How To Collect Medium Newsletter Sign Ups (Without Sending Readers To A Separate Landing Page)
If you’ve been pouring your heart out on Medium like I have and thought,
"Shoot. I’m getting so many claps! I should start an email newsletter and get my readers to sign up"
.. then you’re fresh outta luck.
As of this writing, there’s no way to natively embed forms (at least, ConvertKit forms) on Medium unless it’s from a third-party developer.
If you’re a creative like me, though, you just want something simple: You want your sign-up forms to automagically appear after you paste your newsletter sign-up link and hit Enter.
Kinda like how YouTube videos and photos appear when you paste a link on a Medium draft.
Anyways, after trying and failing to make my ConvertKit forms appear on Medium (without redirecting my reader to a different site), I found Upscribe. The app is embedded (pun intended) deep in this Medium help article and I was delighted to see that it did let me magically make forms appear in Medium articles:
I was so excited that I wrote this short, comprehensive guide on how I did just that.
A short message before we dive in: I usually write about web3, creativity, and the creator economy. If these interest you, you’ll probably enjoy my weekly newsletter. Subscribe below to get more posts, or check out previous editions to “try before you buy”.
How to Add Newsletter Sign Up Forms to Medium
1. First, sign up for Upscribe with my referral link (or not ☹️)
This is what you’ll see:
2. Edit and design your sign up form like any other form editor software
3. Go to the Integrate tab and — well — integrate your Upscribe form with your service of choice
You might have to grab an API key, depending on what you use. I use ConvertKit and mine is in “Account Settings”
4. Depending on which service provider you use, you might have to pick a form, list, landing page, or spreadsheet that the Upscribe form maps to
5. Copy the Upscribe sign up form link from the Embed tab's Medium option
6. Now the moment of truth: Will the link actually turn into a form when I paste it on Medium?
Dun dun dun...
Amazeballs! It does! 💃
7. Now let's test the form to see if it captures emails
After checking the Upscribe dashboard, I see my test email. Amazeballs, again! 🙌
Congratulations, you can now embed snazzy newsletter sign up forms in Medium and remove friction for a reader to become a subscriber. 🙌
Upscribe Pushes the Newsletter Sign-up's to ConvertKit - For Free 🙌
After I started celebrating my new integration, I saw this on Upscribe's Pricing page.
My heart sank a little. I was afraid I might have to manually export emails from Upscribe before importing them into ConvertKit: (First world problems, I know, but it's a new problem, nevertheless)
Fortunately, Upscribe's free tier plays well with ConvertKit. My test email address eventually appeared in my ConvertKit dashboard:
Upscribe even sent me a little email to let me know someone signed up:
Amazeballs, part 3! 🙌
I'll update this post if anything comes up with Upscribe or if I find a better service. But otherwise, there you have it: a way to collect newsletter sign up's in Medium without sending your readers to a separate landing page.
Oh, and don’t forget: Use my links, if you sign up for Upscribe or ConvertKit. Thanks, fam. 😉
Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash