Writer’s Workshop
The Art of Promotion
Our tips for reaching a broader audience
Weeks of writing and editing have finally paid off, and your article is now published on Towards Data Science. You proudly announce it to your circle of friends and colleagues, showing them your article on our front page and sharing our Twitter and LinkedIn posts. You watch the claps and follows, expecting to see both grow into the thousands, as you’ve seen with some of our most popular authors. But after an initial burst of interest, things stall. What happened?
Every newly published article gets its spotlight moment on our site and on our social media accounts. But to be truly successful, authors need to play a part in promoting their work. Many authors aren’t sure where to start, so we’re sharing our top tips around promotion. While they won’t necessarily make you a star TDS author out of the gate, they’ll put you on the road to success.
Networking
Even if you have yet to write a single word, it’s important to build your network because it’s tough to spread the word alone. Your work colleagues, friends, and family are a great place to start, but to truly grow your network, you need to reach out to strangers.
Social media accounts. This is the form of promotion most familiar to authors. It’s a big topic, so we’ll be offering a separate post on it in our Writer’s Workshop series. Here we’ll mention that to increase your followers, you often have to follow others first. Follow other members of the TDS community, as well as leaders in your field.
Educational providers. If you are studying or have graduated from an educational program, connect with them on Twitter. Many actively support the promotional activities of their students and alumni. Some of these institutes will also offer opportunities to promote your work in their newsletters and publications, so they’re worth a deep dive.
User groups, professional associations, and conferences. This is an often overlooked opportunity to establish a network. If you’re a Python expert, for example, seek out Python forums. And don’t forget the software companies — many offer annual conferences and networking events where you’ll find like-minded colleagues.
Website. Some authors create their own websites, and although this can be effective, it takes work — and requires its own promotion because you have to attract people to the site. If you do decide to take this route, keep your site up-to-date, informative, and easy to navigate. Also remember to take advantage of your Medium profile biography to mention and link to your site.
Distribution lists. Gathering contact information from people who have expressed interest in your work is another popular networking tactic. And for good reason! These individuals like your work and are waiting for more, so they’re already supporting your efforts. We make it easy for you to build your distribution list, and we explain that and offer some great advice in a separate section below.
Other authors. It can be uncomfortable to approach someone you don’t know, but remember that many of them, especially other authors, have been in your shoes. They had to build their network from scratch too, and for that reason, you may be surprised to find that it’s easier than you think! Consider reaching out to authors who write similar topics, or simply add author mentions directly to your post. It’s important to use good judgment when involving other authors; chose the author(s) you mention carefully, and don’t go overboard.
Make sure your articles are found
Gone are the days when people eagerly anticipated their print copies of magazines and journals, all of which were read cover-to-cover. Instead, internet searches identify articles of interest, and you want to be in the top results.
Search engines use proprietary algorithms to determine what shows up first, and that makes search engine optimization (SEO) an important aspect of every published article. TDS authors benefit from the SEO boost of an established platform, as we are one of the most popular and most-read data science blogs in the world with +600K Medium followers. But there is more that can be done by authors themselves.
Basically, we want to feed the search engine what it needs to quickly establish that your article is an ideal match for an entered search. The fact that we don’t know exactly how Google uses an estimated 200 factors to rank content makes it important to pay attention to the factors we understand play a role.
Add keywords. Keywords are commonly searched terms, and including relevant ones in your article title and text can bolster visibility. It can be helpful to combine primary keywords such as machine learning or data science, with terms specific to your topic, such as visualization or deployment. If you’re not sure which keywords to include, Google Trends is a good place to start.
Place keywords effectively. Use keywords that relate to your content in your title, subtitle, and opening paragraphs. Ideally, a keyword should appear near the start rather than the end of your title and subtitle. The same strategy applies to your introduction, where you should try to include keywords in the first two or three sentences. The Search Engine Journal shares some good tips about keyword placement.
Use keywords wisely. Be natural about your keyword usage; many search engines actively watch for too many repeated keywords, known as keyword stuffing — and so do TDS editors. So, use keywords only where it makes sense, and consider related terms.
Don’t forget metadata. In the Story Settings for your post, you’ll find an SEO Settings section where you can view your title and description, which function as search engine meta description tags.
There are a few things to keep in mind when entering these settings:
- Your SEO title can only be changed before publication. Ideally, it will be between 40–50 characters and include keywords. While you can choose a longer title, please keep in mind that search engines often truncate titles to 60 characters. This means that the most important elements and keywords in your title should be at the beginning.
- A good SEO description is a tight, compelling summary of an article that is between 140–156 characters long and includes keywords. By default, the first paragraph of the post is used, so review this carefully to be sure it works. This setting can be changed after publication, but you’ll want to take care of this beforehand to get the most from your initial post promotional period.
Encourage readers to engage with your article
Faced with a long list of internet search results, readers can be picky about what they decide to dig into. So, in addition to a great title, subtitle, and good keywords, it’s important that you consider your opening paragraph and featured image.
Create a meaningful title. Create a title that’s short and designed to catch a reader’s attention. That doesn’t mean clickbait — to meet our guidelines, your title must reflect the content of your article.
Add detail with a subtitle. A good subtitle should expand on your title without repeating it, so that taken together, your title and subtitle reflect the contents of your article.
Use images to your advantage. A carefully selected image speaks volumes about the content. If your image carries a theme that closely reflects your post, it will immediately engage readers interested in the topic.
Open with your best. Polish your opening sentences, and be sure they reflect your writing style. This tells readers that you’re professional in your approach and sets the right expectations.
Make it count. Resist the temptation to fill your opening paragraph with information about yourself. Readers want to know what the article is about by scanning the first paragraph. If they’re viewing your article on a mobile device, that’s all they may see.
If you’d like to learn more about crafting great articles, watch for upcoming columns in our Writer’s Workshop series.
Reader Interest Tags
Take advantage of the reader interests tags on the Story Settings>Story Preview page when you’re publishing your article. These tags categorize articles published on TDS, and serve to help readers find topics of interest. You can add up to five, so a mix of high-level terms and more specific ones makes sense. TDS Editors sometimes edit your tag selection to ensure the most relevant ones are present. We work closely with Medium to ensure that the stories in TDS meet Medium’s editorial and distribution standards, and stories in TDS often see further distribution because of that.
Write more articles
Name recognition is important in promotion. Not only does it impact your search engine optimization (SEO), but readers are more likely to open an article written by someone they know or have heard about. As your writing reputation grows, you’ll find that doors open.
Create more content. Our best advice is to build a body of quality work. For many authors, this means writing more articles, but it might also include YouTube videos, workshops, or conference presentations.
Establish your niche. Many authors grow their reputation and followers by focusing on a specific niche. That may mean writing articles that share your expert experience, but it may also mean tutorials, or articles geared to beginners.
Keep up your momentum. Once you’ve gained followers, it’s important not to lose them. It’s easy to forget about an author, even one whose articles you thoroughly enjoy, if they’re out of sight for too long. It’s a little like a friend you haven’t seen for ten years.
Often authors who have written a great article struggle with what to do next. We offer some suggestions in our FAQ and we’ll be publishing a Writer’s Workshop column on the topic soon. For those looking for current topics and datasets, we are also hard at work on a new column called The Spark.
Distribution lists
We’ve already discussed the importance of networking and its value in building a contact list. But you have to move beyond people you know.
Medium provides an easy-to-use option that’s great for adding readers to your distribution list. Everyone who clicks on the follow button that appears with every story is automatically added to your private list. What’s great about this, is that these new contacts have seen your work and feel that they’d like to see more. It’s a little like finding gold!
If you collect contacts elsewhere, those email addresses can be imported into the same list. And just like that, you have a single central distribution list for sharing your latest story! Full details are available through Medium’s Email subscriptions and Your audience stats pages.
Some authors expand their use of a distribution list to share things like newsletters and tip sheets. They can be helpful, but also challenging. While someone may have signed up initially, perhaps to receive a tip sheet, there’s no guarantee they’ll open anything you send.
If you plan on going this route, take time to research what works.
Add value. If your newsletters or publications are chock full of great tips and advice, then people tend to be more engaged.
Don’t over-advertise. The fastest way to lose your carefully built following is to send out short newsletters that do nothing but promote your latest article. It’s fine to promote, but remember the first rule: add value. Consider how you can provide some additional code or techniques related to your article.
Share information about yourself
Readers connect not only with an article, but with the author themselves. This means that your Medium profile plays a role in promoting your articles.
We find that an author photo and full name helps build trust between authors and readers. But what you say about yourself is your first conversation with readers. It builds credibility and connection.
Introduce yourself. Let your readers know about your work, your specializations, or your interests. It can be a simple list or an elaborate statement. What’s most important is that readers learn a little about you.
Tell us more. Authors often overlook the About tab associated with their profile. Here, there’s loads of space for you to share everything from your professional pursuits to photos.
Improve your craft
This may seem like an odd bit of advice about promotion, but a well-written article shines, both with our readers and our editorial team, and it serves to spotlight an author. Think about your own reaction to a great post. You likely clapped for it, followed the author, and perhaps left a comment. What’s more important is that you may also have shared and talked about it — you promoted the article.
We do that here at TDS as well. We feature and highlight our best articles and authors, extending their reach.
Social media. In addition to the usual Twitter and LinkedIn posts, our best articles are shared on Facebook.
Editor’s Picks. Our editorial team picks their favorite articles for our Editor’s Picks page. In addition to receiving extra time in the spotlight, these top articles are tagged so readers can easily spot them.
Curated Features. Our top articles and authors are highlighted in our Variable newsletter and Monthly Editions.
Author Spotlights. We regularly invite our most engaging and prolific authors to participate in a Q&A that introduces them and their work to our community.
Maybe you wrote a great post and followed most of the advice above but still didn’t get the tens of thousands of views you were hoping for. That’s fine! Success takes time! If you continue to write strong, original content (that your first few readers love), eventually some posts will start breaking through the noise. You will then get more reads and engagement on your content as a wider audience discovers you and your work.
Discovered another good way to promote your articles?Want to know more about something mentioned here?
Share it in the comments! Your question or idea might be part of our next article.
