Some of my best Medium articles are articles that I wrote a long time ago. Some, I wrote more than a year ago. A couple I even wrote more than two years ago.

When I originally published some of these articles on the platform, as a new member on the platform, I received very little traction. The articles got no curation, no reads, and no views. I was an unknown presence on the platform, barely a blip on the radar. It frustrated me that articles I'd spent hours on in the past, or even articles I wrote in March when I first started on Medium, were so invisible to a general audience. A part of me started to doubt the quality of those articles given the complete invisibility they were met with, the return on investment for pieces I'd poured my whole heart and soul into.

But then I started gaining more of a following, being active in Facebook groups, and having more people read my work consistently as I gave more to the platform myself in terms of engaging with other people's articles. I started to republish some of my posts that were dead-misses at the very beginning. Some were met with smash-success, with multiple curations, and generally great engagement. Others didn't get the curation or the bombshell views, but still did significantly

It was a reaffirmation that success on Medium is more about luck and perseverance than it is a personal knock on your talent or aptitude. I know many writers on the platform who are terrific writers but still haven't been on the platform long enough or don't have the presence yet to benefit from great stats and consistent curations.

I understand the frustration, but to those writers, I would say try to worry as little about stats as you can. Have a life outside of Medium, and don't take lack of visibility or a lack of curation personally. Be patient and consistent. Stay the course and be a great member of the community. Try. Pitch to big-name publications. Take whatever you perceive as failure in stride and keep going, and no matter what, don't give up. Whether you want to give up or not is the ultimate test of your joy and love for the writing and community. Life is about relationships, not stats. Always remember that when you hit "publish", no matter how much your mind tricks you into falling into the bourgeois mindset that stats and money are all that matter.

After all that, when you have a decent following and have established a consistent presence, republish some of the old work. I usually delete the older piece and republish it, maybe tinkering with an image or a title but often leaving the content the same. I do this especially on days where I lack the energy or motivation to write an entirely new piece, which these days is often given the rigors of life and a heavily draining job as a inner city special ed teacher. Republish because you took the time, energy, and poured your heart out into that piece.

Remember that you're taking the long road, not the short road of instant gratification. Remember that just because the article didn't do well the first time doesn't mean it's bad. Trust your writing. Trust yourself. Trust your higher power. I always trust that God is in control, and that helps me take things in stride and keep moving even when it seems like I failed.

One article I republished, "Carrying The Emotional Burden of a Dysfunctional Family", is my most successful article to date on the platform, with about 2300 claps and 120 fans. What you don't know about the article is that I already published it, twice, before it got curated in family and mental health. I thought it was a bust on the platform. Twice. But then it boomed, and I was pleasantly surprised.

What republishing reinforces for me is that Medium is a crapshoot. Erik Brown once commented to me that every time we click "publish", it's a roll of the dice on whether that article makes it or not. Nothing about my most successful article changed on the three publishes. I loved that article and my friends did when I wrote it a year ago, and I wasn't going to give up on it because it meant so much to me.

To me, my writing is an extension of myself. I know many of you feel the same about yours. Don't give up on your writing, because that means you give up on a part of yourself.

A general rule I have for republishing on Medium is that if the article gets curated, I won't republish it. Curation is not the end-all-be-all for Medium articles. I have had plenty do well without curation, and I would even argue I worked harder to promote those articles because they weren't curated, hence a reason for their relative success.

But curation guarantees that the article is visible well-past the day or two after you publish it to a general audience. I do not know the technical, algorithmic details behind SEOs or online search jargon, so I can only speak from personal experience. What I notice being on the platform for eight months is that my curated articles live well past my non-curated articles. They are "distributed", whatever that means, which often gives the trend that more people outside of Medium will see the articles.

Again, republishing gives your piece the reset option. It gives you the reset option to give another shot to a piece that didn't do so well the first time, but that you did work so hard on. You don't have to do everything I do. You can change your headlines more often, and you can actually change the content of your original pieces to fit your mindset now. Those are things I don't do that I would drastically benefit from, but republishing when you have no ideas or time or energy is an awfully convenient way to stay present on the platform.

If Medium were a game, republishing is the option that gives your article another life. Go for it.