Medium is a platform where we can publish written posts and reach its 85 to 100 million monthly readers. Also, you’ll get paid based on the number of paid subscribers who read your work.
Medium was launched in 2012 by Ev Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, and content on Medium is sorted by category, not by author or publication. Meaning, even if you are a brand new, unknown writer, your content might gain traction if it is good according to Medium’s algorithm and its audience.
An interesting thing about Medium is that you don’t have to publish original work (although you have to own the copyright of the content). Meaning, you can re-publish your blog post or other content and use the platform to promote them.
Why You Should Use Medium?
I have a pretty good blog with a steady amount of audience. Do I still need Medium?
The short answer is yes because it simply means reaching more people. Unless you are a perfect website with perfect marketing, chances are your website visitors and blog readers are only a small number compared to your total potential audience.
Since, as mentioned, Medium has a pretty huge user base (close to 100 million) and all of them are looking to read something, there is a great chance of untapped potential among Medium’s audience that might be your ideal audience.
Medium is focused on promoting quality, curated, and personalized content to its users, and so people are visiting Medium because they know that it’s going to be easy for them to access high-quality and relevant content.
However, that’s not saying that Medium is a perfect platform either, and in general, you can’t use Medium effectively in achieving the following objectives:
- Drive traffic to your Website:, Medium is not designed to drive users off the platform (which is understandable).
- Lead generation: You can’t include opt-in forms and other CTAs to your Medium posts, and so it’s difficult to capture leads in Medium
So, if your main objectives are the above, you might not get much success with Medium. However, there are still ways Medium can indirectly help with the above objectives, such as:
- Improving your content’s reach: Again, Medium allows you to publish non-original content that you own including images and even videos (you can embed YouTube videos). You can repurpose all of these content pieces on Medium to access Medium’s huge userbase.
- Brand awareness: Medium is optimized so that users can discover relevant, high-quality content according to their preferences, and there’s a high likelihood that your content can reach a huge audience.
If you can reach more people and build more awareness on Medium, you’ll get some of these Medium readers to visit your site and blog, and in turn, can indirectly improve your website traffic.
Medium, like any other social platform, has changed and is still changing in various ways, but for today, Medium is probably the most powerful and versatile platform to publish and promote long-form textual content, which has no competition as of this moment.
The Benefit of Using Medium to Promote Your Content
There are some key benefits why Medium is a versatile and powerful platform for promoting your content:
Easier Time in Repurposing Your Content
As mentioned, you don’t have to publish original content on Medium, and you don’t have to give up your existing blog/website/other platforms to have a presence on Medium. This is a huge advantage.
In fact, Medium provides an easy to use tool to import your content from anywhere to the internet and republish the content with just a single click. You can edit and customize the content according to your needs with Medium’s editor. The editor itself is actually quite versatile and so you don’t have to keep the original format of the content.
Also, posting your content on medium won’t create a duplicate content issue, and in fact, an optimal Medium presence can help your SEO.
Medium really paid a lot of attention to this feature, and there’s a detailed guide on how to import posts from various platforms including WordPress archives.
Reaching a New Audience
One of the biggest advantages of publishing on Medium is the fact that it has a huge userbase nearing 100 million active readers every month. If you can tap into just 1% of this, you can get a million of new audiences that won’t only read your content on Medium, but will also visit your site and existing blog.
Earning Potential
If you’ve already had a performing blog with its own revenue, making money on Medium might not be your core objective. However, extra money is extra money. When Medium members read your content, you’ll be paid via the Medium Partner Program.
Also, if you are an affiliate marketer, you are allowed to leave affiliate links on the Medium post (although you’d need to disclose them as usual). So, if your aim is to make more money through blogging and textual content in general, Medium might just be the right place for you.
More Guest Post Opportunities
Medium is now a huge platform that attracts various reputable publishers, blogs, and websites including HuffingtonPost and Lifehack, among others. So, if your Medium content went viral and gained a lot of claps, you can potentially catch the attention of these publishers and they might ask you to syndicate your post on their site or you might also get a guest post or even contributor opportunities.
In short, Medium is a good place to get your textual, long-form content known by others, which can lead to various other benefits.
Tips and Tricks in Using Medium To Promote Your Blog
1) Republishing and Repurposing Content on Medium
As discussed, Medium offers a very handy and intuitive feature to import your content to Medium and edit it without ever leaving the Medium platform. However, we’d still need to follow the best practices below:
- Use relevant tags
Medium uses Tag mechanisms to suggest relevant and personalized content to its readers. Readers on Medium can choose to follow only certain tags, which will effectively filter what kinds of posts the user will see on their Medium homepage. When adding tags to your content, you can check the follower count next to each tag, and so you can combine various tags to target different audience according to the content.
Also, you can only use five tags in your Medium post, so make sure to choose wisely and try to reach the best possible audience.
- Medium Analytics
Medium offers a pretty handy, built-in analytics where you can evaluate the performance of your content. This can be very useful to analyze and optimize your target audience, and also to develop a strategy for future content.
You can also use these insights gained from Medium for your overall content strategy (i.e. to improve future content on your website)
- Add and Optimize Images
It’s no secret that we all love visually pleasing things, and using well-taken images and infographics throughout the content can be effective. Especially for longer content, these images can break blocks of text (which can disrupt our attention space), and also can help make the content more attractive and memorable.
Adding images on Medium is also very easy (you can directly copy and paste images), and there’s also free stock images library from Unsplash.
2) Article Commenting on Medium
This is an effective way to get traffic not only to your Medium posts but also to your website in general. Just like other social media (i.e. Instagram) and traditional blogs, you can leave comments on Medium posts, which will display your Medium profile and you can include a link to your website on your comment.
The idea here is to contribute to the conversation and add value to the article at hand. Ask relevant questions, provide additional tips/facts, and answer other’s questions with credible information.
When you add valuable comments to a Medium article, other users will check out your profile and might start following you. Meaning your next Medium article will be visible to a larger audience.
There are also several other benefits you get from this:
- SEO benefits
Unlike other similar platforms (Reddit, traditional blogs, social media platforms), there are relatively fewer comments on Medium.
On the other hand, your comments are treated as unique content that will also be featured on your Medium profile. Paired with Medium’s authority as a website, this can provide a lot of SEO values especially in creating more backlinks to your site.
Also, since you can tag your comment response to comments on your Medium content, you can also optimize your Medium posts in Medium’s internal recommendation.
- Interact with your audience
Like any other platform, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless someone actually sees your content. Also, no one is going to see your content unless you promote it well.
So, follow publications, tags, and authors on Medium, and leave comments to expose your profile to their audience. If you can start or contribute to a meaningful conversation, more people might notice you and consume your content as well.
3) Medium as a Link Building Tool
Here is an important consideration: Just like most other social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), links coming from Medium are nofollow links.
With that being said, when you import a story from your blog to Medium (using the import feature discussed above), it will create a canonical backlink to the original content, and even if you don’t use the import tool, it’s also very easy to create a link.
There are, however, two questions to consider about this feature:
- Should I do it the other way around?
It’s certainly possible to publish on Medium first and then repost/repurpose the content on your blog. However, unless you have a pretty huge blog with a lot of authority, chances are it has less authority than Medium, and so doing this won’t bring much value to your website.
However, there are cases when you might want to do this, for example when a Medium publication prefers a totally new, unique content from you.
- Duplicate content issue
When your blog’s content is reposted in Medium, it is technically not duplicated, but syndicated, and so it won’t incur a Google penalty. As mentioned, Medium will also credit your original content with a canonical link to avoid this issue. Again, due to Medium’s high authority as a website, it’s likely that it can help the original content’s SEO performance.
4) Medium Publications
Publications are essentially online magazines that exist within the Medium platform that curate articles around specific niche or tags. If your content is published in a publication, you can gain more exposure to this publication’s followers and engage a new audience. Some of the Medium publications also have their own email newsletters, and so you’ll have more ways to promote your content.
You might want to check this list of the top publications on Medium and start reaching out to the ones that are in your niche. You can try to find content similar to yours, and check which publications they have been published before.
Most of these publications have their submission guidelines, and you’d only need to follow them and submit your article draft.
End Words
Medium is an effective platform to support your existing blog, and there are several options you can approach:
- Medium as a teaser: For example, you can publish a longer, more complete post on your website, and publish only excerpts of 1,000 words or below on Medium. You can then say “to continue reading go to…” or similar CTAs.
- Roundup: You can republish successful blog posts to Medium or the other way around.
- Mirror your whole blog to Medium: Many brands are actually doing this, although it’s now harder since Medium has removed the feature to embed posts.
- Launching a publication: You can also start your own publication, which can be a great way to connect with influential writers and influencers that probably can help your brand and you can get them to write for you
Note: This Guide on How to use Medium to Promote your Blog was contributed by Mike Khorev. If you have interesting content to contribute, then check our Guest Blogging Guidelines.
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