How to Maximize ‘Topic’ Tags on Medium

Attract more readers by putting some data behind your decisions

The paywalled edition of the Writer’s Guide goes out on the first Monday of each month. This is a special bonus paywalled edition, a post with an admittedly narrow audience—those of you who publish on Medium. It explains the proper use of Topics to help you maximize your chances of attracting more readers. — Rob

Today’s Topic: Topics

On Medium, Topics (which are inserted by writers via the change topics function), are designed to help readers who follow given topics find stories of interest. These Topic tags have nothing to do with Google search traffic potential. They’re all about helping Medium readers find stories. 

But how do you know which Topics to include? I’ve done my research on that, and there’s a big chart below. Here’s the analysis and the upshot:

While each story's Topics (limit: 5) should be relevant (don’t try to trick anyone!), choosing the best ones can seem a rather random exercise. But as I show, it can be based on really solid data. The choices are not always literal or obvious, however. 

For example: 

A story about the science of shampoo should include Science as a Topic tag, but not Shampoo. Who follows Shampoo? (four people — I looked it up). You’re better off chasing thousands or tens of thousands of readers in broader Topics, such as Beauty (307,000 followers) or Self Improvement (5.3 million followers) if those topics are relevant to your story. 

Get it? The important Topic words that lack followers can (and should) be sprinkled into your headline, subtitle, lede, subheads and text, of course, but they’re not necessarily great Topic tags.

UPDATE: After I first sent this newsletter out, I put my learnings into practice on my own stories and those of writer’s who I edit, and I want to add this paragraph:

I often think I know what I’m doing, and of course that’s rarely true. But now and then I get gobsmacked by a lightbulb, a Eureka moment, a great big aha. And this is one of those. Boy have I (and you) been doing it wrong! This is one of the most important bits of advice I’ve ever offered, because it’s SO EASY to do it right. Below I explain how to pick topics that will get your article in front of thousands or millions of people. That does not mean they’ll all read your story, but it beats the hell out of using Topic tags that are followed by only hundreds of people, or nobody.

So… I’ve dug up follower counts for some selected Topics to create a starkly informative chart, after which you’ll find more examples of how to apply the learnings…