As A MediumWriter, You Should Surely Know About These 5 Features

The hidden gems that you’re missing

6 min readFeb 19, 2024

Hey, how long have you been writing on Medium?

Maybe you have been writing on this platform for a few months or a year, but still don’t know some of the important features that can literally change the way you work on Medium.

But don’t worry, I’m about to show you the five features I personally use in my day-to-day Medium writing, which are immensely valuable to me.

Let’s dive in!

#1: Private Note

Can you send a message to someone on Medium?

If your answer is No. You’re dead wrong, my friend. Because yes, you can send messages on Medium. Of course, there is no direct option for this as “Send a message” on writers' profiles. But with a small hack, you can send messages to any writer you want.

Here’s how you can do it:

First, when reading a story, Highlight any word or sentence, and then you’ll have an option that has a lock icon attached to a chat box. Click on that.

Once you click on that, there you’ll be able to see a message option. Write the message you want to send and just click on the “Send” button.

When you have sent the Note, the perspective person will get a notification, which they can open and reply to your Note this way. Also, you can send messages back and forth in the same Note dialogue.

The only condition is though: The person, to whom you want to send the message, has to enable the “Private Note” option from their Medium profile settings, which of course, tends to be set as “ON” by default.

Tell me, did you know this feature before?

#2: Embed A Story

I use this feature a lot. I mean a lot.

You might have seen me doing this in my stories, something like this:

So instead of adding a link to a story, I just embed the story. Why this is effective? It not only looks good, but also it’s about transparency. When the reader sees the story itself, they feel secure.

Because adding a link like this, can cause confusion in the reader's mind, and maybe for this reason, most readers don’t want to click on the link thinking that they’d get redirected to a scammy website.

So how do I do it? Here’s how:

First, you need to click on the “+” then “<>” and then paste the story link that you want to embed, and then hit “Enter.” Boom! you’ll see that the story has embed successfully.

It’s so easy, but did you know about this?

#3: Import A Story

Do you have a personal blog?

Do you write somewhere other than Medium, like on your personal blog, Quora, LinkedIn, or any company website, and want to publish the same content here, on Medium? If yes, I’ve got good news for you.

Rather than copy-pasting or doing the same work again and again, you can simply import your content and publish it on Medium — without any extra effort.

Let me show you how you can do it:

Head over to your Medium profile, open the “Stories” section where you write your stories, and you’ll find an option of: “Import a story,” Which you may not have noticed yet. Click on that.

Once you click on that, you’ll see another dashboard has opened. There’ll be two options, first for adding your desired link. And second, an option for the “Import” Button.

So first get the URL of the content that you want to import and paste the link into the correct section. Then hit “Import.” If the URL is correct you’ll be redirected to the page where you actually write the story on Medium.

The same place where I’m writing this exact story right now!

This can be a time saver especially if you write your stories first on Google Docs or Notion and then copy and paste one by one. Don’t do it anymore.

Use this feature instead.

#4: Drag And Drop An Image

The useless images and pictures on my laptop bug me a lot.

I don’t like having useless images or graphics that have been used in the past but are not useful anymore. Meaning, I like to keep my laptop clean as much as I can. And maybe you’re in the same boat, aren't you?

So let’s tackle this. Instead, of downloading images for your Medium stories and deleting them over and over again, do you know you can just drag and drop images on Medium without downloading them on your laptop or computer?

Yes, it’s possible my friend. Let’s say I want to add an image here. But instead of downloading it, here’s how I’d do it:

Do you see? Okay, let me explain.

First, open the website that you use to get images for your Medium stories. Pixels. Pixabay. Whatever. In my case, Freepik. I open the website, type the keyword related to the image I want, open the image, just click on the image, and drag it to the Medium Story Writing Page.

As you can see, it happens smoothly.

I didn’t need to download the image to use the image.

But one thing you should make sure of is to always give credit to the owner of the image. So, find the link to the image that you’re using and just add the link attached to the image of your Medium story.

You never know when and where you’ll get a copyright strike. So better is to go safe and give the credit it needs. Tell me, did you know this before?

#5: Don’t Delete, Unlist The Story

This is one of the most useful features on Medium.

There comes a time when you have published a story a while ago, but now you don’t want people to read that story (for many reasons) but you also don’t want to delete the story (for some reason.)

Pretty tough situation, isn’t it?

This is where the unlisted feature comes in. You can unlist the story you don’t want people read to, and also the story you don’t want to delete.

How do you do it? Here’s how:

Find the story that you want to hide (unlist.) Click on the “Edit the story” option and it’ll redirect to the story writing dashboard, from there, you see a three-dot menu in the top right corner, click on that, then see the option for “Manage Unlisted setting” Click on that.

Once you click on that, you’ll see another popup has opened. The option, by default, will be on “No” So to unlist the story, select the “Yes” option and hit the “Save” button.