Why You Should Pin an Index of Your Articles to the Top of Your Profile

You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t

Photo credit Tim Sullivan on isorepublic

In October 2020, Medium introduced the ability for its writers to pin one or more articles to the top of their profile. For the rest of 2020, I experimented with pinning my most popular articles to the top of my profile anytime I went 2 or more days without posting something new to read.

The upside of pinning articles is that doing so increases visibility for older articles that have a history of earning you revenue. After all, when new people discover your profile, you want to put your best work forward. Not only will they be more likely to read what they find pinned, but they’ll also be more likely to follow you and keep reading your new work.

The disadvantage of pinning articles is that a lot of readers don’t realize they are pinned articles and think you haven’t written anything new in a while. This can cause them to miss your latest, costing you reads and revenue.

The best solution I have found is to create an index of your work on Medium, and pin that and only that to the top of your profile. I created an index in January 2021, and many of my articles, particularly older ones, began to perform better.

My January income from writing on Medium nearly tripled that of December. Now, that’s not all due to the addition of an index — January was the first month I manage to publish all 31 days. However, I would guesstimate that about 40% of my income came from older stories that are near the top of an index page.

Would you like an extra 40% added to your Medium income? Read on.

Who benefits the most from having a pinned index?

You should especially consider creating and pinning an index if any of the following conditions apply to you:

• You have written over 30 articles/stories/poems on Medium. When a new reader discovers your writing, they might scroll through 5 or 10 of your posts — but how many are going to scroll all the way back to the first one you wrote? Not many.
• You write in multiple niches. If someone visits my profile to read my latest articles on the topic of…