Recently, I noticed that more people are abandoning their personal or official blogs in favour of Medium.
I respect the reasons why people like @asemota, @Jason_Igwe_Njoku and the Paystack team now have their new posts living on Medium. At a point, I was nearly going to do that too, primarily because of the network effect and it’s beautiful editor…but Medium also have its drawbacks.
However, i am of the opinion that you can eat your cake and have it.
Here are simple tutorials that can help you autopost your blog to Medium and vice versa using plugins or IFTTT
Why leave your blog for medium if you can autopost articles from your blog to medium? Yesterday conducting a research for my new project i discovered some blogs. Most of which until then, i never knew a thing about. These guys did some great articles on medium and had me go to their blogs to read rest of it. Perhaps a read more kindaa link with an autopost feature would be great but then again it depends on your goal. Are you tryinna get traffic? Build links or just provide value where the market is.
Medium is great. The design is beautiful, simple to use and the tags can allow you scale up audience quickly. If I had the time or was a good writer I would have taken a position on this new space. It is quickly getting crowded and early adopters will win.
Medium also gives you the option of also using your own custom domains. I have not gotten around to moving all my stuff to one place yet. They port Wordpress data very well and I have not yet had time to move my data from my $5 monthly Posthaven (which saved me from dead Posterous) to WordPress before I move it to Medium. Everyone will be using Medium eventually. It makes much more sense because of how it is designed and the social connections. Social should be baked into blogging platforms and not an afterthought.
@asemota, The points you raised here were basically my original motivations to switch to medium. I also knew it was going to save me the monthly $10 for Digital Ocean hosting.
The flipside of using Medium is that I will be a rent seeker and not be the landlord that I am on my blog. PLUS there are other third-party integrations Medium is not supporting yet.
The social connections and reach gotten through Medium made me choose to post on Medium over my Wordpress blog… I couldn’t completely scrap my WordPress though cos it pretty much also hosted my portfolio. So i initially tried out the methods you mentioned @spokentwice
I didn’t know which links to share at the end of the day… so i decided to build a Wordpress plugin that displayed my Medium posts on my Wordpress site and i’ll only post through Medium. Win Win for everyone
The plugin has grown over the weeks thanks to the nice feedback i’ve gotten with 300+ downloads so far… Would love if you can check it out and see if it solves this for you…
I think any blogger/business who wants to build a brand online has to publish on their self hosted blog always. Medium or LinkedIn Pulse should be used as distribution channels only and not as the main publishing platform.
The way Google indexes and show pages on Search for your website is quite different to how they index pages from these popular platforms and show them in search.
But, as with most things, people will have different preferences and that is what makes us unique.
If you blog, you should actually use both… And to that, I’ll also add LinkedIn.
Own your blog to own your content, and your audience. Then cross-post on other platforms with a link back to your own blog. Good for SEO and to increase your influence.
Then you’d have duplicate posts. How would you manage the comments then? I think you should choose one and stick with it.
For me, Medium takes away the hassle of having to style my blog and look for traffic. I daresay it’s the same for others who have abandoned their blogs for Medium.
Most of us use our posts to share our thoughts and Medium is like a “plug-and-play” platform to get the ball rolling. I think for those who want a quick MVP to validate their blogging skills, they can use it to find their voice. In the long term, it can be detrimental to you as a rent seeker.
Few years ago, it was MySpace…then Facebook pages - just because they promised us free and bigger audience. Now we have to pay to reach our fans.
While I don’t know Medium’s playbook, but it can’t be free forever, I suppose. When the “noise-to-signal” ratio is getting high, you might realise that putting all your eggs in Medium may make you lose your voice. To some this might be apocalyptic, but it is good to keep such warning in mind.
This reference by @amarast actually sums up a lot of things.
I used to host Layrz. 2 crashes later, I shifted to Medium.
My reasons were simple:
1.) I got tired of looking for a theme that presented a complete design solution. Working with WP could be a chore and hiring someone to do that…well…checks outside, shey una see as the weather be.
2.) I could focus on content and let medium handle the rest.
3.) Exposure. Sweet sweet exposure.
I’m shocked most people have problems with setting up Wordpress sites.
I think it is extremely easy.
Styling and setting it up for Google search also can be done for $20 on Fiverr.
On this:
Do you actually get leads/clients from Medium?
I noticed Medium is great for sharing ideas. LinkedIn pulse on the other hand can send you targeted leads
You can do one of two things. You can either focus on your own blog 100% and optimize your posts for distribution on social platforms like FB and TWTR (like John Gruber does Daring Fireball), or you can park your bus inside Medium and embrace everything that comes with publishing on someone else’s property.
I strongly believe that you should choose one and let all the parts of your operation point in that direction.
There are specific kinds of stories that incentivize Medium readers (who are often writers themselves) to recommend your posts (thereby increasing their reach). Those are not necessarily the same things or story structures or subject matters that incentivise people to share to their FB or TWTR networks. Replicating articles your Medium articles on your personal blog feels like doing a split on a see-saw instead of picking one side.
I picked Medium when I decided to start a blog-ish thing (alphabe.at), and I absolutely love the experience. From creation to publishing to distribution. Plus, there is a lot of value to be gleaned when people can discover your work without leaving the platform you published it on. And the fact that my connections on FB and TWTR are automatically subscribed to me on Medium (and so, immediately become part of my potential audience)? Great.
Like @asemota said, I think everybody will still port to Medium last last. It’s only a matter of time.
I actually had this conversation with myself some days ago and after evaluating my options I went with Medium for some of the reasons already stated. I also felt using WordPress is an overkill for something as simple as housing a blog at my err… homepage. Also, I like simple and WordPress is not ‘simple’, at least not for something like this.
If Medium wasn’t an option I’d still go for Jekyll over WordPress because, simplicity. Setting up medium was almost painless save for frustration from 1&1, had to move my Nameservers to NameCheap.
Oh, plus I was not ready to pay for hosting at the current neck breaking dollar rates (and no, I’m not ready to use Nigerian hosts. Don’t @ me )
Site is running on Github Pages, blog is on Medium here
Weird that I passed on this topic several times, just got to read details.
But just like @Jimi said, lead gen is important to a lot of us, along with SEO ranking and brand building. The first two you can’t really get with Medium (not in the way that it works best), the last, possibly.
My website (personal website) is WordPress, and I’ve probably redesigned it 3 times. But I get about 100 people to it every day even though I have only posted maybe 5 posts in the last 2 years. But I’ve made about 4/5th my annual salary from the leads I get from my website. I seriously doubt you’d get that from medium.
Ultimately, I think that using medium is a matter of end goals. If you’re just looking to voice your opinion and hope to be seen by fall-out traffic from the platform as a whole, I think that medium is perfect. However, if you’re a freelancer / small business / building a personal brand… I think you just cross post to Medium after posting first on your website.
We respond to comments from FB, Twitter, IG, Snapchat, WordPress, Radar, and anything else there is… So adding just one more platform to respond to shouldn’t hurt
Medium isn’t an absolute solution in the end, easy or not, traffic or none, there’s nothing that compares to a platform you own yourself.
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