Blogging on Medium does not only assist you to share your content with the world, but it also relieves you from the work of getting traffic and finding your audience Medium already has a large amount of traffic. In 2020 Medium.com is the top 246th website visited in the world. It gets 213.79 million visits every month and a third of the traffic is from the US.
Like any other social media type platform that assists you to get traffic to your blog, Medium is the best alternative for content lovers.
If you are not on Medium, this is the right time to be.
Medium Post: Why Blogging on Medium?
Recently Medium introduced a premium membership where you need to pay a small amount of money to read premium content. And for every premium content others read, you get a share of that money.
Medium is growing fast and starting blogging on medium early is great for future traffic.
Medium could be a place where you can build your brand and your connection. Medium has thousands of bloggers and writers who share a very useful content every day.
Medium is completely free.
Blogging on Medium: What is Medium?
Medium is not like any other platform on the internet. Our sole purpose is to help you find compelling ideas, knowledge, and perspectives.
Medium.com
Medium helps you publish your content for free. It is a directory of articles. It serves good articles on the front page and helps you get more traffic. It is completely free and serves no ads. For any good article, the readers enjoy the clap for you using a button that is equivalent to Facebook.
How To Start Blogging On Medium: Account Setup
Setting an account on a medium is easy. Go to medium.com and click sign up if you don’t have an account yet. And follow the form.
Once registered you will be directed to the home page where you will see other fellow bloggers.
G0 to your account by clicking on the left upper side of the page. And Edit your profile. Here there are few things you need a tweak.
- About – The about line under your name is important as it tells the world who you are and what you write. Click on edit and enter who you are and what you do. You can also include a call to action saying visit my site at xyz.com or follow me on Instagram.
- A profile picture is necessary. A visible friendly picture attracts more readers and creates trust.
- Follow a few accounts that are similar to yours or that you are interested in. This is a good way of knowing what is going on in your niche and way of getting to know others.
How to Start Blogging on Medium: Story
Stories are your articles to create a story go to your account and click the story.
Here you can enter a title, your story, and other media files including links, images, and videos.
There are three things you need to know to publish your story.
- Headline- the headline is a way of the story. This should be short and attractive
- Short once sentence line. This concludes what the blog is about. This will be displayed under the headline on the home page a well.
- The body
How to Start Blogging on Medium: Publication
The ‘publication’ is online agglomerate or simply is a magazine. A publication can be accessed under the account. Your publication will have a URL or medium.com/yourusername. People can access your work under the publication. Your publication page could have menus and a list of stories.
Blogging on Medium: How to create a publication
Go to publication, under your account. Then add a new publication. Add name, logo, tags, and descriptions, and contact.
This is like the basics of your blog, then you need to finish filling everything.
You can choose your homepage layout. This includes the color, logo, font, arrangements, and more.
How to add Menus for Medium publication
Menus are a way of categorizing your content. Like Blogs, you can create a menu in Medium.
TO add navigation first you need to open your publication. Here you will see your publication logo next to your account link. Click on the publication logo and go to navigation. Here enter Tab name and tab type. The tab name will be your menu name.
How Do I Communicate to My Publication Followers?
Letters are the way to communicate with your followers. You will find letters under publication account and click a letter. Enter your header and letter body and preview it before sending it.
You can send your email to any number of followers.
This is a great way of communication since the medium is a trusted site and the letters rarely become spam. Receivers also welcome the email as it came from a known email address that is [email protected].
How to Start Blogging on Medium: Medium Analytics
Under stats (see under account) you can see the statistics of your medium page. Here medium gives you a month by one reads, views and reads ratio and fans. Views are impressions. Reads are the impressions that read your article. Read ratio is how long your article’s readers read. Sometimes readers may start buy may not finish your article. This will tell you what to improve on your articles. Fans are readers who clapped for your article.
Stat image
How to Start Blogging on Medium: Notification
The small bell at the upper right side of the medium shows you the people who clapped for your article, people who followed you, and more. This small bell is a good way of looking into the history of your medium.
What should I write about?
Well, this is a complex question. Because people are confused about what they are. This question, no matter how complex it is, should not be something that holds you back.
It is ok not to know what you like to write about. What you have to do is to choose one and go to the next and test the waters.
For example, you can start with food or health or fashion, and write a few articles for yourself. And if you are not interested after a few days, then drop that and test another.
This is time-wasting but it is worth trying. If you don’t do this, I will probably meet you years after and you are not starting and still complaining that you don’t know what you want to blog about. Remember everything is free. And what is lost will be only your time and energy. And that is a process of learning.
If you are ready then go to Medium and search the general market you want to join. For example, search fashion.
Here see what others are writing and the tags on the right side. The tags are sub-niches where you can detail down and write.
Here are criteria to choose your topic
- Is there a problem with it? If the market does not have a problem, it may not have a reader. Only entertainment articles are excluded here. Is there something that you can offer your audience that they would need. This should be demand-oriented not supply oriented.
- Can you write for a year or two on the topic? Don’t niche down a lot. Be narrow but find a way to grow to the big market.
- You can also write about trends and news. This is the hardest one of all. You need a fast update on your posts. But if you are a news type blogger then this is a good way for you to acquire followers. Write a good analysis of stories and be critical in your approach. So that people can share their views as well.
How to Start Blogging On Medium: How to write on Medium principles
- Write a good header but don’t be misleading. Many articles these days are click baits. Click baits bring a good amount of traffic. But it pisses readers off. It is also not appropriate to waste people’s time on useless articles. Write a good article header the explains the content and engage click.
- Write a good article. Make sure the article has a good flow. Cut the redundant. Add images cut the continuous flow of articles with images and quotes.
- Add a call to action at the end of the article. As readers to clap or to follow you or to comment. Many top medium writers advise not to put links inside that distract readers from the medium page. Instead, only put links at the bottom.
- Make your article Interactive. Youtube videos, Instagram are good ways to make your article appealing to read. You just have to copy the URL of the youtube video or Instagram image and paste it into your story.
- Add good images. You can find free images at sites unsplash and pexels. You can edit the images as you like and even not expected to give copyright info. (it is good to do, to support the owers of the image)
- The more you publish the better engagement you will have. 3 times a week is a good benchmark.
- Grammar check and spelling check Grammarly
- Use tags- tags classify your article and place it easy to find for readers. Add relevant tags to your post.
How to import your existing blog into Medium?
If you plan to start on Medium, then this is a great option. You can import your blog articles into Medium and you don’t even have to edit and do additional work. Just click import.
To import go-to stories, under your account, and click import story instead of add story. Then import your article from a live website. You simply put your blog post link and click import. In a few seconds, you will see your post on Medium. Click publish to finish the process.
How to get 1000s of followers on Medium?
There are many ways of growing on Medium. The best one is the following unfollow method. This method, I have to warn you, is kind of spammy. And do it at your risk.
The following unfollow method
This method works like this. First, you need to find top accounts on medium. Then go to their follower’s accounts and start following their followers. You can follow up to 200 people. Don’t overdo it or medium will block your account.
The trick is the people that you followed will follow you back. If they don’t, then you will unfollow them and continue following other new accounts. If 10 percent of the people you followed follow you back you can get up to 20 more people in a day and more than 600 in a month. Imagine if 50 percent follow you back?
Commenting on good articles
Commenting attracts attention. It also shows concern and professionalism. Just like Instagram, the medium algorithm also favors writers who engage.
You may need to do this for many articles every day.
Highlighting articles you like
Medium is great in bookmarking and highlighting articles you read. You can highlight a line or a paragraph and put a response attached to it. The author of the article will see it and they will respond in private.
You can highlight and tell the author how that article or that paragraph changed your life or how it solved your problem. You can also write your ideas and how you disagree, without overdoing It.
Series of articles
Once your readers read your article, they are gone. They are amidst of articles written by great writers. Therefore, you need to keep them in your article. Series is the best option here. How many series of films or books have you read? What makes you stay on the author? It is probably the series.
Once you publish your article, at the bottom of the page, ask readers to see your second article. Say if you liked our first article then here is the second.
Blogging on Medium: How to get traffic
Social media: Quora
Social media is the best place to get traffic. Image-based media such as Pinterest and q and a site Quora are the best ways to get fast traffic. Especially quora are similar to blogging on Medium since both are text-based mediums.
Begin on quora by answering a question that you have already wrote on medium. Answer a question and put your link for a full answer. People click on your link to visit your site. You can do this in two ways, ask people to follow you on medium and put a link to your account page, or ask people to see more on that question and send them to a single medium post you wrote.
You will be surprised that almost all of the articles you write have at least one question on quora. Help people by answering their questions.
Social Media: Twitter
Twitter is another text-based platform. You can simply share your article from the medium. Simply select your title and click the twitter logo and click share. The secret to twitter traffic is to use A-B testing for your post. First, share your story with Twitter. Then after an hour or two reshare the same story but this time under a different name. Third time under the different image. And another time with a completely different image and header. With this, you see which type of posts are shared and reposted and which ones are not favored on twitter.
As twitter posts are vast in number, your post is easily buried under the rest of twits. Therefore, it is always food to share more than one time on twitter so that you increase the chance of your story being read.
This may not work on other platforms such as Pinterest. Because these are directories, and every post is categorized and packaged for later use. In twitter, what matters is what is trending.
Advertisement
Ads are an alternative way to get fast traffic. Ads use pay per click and pay per impression. PPC is paid whenever readers click to view your link. PPC could be a dollar or more, depending on your niche. The more competitive the keyword you are focusing, the more expensive the PPC is.
How to make money on medium
Medium is pushing locked stories. Locked stories are premium posts where readers have to be paying members to read your stories.
Membership ( open paywall)
To be part of the program, you first have to register and become a member. Membership is 5 dollars a month and you will have access to premium stories. With this, you also are eligible to make money. Whenever members read your post, you make money. Every month you received the money in your bank account.
If you plan to make money from your posts, then you need to choose eligible to make money on the top of the story header. Then click yes.
In medium partner program( under account) you can see the stats and how much you are paid.
Finally, Blogging on Medium
Blogging on Medium is preferable for many since the process is easy, and getting traffic is not hard. Medium will take care of most of the process.
It is easy to set up and start blogging on medium. In fact, most of the process is automated, you even can import your existing blogs on other websites.
Making money while blogging on Medium has become easier these days. Medium has set up memebership programs where readers have to pay to read some of your content.
Blogging on Medium is a great way of communicating with fellow bloggers as well. There are are many high quality articles on medium. The plaform is growing everyday.
Even though blogging on medium doesn’t seem sustainable for your business, it is wise to use the platform to your advantage. If you have questions about blogging on medium or how to launch your account on medium, contact us. We will assist you.
