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June 28th, 2017
Have you heard of Medium? Who hasn't? (Don't be shy, leave your name in the comments)I was vaguely familiar with Medium, the publication site, but haven't seen anything about it until I clicked on one of Gary Vaynerchuk's articles on LinkedIn, and there was the shiny M...
At first I thought, gosh what a boring name for a site. Medium! Of course! Use our site as your medium, for your content. Duh.But something strange happened, I couldn't stop reading articles on the site. Every title was creative, every article was well written. And the site itself had a feel to it that somehow said: "people don't just scroll through our site, they actually read stuff".I don't know how they created that magical feeling, so I did some research and I found exactly what they did. It blew my mind. Check this out:
Measuring How Much Users Read
Before the invention of the Internet media companies measured their success by the amount of copies they sold. The newspapers would guess at the percentage of the copies that were actually read, multiply it by the amount of copies, and get some ambiguous number to judge their efforts by.It totally made sense because there were few newspapers that dominated the scene.Post-internet we used analytics to measure events - clicks, number of emails opened, etc. But everything has changed with the social media age.There are so many things online that compete for your attention and so many things that you click on that the real question becomes - which content do you actually consume?That's why Medium actually studies a term they like to call Total Time Read. they do this using scroll movements. They use AI to measure how much the user has read, when they started, when they stopped, and when they took a break (went out for a drink, couchsurfed, did another vlog).For more info on TTR and how Medium uses it check out this article.
No Corporate Ads
Medium figured out that corporate ads ruin every platform, even more than marketers do. Who do you think is behind the ads?(duh, marketers).Medium changed their focus a year ago when they realized that people want a platform that is all about content, not about advertising and corporate sponsorship.So they took all the ads out, and decided to focus on their readers. It's really refreshing and has actually contributed to building a purely content-focused site.Instead of ruining the platform, marketers are thriving and contributing to something really special, and free of ads.
Medium is so easy to use, it's ridiculous.
They actually limited the amount of templates and design settings to streamline the entire reading process. You could open an article and know immediately that it's on Medium (don't cheat and look at the logo on top).When you start writing you see a blank space, like a blank canvas.
I guess rainbows were particularly popular the day I was writing this, as you can see the Medium logo is a bit rainbow colored, if I may say so.So there are only 4 options I could choose from -
- add an image
- add a video
- embed something
- start a new segment of the article.
That's brilliant. Also the text editing options are simplified as well
- change to bold
- change to italics
- add a link
- add a quote
- add a header letter
- change text size
- add a private note
That's only 7 ways I can alter the text, and 4 different elements I could add or change in the post itself. Super simple.
Medium Makes It Easy to Import Content from Anywhere
When I first went on Medium I thought crap, I will need to write whole new articles just for this separate platform?who has the time for that? Wrong! Medium allows you to import an article from anywhere, puts in the source link on the bottom automatically, and makes sure that Google doesn't lower your site's rating. Google automatically knows to treat Medium like the secondary source of that article. How? Check out Medium's article on SEO and duplicate content here.If you want to import something onto Medium just click here -https://medium.com/p/import.Here is what you will see:
Importing an article is as simple as writing a new one. Here is what I did:
- import the link
- click import
- add images
- change title
- click publish
Medium as a Social Network
One of the greatest advantages of putting content here, is the large number of engaged users on the platform. Because of the simplicity, and the focus on content instead of advertising, Medium was able to grow 300% last year. As of today they have almost 90 million visitors.That's a third of Twitter's user base!So if you have a blog or run a startup you could not only get ore followers and readers by importing your articles here. It would also improve your ranking on Google by getting a link on a high authority site.
To Recap
Medium is a great tool to boost your content marketing. It's unique, stands out, focuses on content, and is simple to use. Here are all the big reasons to use Medium as a content publishing tool in conjuction with your blog:
