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Optimize and take your Medium profile to the next level with these proven strategies
At the end of July 2023, I decided to take Medium seriously in the next 6 months.
Where should you start your Medium journey?
It’s your profile.
If you’ve been on Medium for a while and still don’t see success, you must take a step back and audit your profile objectively. That’s exactly what I did.
I asked the following questions.
Does my profile show
I had to face the truth because the answer was no to all of these questions.
Whenever I read an engaging article, I want to check out the author’s profile. So I thought, if I like to do that, it’s very likely others have this habit too.
That teeny-tiny round profile picture is our readers’ first impression.
It was crucial to establish myself — recraft who I am.
For full disclosure, I have another Medium profile with a pen name, no picture, and no one knows that’s me. I was contemplating using it moving forward. But eventually, I decided against it. Because if you want to build a personal brand (which I want to do), it’s better to use your real name instead of a pen name.
I believe we all have multiple layers, and it’s ok not to niche down.
Our Medium profile has 3 essential elements: your image, bio, and about page.
On the left, you can see my old profile image; on the right, you can see my new one.
I made my new Medium profile picture last week, casually sitting at my dining table after 2 hours of video recording.
I’m very expressive with my eyebrows in real life, so I thought I wanted a picture that shows it. The side effect is it shows my forehead wrinkles too. Which is ok because it happens when you raise your eyebrows, right?
However, it made me a bit self-conscious. And now I’m thinking, shall I get Botox or a fringe? Aging is hard!
This section is the hardest because Medium allows only 160 characters.
It needs to be concise & punchy and capture the essence of who you are. Your bio should be as much about you as it is about your readers.
Here’s my thought process.
Here is what I came up with after rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting some more.
When writing your bio, there’s the holy grail formula people use all over Medium.
I help [your perfect audience] to [do this] and [do that].
Although my bio may not be the best, and I’m sure I’ll change it hundreds of times in the future, for now, it’ll do.
I previously had a ridiculously long About page, so I wanted to shorten it.
It’s funny how we love to write about ourselves.
My previous About page focused on my day-to-day job, and I provided designers with many opportunities to check out my other articles. But that was different from my current focus.
Now, I’m laser-focused on my writing and storytelling and want to build a community around the topic.
I’ve seen writers apply creative ways to their About page; for example
My goal was to keep my About page interesting enough but also brief in the age of the goldfish’s attention span.
Go ahead, pimp your profile if you haven’t already!
And let me know what you think of mine!