Long-form that gets picked up

Medium's distribution comes almost entirely from publications and from its own recommendation surface. A good post published to your own profile reaches your followers and stops.

Submission

Pick publications by whether their readers are your buyers, not by follower count. Most have a submission page in their about section; most reply within a week. Have the piece finished before you ask — editors say yes to a draft they can read.

The first 200 words

Medium truncates the preview at roughly there, and the recommendation surface uses engagement in the first minute. What that means practically:

• No throat-clearing. The first sentence is the argument, not the context.
• No "in this article I will". Say the thing instead.
• One concrete detail early — a number, a name, a date. Abstraction in the opening reads as filler.

The headline is the whole job

More people decide from the headline than from anything you write after it. A good one makes a specific promise a specific person wants kept.

"How to grow on social" is a headline for nobody. "What we learned running a subreddit for a DeFi protocol for six months" is a headline for one person, and that person clicks.

Write six. Throw away the first four.