Medium is quickly becoming the go-to destination for many bloggers. They are abandoning their self hosted blogs for Medium and for good reason. For those of you on the fence this article will help you understand the benefits of Medium and why you should consider making it your home too.
What exactly is Medium?
Medium is Twitter for longform content. In simple terms it provides a great experience for reading and writing articles. The focus is on words but you can includes photos, videos and links in your articles. The reading experience is minimal allowing the article to shine.
Medium is a social platform. It tracks the performance of your articles, shows you how many views, reads and likes that you article received. This helps you determine how successful your writing is. For your more successful articles Medium will recommend those articles to other readers giving you a boost in performance. It also allows readers the ability to engage with you through comments on your article.
Medium is a writing platform. Whether you are writing by yourself or with a team, Medium provides tool that allow you to craft great content. The team tools are impressive allowing you to share your drafts with others and solicit feedback. This last feature is really powerful because it encourages you to leverage your network to deliver better content.
Why should I use Medium?
You should use Medium because it is the easiest way to share your longform content. The writing tools are excellent and the reading experience is one of the best high quality minimalist user experiences. Medium enforces this consistent experience across desktop and mobile devices alike.
Content on Medium is first class. Medium removes much of the distractions that would get in the way between your readers and your words. The result is that your content really shines. When you publish an article on Medium you feel good about leaving it there. After hours of hard work crafting the perfect words you want to leave your article in a collection of other high quality pieces. Medium delivers.
Writing on Medium is a pleasure. Medium has a minimalist but powerful easy to use editor. Whether writing on a mobile device like an iPad or view the web on your desktop/notebook Medium provides a consistent writing experience. The tools fade quickly into the background again bringing your content up front and center.
Medium will help you build an audience. Medium is as much a community as it is a publishing platform. It has attracted a very large engaging audience that is full of opinionated smart folks. When you publish an article there is a good chance that someone will see it and engage with you. Sometimes it’s just clicking the little “like” button but sometimes they will leave comments or feedback. Hot topic articles drive long interesting discussions and many of those comments turn into articles themselves.
Companies are publishing on Medium. Many companies like Amazon are writing on Medium. They are publishing some of their most important articles there. They are doing this because much of their audiences are on Medium. Publishing to Medium gives those companies better visibility for their work and a high chance that their customers will read their content. How many of your read a company blog vs articles on Medium? Exactly.
Google likes Medium. Google search is doing a good job of indexing content posted to Medium. Articles are properly indexed and categorized in a way that helps Google better understand what the article is about. I’ve personally written a few articles that are already ranking well in Google search. This is a great driver of traffic to my content and it is helping me build a larger audience.
But I already have a blog?
Self hosted blogs are a pain. You have to keep the software updated, there are plugin incompatibilities, bugs in themes, all sorts of extra work that you won’t have to deal with on Medium.
Your self hosted blog isn’t going to get as much traffic as that same article on Medium. Medium as a site has many more articles ranking in Google Search than your blog. As a result your new articles on Medium have a better shot of getting ranked in Google Search. Why bother publishing on your own blog if you could publish it on Medium and have a higher chance of success?
Medium gets a higher read percentage than your self hosted blog. I attribute this to the high quality reading experience. Your blog is going to have a theme that is different from most other blogs. Your content is going to look different that content posted to other blogs. On Medium everyone’s content looks the same which makes it much easier for folks to read. There are no strange fonts or colors, just consistent easy to read content.
It is easy to move your content to Medium. There is a simple import feature that allows you to selectively move your article to Medium. You don’t have to move your entire site. You can choose one article at a time. This reduces the risk that something might go wrong. The import works very well including importing photos and formatting.
In conclusion
There are a lot of reasons why you should move your content to Medium. Hopefully this article will highlight some of the benefits to publishing your content here. I’ve been writing on Medium since it’s early days but more recently it has become my exclusive spot for content. I believe that the future of publishing will be on Medium As more folks move over. The fragmented world of self hosted blogs are a thing of the past. It will be interesting to see how blog platforms like WordPress and Tumblr respond to the challenge.
You must log in to post a comment.