Blogging has become an indispensable part of any online business today. Whatever kind of business you have, whatever product or service you are selling, you have to have a blog along with it.
Having a blog is a great and inexpensive way to get in customers, to build your credibility among them, to provide your target audience an interactive platform, and to understand the needs of what exactly they are looking for.
This boom in the blogging scene is the reason why blogging platforms like WordPress have become so important and so popular today.
One of these blogging platforms is Medium. If you are an active blogger, you have definitely heard of it.
Users and experts have said a lot of things about Medium, that it is an online magazine, a self-publishing platform, etc. That shows how tremendously popular and important it is in the blogging world.
In this article, we are going to tell you everything that you need to know about Medium and how you can use it to market your business.
First, let us understand a little more about this platform.
What is Medium?
Even before we can start discussing how to use Medium to market your business, you have to first understand why Medium is so different from other blogs.
The one great thing about this platform is that it gives a platform to people who might not have thousands and millions of followers on Twitter or a functional blog even the right contacts in their industry.
Medium focuses on just rewarding the content and its quality, and not based on how popular the author is.
In a way, Medium gives writers the platform to write and gives users only high quality and relevant content.
It has an editorial team that is constantly working to curate the best content for readers.
So when a reader opens his account, he will find the best articles at the top of his feed, and as he scrolls down, the not-so-good articles come long. That is how the algorithm of Medium works.
Another great thing about this platform is that it does not sort content based on the date it was published on, but only on quality. So, even if a user logs in after a gap, he does not have to worry that he missed earlier posts.
The content that he sees at the topmost positions on his feed is the best he is seeing, not the most recent.
This platform also allows writers to design their post in a very simple but catchy manner so that when the reader looks at it, they see a properly formatted piece of text.
The next immediate question you will have is, why Medium? Let’s throw some more light on that.
Why Medium and Not Any Other Platform?
There are plenty of reasons why Medium is the best content publishing platform and why it is a great place to market your business. Let’s have a look.
- Medium has millions of viewers and huge traffic. In November 2015, more than 35 million people visited the website.
The number has only increased since then. So, you know you have a huge audience already.
- Medium has its focus on only one thing, that is, the content and it’s quality. So, when your content is top notch, it automatically builds your credibility among users.
- When you open an account on Medium through your social media handles, you already have an established set of readers.
Your Facebook and Twitter contacts who use Medium are automatically your followers on this platform.
- Medium has a way of notifying users through mail whenever a new post is published. So, when you post something new, all your followers will know about it.
- If your followers who have large numbers of followers recommend some story of yours, those stories will be visible to their followers as well. This increases your audience base.
- If one or more articles of yours get popular, then they will get featured on the Top Story section on the platform.
All these factors make Medium an exciting space for marketers to promote their business.
How to Use Medium for Marketing Your Business?
Using Medium to market your business and your content is not rocket science.
It is a step by step process that you will pick up. For now, we are here to tell you how you can use Medium for marketing.
1. List down all your target publications:
The greatest thing about Medium is that you have the opportunity to get your content featured in the feeds of thousands of the right people, even if they are not following you.
You can do this when you submit your posts to the right publications. You have to move ahead of just writing posts and publishing them on your profile. That won’t help you reach thousands of people.
When you are submitting your post to the right publication, all the people who follow that publication will be able to see your post on their feeds. They also get an email from that publication about their latest stories.
Also, when someone ‘recommends’ your post, be it a person or the publication, the followers or that person or publication can also see your post.
So, on Medium it is relatively easier for your content to go viral than on other platforms.
So, even before you begin posting, take down a list of all the right publications where you think, you will find your target audience.
2. Write an engaging post for those target audience and target publications:
When you have found your desired target publications, start writing, keeping in mind their content guidelines and the quality they adhere to.
Writing is your creative liberty, but when you are writing on Medium, there are few things you have to keep in mind.
You have to pay extra care to headlines here. The practice of SEO headlines is not so common here, because you don’t aim for organic search here.
Rather, you focus on the audience in your network. That is why you will find the headlines to be really creative and ranging over a wide variety of Medium. There are long sentences, short headlines, ‘how to’ posts and so on.
Here are a few things to keep in mind while writing for Medium:
- Start with a topic that is relevant to your audience in terms of what they are looking for.
- The introduction should be the star of the story.
- Break down your articles into headers, subheaders, and bullets wherever you can. That increases the readability of your posts.
You can always look at what kind of stories your targeted publications are posting and that will help you to get an idea about what you should ideally post.
3. Make those posts link back to your website:
Without this, the entire purpose of being on Medium remains incomplete. You have to give your readers a call to action.
Otherwise, you won’t be able to generate leads for your business. That is the biggest benefit that this platform provides to business owners.
After you have written the post, include a small text where you can ask people to visit your website for more such posts. Also, ask them to enter their email ids and give them a small incentive for that.
When readers click on that section, they will be redirected to a landing page where they can enter their email ids. That will help you to build your customer base.
4. Republish the already published articles from your website to Medium:
The articles that are already published on your website, republish them on Medium.
One thing you have to keep in mind is to keep posting regularly if you want your target audience to take your posts seriously.
It is possible that you run out of topic ideas and you are not able to create a new post. For such times, republish those old posts.
A lot of popular handles and people on Medium do this. You can either post the content word by word or make some changes to suit your audience on Medium.
5. Don’t just keep your publishing limited to texts; post visual content as well:
Long texts can get monotonous sometimes. A lot of readers sometimes might even skip the article if they find it long enough.
So, do not keep your content restricted to just text. Design visuals that tell a story and give a takeaway to readers.
You can make a comic strip or an infographic or even a meme. That enhances the audience appeal factor and is a good break for them from all the textual facts.
But, make sure your visual tells them a story, the story that your article would have told otherwise.
6. Brand your collection of posts on Medium:
If you are a frequent Medium user who uses the platform to post regularly, or if you are someone who uses Medium as a blogging platform, there is one great hack that you can follow.
You can create a collection and use your brand name or the website name as the title of that collection.
Under that, you can keep all your posts, both articles, and visual posts. Even the new posts that you publish, can be published under this collection.
That way when users or your target audience visit your collection, they will be able to find everything in one place. This will make you look interesting and someone with authority. A lot of famous and popular pages already do this.
Why Medium is the Best Platform to Market your Business?
Apart from all the amazing facts and features, we have already mentioned, there is more to Medium that makes it the undisputed content platform.
Its ‘Import’ option is great if you are republishing your content:
If you have a published article or post anywhere on the internet, you can import it on Medium.
It necessarily does not have to be on your own website. If it is published anywhere, you can import it here.
Once you have imported the story, you can make any changes if you want to. You can change the headline, or the introduction or the body, add or remove images.
Basically, you can tweak the entire post-suit it with the needs of your target audience on Medium.
The traffic metrics are quite advanced and useful:
Medium’s traffic metrics tell you how many people saw your posts and how many read it till the end.
The average reading time of the posts is between 7 to 11 minutes. In fact, engagement is better here than on Twitter.
On Twitter, you might get millions of impressions, but you never know how many people actually read your story. On Medium, if your content is relevant and impactful, it might give you the kick-start to even better marketing ahead.
- You will have a new audience on Medium
The algorithm of Medium is such that it presents your content to a completely new set of audience who might not have ever heard of your brand before.
Even if you have huge followers, Medium will still get your content and expose you to a new audience. The trick is to get people to recommend your posts with a heart sign.
If you can manage to get 200 hearts or recommendations in 24 hours, you are set.
Your story will become one of the top stories of the day on the platform. The top stories are quite clearly featured on both the Medium website and the app.
Wrapping Up:
So as you have understood, unlike other content platforms like WordPress, Medium is not just a content platform. While it lets you publish content and blog posts, it is a social media network in itself.
Medium has its own world where there are lakhs of users from around the world, who are on the platform just to find useful and relevant content.