that’s what medium wants they
00:24
want you to be able to write something
00:25
that is easy that is fun that is
00:27
straightforward and that doesn’t take
00:29
like you’re focusing on the writing part
00:31
not the formatting part
00:32
so let’s keep that in mind as we go
00:34
through this video
00:35
so the first step is to hit right that’s
00:39
it
00:39
this takes you to the medium editor and
00:41
where all of the action is about to
00:43
happen
00:44
they make it easy for you you can see
00:45
where your title should go and then they
00:47
say where your story should go
00:48
so let’s put in a good title let’s say
00:50
that we want to write about cats
00:52
why cats are the
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best i want to make it clear that
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medium sorry medium medium prefers title
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case which means that every word
01:03
um is capitalized unless it’s a
01:05
preposition now if you wanted to do a
01:07
subtitle
01:09
a subtitle about lovely
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and fun cats that they prefer that to be
01:16
in sentence case and the way that you
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can do this is just make it like a
01:18
sentence and add punctuation at the end
01:22
to turn this into a subtitle i i want to
01:24
show you actually that this
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will if you just hit publish it already
01:28
knows that that’s your subtitle
01:30
because you you have it in the right
01:31
spot but from a format perspective it
01:33
helps if you actually turn it into a
01:35
subtitle by pressing the little t
01:37
and then now medium recognizes it title
01:39
and subtitle
01:41
the next thing is an image i personally
01:45
like to do my image when i finish the
01:46
story but
01:48
in terms of like order of the the
01:50
physical story
01:51
it’s we’re coming to it next so there
01:54
are two ways to do this
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first you can search using unsplash this
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is what i recommend for people who just
02:00
want to get their first story out the
02:01
door they don’t have time or the energy
02:03
to scroll through thousands of pictures
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on the internet
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that’s fine media makes it easy for you
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so you just hit your search term
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press enter and they’ve partnered with
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unsplash which means that you can just
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search
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a ton of pictures that come up i love
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this one how cute is that
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medium likes photos that are
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horizontally
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so like they’re long on the top and
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bottom and short on the sides
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um instead of for example let’s see
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instead of a long one like this this
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you have to scroll to get to the story
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and remember medium is the focus is on
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your readers
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so um i always go for a
02:44
horizontal one rather than a vertical
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one you also have a couple
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options for size i go for this as the
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default um
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sometimes this if i really like the
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picture i’ve seen a very few people do
02:55
this but
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it has to be a really good picture to
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warrant that
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you should always add alt text this
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helps people who have visual impairments
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if they’re using a screen reader
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this means that they’ll still be able to
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sort of know what the picture is without
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actually seeing the picture so cat
03:12
looks at camera with
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tongue out cute save it and there you go
03:20
the nice thing about this is it
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automatically imports the accreditation
03:24
i can’t stress this enough always always
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always credit your images and this is
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going to become more important
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as i’m about to show you because i don’t
03:32
like using unsplash
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to find my pictures why because if it’s
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unsplash and especially if it’s on the
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first couple pages of results of
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unsplash
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it’s super likely that this picture
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exists on medium
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a thousand times already and if you’re
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you want to stand out a little bit so
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what i tend to do
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is i go to pixels instead pixels has a
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lot of photos
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it’s a lot easier to sort so for example
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i only ever look at horizontal ones
04:00
and they upload them with more frequency
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they have better
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in my opinion uh higher quality images
04:06
that’s just me
04:07
um like i love this one how cute is this
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so you download it
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and you’ll have to manually copy this
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but that’s okay
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and then i normally just drag like that
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and there it is
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and again paste your caption in add the
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alt text
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orange cat snuggling in blanket
04:29
and you have an image so let’s talk
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about the story
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what i want to focus on is what the
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structure should look like
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obviously this will depend based on your
04:42
story if you’re doing a long personal
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essay
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you won’t need headers or anything like
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that but i find most of the stories i
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write and most of the stories that tend
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to do very well on medium
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have some kind of a structure so whether
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that’s a listicle
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whether that’s section by section
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whether it has a table of contents
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a structure just helps your story sort
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of organize itself and it helps readers
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understand what they’re going to get
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from your story
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so this is an introduction
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you know it’s a silly little thing but
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whatever you want so let’s go into our
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section
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now if i were talking about why i love
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cats you know why cats are the best
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um they
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really love you too
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and this is going to be the title of a
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whole section that i’m putting in here
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it’s the exact same as the title up here
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you just pick
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big t and i go in here and i can say
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there are so many reasons
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cats show their love
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they do slow blinks
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but let’s say that you wanted to break
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up this section even further which i
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really recommend if it’s a long section
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so for example here we could do slow
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blinking
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highlight this and it’ll turn the whole
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sentence into a subsection just like
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that
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one of the cool things that i don’t see
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a lot of people doing on medium is
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actually embedding things so you can
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embed pretty much anything on medium an
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instagram post a tweet
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an article anything you want um so what
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i like to do
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ncbi cat
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slow blink oh slow blink not bling
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uh see what’s in
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this article just as an example all
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right go to a new line that part’s
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important
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paste your link and then hit enter
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it takes a second but medium turns it
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into a really nice little
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embed you can do this with any article
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and it just automatically
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does it it’s really neat um some people
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don’t like to do this because they feel
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it sort of detracts from the story like
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it breaks it up so if you prefer
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you can always hyperlink you press that
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with the hyperlink button paste your
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link and there you go
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to get rid of this you just highlight
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the text and you know backspace
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you might also want to include a
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numbered list or a bulleted list
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so media makes it super easy to do this
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you just type one
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full stop and then a space
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reason number one and then hit enter and
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it automatically populate with the
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number two
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again you can do the same thing with
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just a dash hit
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dash and then space and it turns it into
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a bullet
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if you’re doing this if you wanted to
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turn this into a listicle medium doesn’t
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like that so
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it would get rid of the one you’d have
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to manually add it back in again but
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um that’s not important you can also
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bold and italicize
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your words on here people do this for
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emphasis
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i recommend doing it as infrequently as
08:01
you can sprinkle them in when you really
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want your words to pack a punch
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but less is more when it comes to medium
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again you don’t want the format to be
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the standout star of your story you want
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the writing to be the standout star
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but in case you need to know you can
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bold it you can italicize it
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you can bowl down italic size you cannot
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underline
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because underlining is only for
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hyperlinks
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so in case you wanted to know
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another thing is you can add quotes so
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for example if i wanted to say what a
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slow blank is
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you could copy that
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write the authors
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you can do two types of quotes you can
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do that or you can do
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that i typically see these
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when you want to break up like a long
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section with or you want to pull a quote
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out to sort of emphasize it and make it
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seem more important
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um you can do that i tend again not too
09:00
much of this because you want the focus
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to be on your writing so i
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only ever do one max 2
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in a story at any given time you can
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always do a quote in line so just like
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that
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without any problems but formatically
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speaking i would only use one or two
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quotes
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quotes like this max per story
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another thing that’s good to know is how
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to do spacers i find these really
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visually attractive
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and i use them a lot when i’m coming to
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my conclusion so i’ve got my
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section my subsection and i come to my
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conclusion and i just put little three
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dots in
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and then i just start writing i love
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cats so much
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if i want to make it more obvious that
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it’s a conclusion or just otherwise sort
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of formatively make it stand out
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um medium lets you do like a little
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storybook big letter here so
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you can just go like that and it sort of
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wraps around the text to make it a
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really big eye
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i think this looks nice but again don’t
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do this for every paragraph because it
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looks a little silly like if you do
10:01
like to here and a begged to hear and
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suddenly you’re like oh my god what is
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happening to the story
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you might want to know as well how to
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add a table of contents if your story is
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long if there’s a lot of sections and
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you just want your readers to be able to
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save it and navigate and always come
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back to it and know what’s happening
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that’s important you’ll want to add a
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table of contents uh you can do this two
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ways
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i’m not even going to talk about the
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second way because it’s it’s faffy and
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you don’t need to
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just use chrome and download the table
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of contents extension
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what this lets you do is here your very
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furthest
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section as you can see these correspond
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to these
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i like to sort of differentiate this
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because i mean that just looks like
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underlined text
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so i normally make it a code block and
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the way you do this is you just do three
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backticks and it puts it into a code
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block so what we have here
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is a story on medium there are a couple
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other things that will be useful when it
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comes to
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when it comes to sort of polishing it
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off and hitting the publish button
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first if you want to share a draft link
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you can’t just copy this url this won’t
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send anybody anywhere you have to click
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share draft link and this gives you a
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special link
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that you can share with your friends
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your family your frenemies whoever you
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want
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and this will let them read your story
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even when it’s in draft format
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the second thing you want to know is if
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you want to share it to twitter
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you can just click yes and then if
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you’ve connected your twitter account to
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your medium
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account it will just ship it off when
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you hit publish that’s great stuff
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and of course you can also add to
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publication um you know pick the one
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that you
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find the best for this story and then
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you can submit it to them so like if i
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were to
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hit this one just as an example that
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would change to submit there are a
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couple other things in there that’s
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good to know like you can change the
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display title and this means that when
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it’s
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a story on medium’s feed they’ll see
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what you put here
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in the title and subtitle rather than
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what you’ve put here
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um not a lot of people use this
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and if you’re trying to canonize this so
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for example if you are
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importing this from your blog you can go
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to advanced settings
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and say it was published elsewhere and
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import and you know use the link that it
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originally appeared on
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to help google sort of avoid duplicate
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content which is really great
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but the last thing to do is to hit
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publish
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i would not recommend stressing out too
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much about the tags i
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i normally say like try to pick tags
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that overlap with the topic pages if you
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go to medium.com
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topics it’ll give you a list topics are
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what medium curates into so
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if you go to the comics for example
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everything in here has been curated by
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medium curator into the comics
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section um tags are only manual
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so for example this shows us everything
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that a reader a writer has manually
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tagged as a hashtag cat story
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um and it’s not i mean i know some
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people like to use this to read but i
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don’t know very many who do
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most people just you know read whatever
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medium sends them
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you can also email a link to your
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subscribers medium
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literally recently very recently changed
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this so if you go to
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your settings scroll down to your
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followers
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you can display a message to promote
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email subscription so what this means is
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somebody gets to the bottom of your
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story and it says
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subscribe to zully for more stories from
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zulie
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um you can do this if you want i don’t
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because i already have a newsletter
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so i don’t but if you were to do that
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and you were to hit publish and it would
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email a link to your subscribers when
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you hit publish you can also schedule
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for later
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um you can do this like years out in
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advance i typically do this a few weeks
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out in advance when i’m going on holiday
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and i just want to be able to enjoy my
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time off
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without logging onto medium.com every
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single day
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and then you just hit publish and that’s
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it that’s the whole editor that’s
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that’s everything that you need to know
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again just focus on writing the best
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story you can
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this there’s a lot of other random stuff
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you can do in the editor
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i don’t want to talk about that though
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because in my experience
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less is more when it comes to the editor
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focusing on
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your story your content your links your
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backup links your structure your flow
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that’s
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way more important than knowing how to
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bold stuff that’s it
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that’s my medium editor update video i
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know a lot of people were asking for
14:21
this so hopefully you enjoyed it
14:22
if you like this video give it a like
14:24
you can always subscribe to my channel
14:25
i’m nearly 28 000 followers very
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exciting
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and if you have any questions leave a
14:30
comment i try to get to my comments uh
14:32
once a week on mondays
14:34
so look out for my answer then and
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other than that i hope everyone’s
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enjoying the kind of weird dead days
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between
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christmas and new year’s and that you
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have a wonderful wonderful wonderful
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2021 up ahead of you all right
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happy writing everyone bye