Housekeeping Activities to Keep Your Medium Account Healthy

Medium is a great platform to write, read, make solid connections, network, broaden your horizon — the list is endless. If you are a prolific writer, every day is filled with thoughts about your next article on Medium and how to gain more followers.

But could you be forgetting some things that you need to take care of? It is a good habit to periodically carry out some preventive maintenance on your vast repository of Medium stories. Like everything else in life, if you leave things unobserved, they will grow into a junk pile and blow up one day.

Everyone has creative downtime — a day or a few hours when you simply cannot bring yourself to write. Don’t fret. Instead, try getting some of these important but not critical activities done. You will feel productive and that may induce the flow of creative juices.

Here is my list of good things to do when you have a few moments to spare.

If you have more Medium housekeeping practices, do leave a comment.

• Backup your work
• Create and/or update your lists
• Delete outdated or poorly written articles
• Update your about page

Backup your work

I am sure you know this already. But I want to mention it, just in case.

Nothing is permanent in this world. So it is best to backup all your precious work on Medium. Of course, we can only hope that the backup is a bit more permanent 🙂

1. Go to your profile page > About You > Account.

Be patient and scroll for a bit. The option is rather far down on the page.

2. Click Download .zip.

You will see the screen below. A .zip file is sent to your registered email ID.

That’s it. Medium will send you an email as shown below.

3. Download the zip file and go to town with it if you are a dataphile. The zip file is a treasure chest of every activity you have ever performed on Medium.

Somewhere in there is a folder called Posts that has .htms of all that you have ever written on Medium. This includes every comment you have left on every post, every dirty draft, everything. Good luck separating actual posts from the rest.

Good news — you get to save all your writing. There is that.

Create and/or update your lists

You are aware of the beautiful lists feature provided by Medium, right? No? Read this article. Wait — not now. Don’t leave yet. I have more to say.

How to Create Lists — Medium’s New Super Cool Feature
Bye-bye indexing, multi-pinning, and all those tedious workaroundsmedium.com

Once you figure out how to create lists, you will need to keep an eye on them. Lists need to be fresh and live. Make sure you use the brain-dead time when you cannot get any writing done to visit some of your lists and see if they need a fresh eye.

Remove some articles from a list if it looks too long, or maybe rename a list to draw eyeballs. You can come up with more ideas. Just visit your lists and poke around. I looked at my lists today and I see that there is a lot of work. For example, I have not updated them since I wrote the article. Noting this activity for my next bout of creative downtime.

Delete outdated or poorly written articles

Go through all your articles. If you downloaded the archive, you have a great way to go through your articles without scrolling endlessly on the Medium page.

You might have written topical posts that seemed terribly relevant at that time. But such posts may not serve any purpose now. Delete them.

Or you may discover that you have blossomed as a writer now and your early posts need work. Bring them down. If the topic is interesting, you could write a fresh article and publish it instead of letting the older one languish endlessly.

Addendum: Based on a comment from Terry L. Cooper, you could unlist an article instead of deleting it. Medium provides this great functionality which helps you retain your article but renders it invisible to others. The article is no longer listed in Medium search results. Do read all comments for more perspective!

Update your About page

I don’t know about you. I set up my about page in the last century and forgot to look at it again. I may not, but people are looking at it to decide whether to follow me or not. The least I could have done was had a face against my name.

When I first started on Medium, I wasn’t sure where the journey was going. So I chose to use a profile picture that did not show my face. Instead, there was me sitting in the middle of a road writing. It was a good photo if I say so myself.

But over time, I’ve realized that I am here to stay and I have overcome my shyness. Therefore, when I recently visited by profile page, I worked up the courage to update my profile picture.

Go check your profile page. Who knows what cobwebs you will notice and clean up? Keep your profile information shiny and bright at all times to attract more followers.

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Are there any other best practices you follow on Medium? Do let me know via comments.