Publishing on Medium

Did you know you don’t need a website to be a blogger?

That’s right. You can publish on Medium and get started blogging in about 30 seconds.

Medium is a ready-made blogging platform. It’s a great option if you’re starting out and you don’t want to mess around with domain names and web hosting etc.

Another big advantage of Medium is that it comes with built-in traffic.

Medium is the brainchild of Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter.

if you’re a beginning blogger who just wants to start blogging without making the investment of time and money that a self-hosted website requires, publishing on Medium is a fantastic option.

Grow Your List with Medium

But it’s also a great option for established bloggers if you want to grow your list.

Benjamin Hardy added 13,000 subscribers to his list in just 2 months.

And Mitchell Harper got 5,583 new subscribers in 30 days.

One Medium user reports that within 6 hours his post on Medium had surpassed the average number of views a post on his site would get in its entire lifetime and within 24 hours, those numbers quadrupled.

How Does Medium Work?

So what exactly is Medium and how does it work?

Medium is hard to define and doesn’t fit neatly into established categories.

It’s been described as:

a platform like Twitter
a publisher like BuzzFeed
a blend of platform and publisher
an online magazine
a blogging platform
an upmarket ‘content farm’

An account on Medium is free and you can sign up and start writing almost immediately.

Like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, Medium uses the principle of followers: people who like your content can follow you. Whenever you publish a new story, your followers immediately receive a notification on their phone that links straight to your story.

On Medium, articles are called ‘stories’ and length is measured not in words but in reading time. The average length of a story listed in the Medium Top 100 is 7.25 minutes. At 300 words per minute (the average reading speed of an adult) that’s 2,175 words.

Medium Levels The Playing Field

One aspect of publishing on Medium that will appeal to beginning bloggers is that it’s a level playing field: Medium is designed to reward content for its quality and takes no account of an author’s fame or popularity.

But, like any other platform, to succeed on Medium you need to know a few insider tricks.

Many writers who start out publishing on Medium fail to get sufficient views or reads, get frustrated and give up.

Almost always, they have failed to understand a key secret of succeeding on Medium.

Medium ‘Publications’

‘Publications’ are curated collections of stories on a particular topic or theme.

They are like blogs within Medium. And like blogs, Publications can have readerships of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.

The key to getting your work seen on Medium is to get your story accepted by a Publication.

It’s a bit like guest posting (in the world of blogging) and a bit like getting accepted into a group board (in the world of Pinterest).

Ayodeji Awosika explains how to pitch Publication owners and also how to find top Publications to pitch. He also discusses the elements of a successful Medium post.

Kevin Lee discusses a number of Medium ‘growth hacks’ such as reposting your blog content on Medium and linking back from your Medium story to your website or blog.

One very useful feature of publishing on Medium is comprehensive analytics that give you a 30-day overview of all your posts and their views, reads, and recommendations. If you drill down further you can see where the traffic to each of your stories came from.

If you run a WordPress blog, simply install the Medium plugin and it will automatically publish your new posts to medium (where they become ‘Stories’).

Conclusion

Publishing on Medium is a great option for both beginning and established bloggers.

One particularly attractive aspect of Medium for bloggers who are still trying to make their name is that it’s a platform where quality of writing is the only factor that counts.

It’s also a platform where you can ‘find your tribe’ very quickly and add hundreds, if not thousands, of new subscribers in the space of a few weeks or months.

Publishing on Medium – How To Add 13,000 Subscribers in 6 Weeks