How To Get Started on Medium [A Tutorial]

Medium: A place to publish your best work

This is a tutorial to help you get started on creating your personal blog on Medium as you take a plunge into writing.

Medium made it easy for anyone to own a blog. While website blogs are still very popular, the Medium blog can be incorporated as your website blog.

You don’t need to get into the stress of having a domain name and hosting just to set up a blog. Forget about the stress of managing a website blog and all that content management hassles; Medium got you covered.

First, Get Started

Signing up on Medium is pretty much very simple.

1. Visit medium.com on a browser.
2. Click on the green button that says “Get Started”.
3. Sign up with Google, Facebook or email.
4. Follow the steps after then and create your medium account.

Creating Your First Story

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Click on your profile icon and select “New Story”.

This is the Medium editor

You should get the page above, the Medium editor.

Type in a title and begin your story.

With the plus sign inside the circle, you can:

1. Add an image.
2. Add an image from Unsplash (Unsplash is a website where you can get free photos to enhance your writing or tell a story).
3. Add a video.
4. Add an embed (you can embed a social media post with this).
5. Add a new part (this helps you to break your writing into sections).

Formatting Your Story

By simply highlighting your text, you can format it in the following ways:

1. Bold text
2. Italicize text
3. Add a link to your text
4. Convert text to title
5. Convert text to subtitle
6. Convert text to a quote or a blockquote (you can achieve this by either clicking once or twice on the double quote icon)
7. Drop cap
8. Make notes alongside your story (using the padlock in a chat icon). The notes won’t show in your story after publishing. This is personal to you.

You can also check out tips and tricks for Medium writers if you would love to maximize the use of the Medium editor.

Publishing Your Story

After writing a beautiful story you would like the world to read, click on the green button that says “publish”. You can find this on the left side of your profile icon.

You have another page pop up. You can add a featured image to accompany the link to your story. This can attract a reader to click and read your story.

You can also add tags that are related to the story you’re about to publish. The maximum number of tags is five.

Click on “Publish Now” or “Schedule for later”. This depends on if you want to publish the story immediately or at a later time.

If you click on “Publish Now”, you are allowed to copy the link to your story to share with others. You can also share immediately to the social media platforms Medium allows you to share to.

And that’s it — your simple guide to getting started on Medium.

It’s simple, it’s easy. Try it now.

And if you found this tutorial useful, please clap and share.

Don’t delay. Get started, start writing, start blogging — on Medium.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash