12 Reasons to Write on Medium
Medium writing and its advantages as a platform
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Medium is one of the most popular publishing platforms on the Internet. And when you stop and evaluate Medium and what it offers as a platform, it is easy to see why.
Whether you are a writer who is considering creating a Medium account, or you are an experienced user who is debating exploring other platforms, here are 12 reasons to write on Medium.
1. Design / Aesthetic
Medium’s layout is simple, clean, and allows anyone to create a stylish post or publication with minimal technical expertise.
Medium’s engineers and designers have spent a lot of time developing fonts, page layouts, and formatting features which all display beautifully, on any size screen.
Unless you are quite tech savvy, this is surprisingly hard to replicate on your own self hosted blog.
Clean design is not only reassuring to writers who are investing their time in the platform, but readers who are confronted with a deluge of websites, blogs, and articles on a daily basis.
This concept, that clean and simple design attracts more readers is backed by actual scientific studies.
A study by Google had two key findings:
Users will judge websites as beautiful or not within 1/50th to 1/20th of a second.
“Visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts.
Moreover, highly prototypical sites—those with layouts commonly associated with sites of their category—that also had a simple website design were rated the most beautiful.
In other words, the study found that the simpler the design, the better.
Medium makes this process seamless for writers, allowing them to focus on writing as opposed to mastering Wordpress.
Related Article: Medium vs. Wordpress
2. Massive Built In Audience
Medium has nearly 100 million unique monthly readers. It also has somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 paying subscribers.
For a new writer, Medium has an unparalleled built in audience.
While there is plenty of competition among writers, you can gain a following and earn money for your articles, due to this built in audience, in a relatively short period of time.
It would take years to replicate even a fraction of this traffic on a new self hosted blog.
3. Free for Writers
A common misconception is that Medium is expensive to write for. This is completely false.
Medium is absolutely free for writers.
While many writers become paying readers to help support fellow content creators, this is by no means required.
4. Premonetized Structure
After finishing an article on Medium, you have the opportunity to check the box to be eligible for curation review and distribution across Medium.
Checking this box means that your story is also eligible to be part of Medium’s metered paywall, and can earn money if you are in the Medium Partner Program.
You don’t need to install on page advertisements, use affiliate links, or promote products (which is how you would typically monetize a self hosted blog).
Medium’s Partner Program allows you to instantly monetize your content.
You are paid based on the member reading time of paying Medium subscribers. While the payment calcualtion is somewhat opagque, it is simple.
Write. Publish. Earn.
Every month, without fail you will be paid through Stripe for your writing.
5. Compatible with Many Embedded Functions
Embeds on Medium are handled through Embed.ly, a dedicated embedding service.
Embedly currently offers over 600 supported embed providers, which have been directly integrated with the Embedly service. Content from those services can be embedded on Medium.
Some of the Embeds You May Have Noticed:
Upscribe — the form many Medium writers put at the bottom of their articles to collect reader information and build email lists.
Play.ht — Used to create audio narrations of Medium articles.
Smedian — Used by writers to submit their articles to publications.
6. Domain Authority
Medium has extremely high Domain Authority (DA):
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
Medium’s 96 Domain authority makes it a force to be reckoned with when it comes to competition among otherwise equal pages in search engines.
7. Platform Stability / Longevity
Medium is an online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012. This 8 year track record is pretty solid in the high turnover world of tech startups and online news media. Williams also previously co-founder of Blogger and Twitter.
Why does this matter?
If you are going to invest your time and energy into a third party publishing platform (like Medium), you want to pick a winner.
Moreover, you want the platform you choose to actually exist in the next few years.
Medium is Ev Williams’ main project. The company has received $132 million in funding. Ev Williams himself is a billionaire. And a longtime player in this industry.
While nobody can guarantee Medium’s long term structure or payment methodology, it is probably safe to assume it won’t disappear overnight.
That said, it never hurts to use Medium’s Backup Tool to export your articles and save them offsite.
8. Allows Reposting of Content
Medium allows you to repost content that you originally wrote elsewhere (such as your blog) and share it on their platform.
There is a pervasive myth that:
“reposting content from your personal website on Medium will harm the SEO/domain authority of your site.”
This is totally false. This is addressed directly by Medium:
“Medium’s publication and cross-posting pathways automatically add canonical links to protect your original content posted offsite. This means that Medium can only boost — not cannibalize — your SEO.”
— Medium
A more nuanced response:
The SEO impact depends on the timing of when you publish the post and how they interlink.
When Google encounters two pieces of content that are substantially similar, the algorithm has to decide which one was the “original” or “canonical” version and which ones are the duplicate versions.
The best practice is to always post on your own website first, and then submit the page for indexation to Google.
After the page is indexed by Google, then it’s a much safer bet to cross post it to other places.
If you publish to Medium or first (before your own site), Google might consider the LinkedIn or Medium version to be the canonical. That means: from now on Google will show the Medium page instead of your own site when people search for your blog post on Google.
Post your content on your own website first;
Make sure this content is indexed before reposting it on another platform like Medium;
When you do repost, use Medium's import tool or set the correct canonical link yourself.
9. Import Content with Relative Ease
If you have a story published elsewhere and would like to import it to Medium, you can use MEdium’s handy import tool.
Using the import tool will automatically backdate the post to the original date, as well as add a canonical link to make sure your SEO won't be penalized.
10. SEO Friendly
Medium allows writers to easily customize the basic on page SEO factors that many other platforms do not. These include:
Related Article: Medium SEO
11. Publications
Medium allows writers to add their articles to existing publications (which greatly amplifies your content as an author) or to create their own publication.
Either way, publications are probably one of the best features on Medium. They allow:
Related Article: 5 Reasons to Create Your Own Medium Publication (And 3 Reasons You Shouldn’t)
12. You Can Include Call To Action Sections and Links to Your Website
Although they may lower your odds of curation, Medium does allow you to include Call to Action (CTA) sections and links which link back to your other websites.
This can be a very powerful tool for developing a mailing list or boosting traffic on your existing sites.
I hope you found this article useful! Let me know if you have any questions.
Until next time,
Casey
For more Medium writing tips, tricks, and the latest platform updates, sign up for the Medium Blogging Guide Newsletter. Get exclusive Medium writer content sent straight to your inbox!
I did not realize that Medium had such strong web authority! But I am not surprised since I found the site because it kept coming up in other unrelated searches! I also did not realize that there were so many benefits to publications. I like the idea of reaching out to my publication writers directly with “letters” and not having to worry about setting up/paying for a complex email delivery system as many have advocated. I am sure these work but I do not have the computer skills. All I know is I love to write and can’t wait to see the next “medium” secret revealed ! I feel like I’m on a game show! So much valuable information here and on medium from you. I am so glad I found this as I almost took the $500+ course you described in another post. After looking into it some more on medium where there were a few reviews, it looked like the Tom guy and his class are a bunch of baloney! Certainly nothing worth that much!
An excellent article. Many thanks for such useful advice. I'm a newbie at Medium and I was looking for a well-written introduction to it. I'll subscribe when I get out of hospital. Take care, Cal.