If you have not heard about the writing platform, Medium, today is your lucky day! Medium is taking off in the marketing world and may be just what you need to take your marketing to the next level. It’s a platform for writers, brands, and readers to discover and create content easily. Medium provides an untraditional platform for blogging where anyone can write successfully and gain immediate traffic to their content, no matter their experience level or the following size. Continue reading to learn more about how Medium can be a great tool to boost your marketing! 

Medium website photo
Screenshot: Medium website

What is Medium?

Medium is a platform where readers and writers can educate, learn, explore ideas, and forge connections. Medium offers a space for both experienced and new bloggers to share their content in an easy format. Any individual, writer, or brand can make a free account with Medium to find and follow writers and post their content. Your content can cover essentially any topic and be just about any length. Medium’s algorithm ranks posts by quality rather than the recency of the post, allowing anyone the opportunity to gain viral traffic for high-quality content. 

How to use Medium

Here we will take you through a step-by-step guide on how to start exploring and posting with Medium. 

Create an Account 

To create an account with Medium, sign up with Google, Facebook, or email. Existing users can sign in to Medium through an existing Twitter, Apple, Facebook, or Googaccount le or sign in with their email. 

Find and Follow 

The Medium Landing page shows new users a selection of trending articles, topics to follow, popular posts, suggested users, and editor’s picks. To manually search stories or people, navigate to the search bar and enter the topic you’re looking for, a blog title, or a name, and the results will display the most relevant stories, people, publications, and tags. If you find an article that catches your interest, click the title to read it or click the bookmark symbol to save it for future or offline reading.

When using Medium for marketing purposes, search and follow relevant topics and businesses when using Medium for marketing inspiration! 

Screenshot: Medium website

Publish an Article

Once you have decided to post content, navigate to your profile button on the web page’s top right corner and click ‘Write a story.’ Medium provides simple and clean formatting, creating professional-looking posts.

The initial setup allows you to enter a title at the top of the page and write your content directly below it. If you want to insert any photos, videos, embedded links, or new sections, hit the ‘+’ symbol to enter them as needed. Or, if you would like to reformat your text, highlight the text and choose from formatting options such as bold, italics, hyperlinking, and headings. 

Once you have finished writing and formatting your content, you can publish your story immediately or schedule your post using the ‘Publish’ button or the ‘…’ symbol to share a draft or make other changes. If you publish your story, you can add up to 5 tags related to your topic. Tags help improve your Search Engine Optimization on Medium. Read more about tags and Medium SEO in the blog’s ‘Medium SEO’ section. 

Join a Publication 

Publications are collections of articles others create, and you can make them too! These collections typically have a common topic or theme and can include various writers. To create your own publication, navigate to your profile button, and click ‘publications.’ Here you will see a list of suggested publications to follow or publications you currently follow with a ‘New publication’ button on the right. Select this button and fill out information such as the publication’s name, tagline, description, and avatar. Below you can add further information, such as a logo, cover image, social media accounts, and tags. 

Finally, add writers and editors to your publication. Writers can submit stories and remove them as desired, and editors have the authority to review submissions, post stories, edit submissions and drafts, and remove stories from the publication. 

Screenshot: Medium website

Medium SEO

Medium SEO is different from regular SEO. To read more about general SEO, check out our blog on the Top Ten SEO Tips! When ranking your website or content higher on Google, adding specific keywords to your topic is crucial. However, performing SEO on Medium differs. 

Medium rewards users who use broader topic tags because readers typically find stories through topics rather than searching in the search bar – the way people do on Google. For example, if you are writing a blog on social media marketing, your SEO keyword for Google would be specific to your topic, such as ‘social media marketing.’ However, when choosing tags on Medium, it is more effective to choose more general topic tags such as ‘social media,’ ‘marketing,’ or ‘business.’

Medium allows you to choose up to 5 keywords; choosing keywords from Medium’s topic list will help you see what topics people are already searching for and make you more discoverable. It is important to remember that SEO on Medium is not about getting your story to show up on the first page of Google search results but rather linking your story to relevant topics. 

Using Medium for Marketing

Medium is a great place for business and marketing because industries and topics such as life learning, business, entrepreneurship, startups, culture, and technology tend to do well on Medium. Taking advantage of Medium as a marketer can be done in various ways. Examples include reading and using other people’s knowledge to your advantage, sharing and marketing your businesses’ knowledge, creating a narrative for your brand, building your brand image, sending traffic to your website, and attracting new customers. 

If your brand’s ultimate goal on Medium is to attract a larger audience and new potential customers, Medium is a great platform to do so. The algorithm allows any individual or brands the opportunity to gain a large amount of traffic based on their content quality.

Medium For Businesses

Medium also provides tools to embed links to your website, products, or blogs. For example, our company, Colibri Digital Marketing, offers digital marketing to small businesses. Our business creates increased brand awareness and attracts new customers by writing blogs about marketing, SEO, social media, and other business topics and embedding links to our website and blog. Anyone who searches through marketing or a related topic on Medium and reads our content is now aware of our brand. Furthermore, if they find our content helpful, engaging, or fun, they may consider looking into our business and services.

Whether your business sells to other companies or sells to individuals, there is always a way to get creative with your content topics and link back to your website.

Posting content on Medium can help to create new content for your other digital marketing platforms and improve your brand image. Let’s say your business sells skincare products. Your marketing team can post a ‘skincare guide’ on Medium and link to your website or products throughout the blog. Once your blog is published, you can reshare it to other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Now, you have additional and informative content for multiple platforms. Your audience on those platforms can read more about how to use your products and fully understand their benefits.

Whether your readers engage with these links and become customers or not, using Medium allows your brand to get creative and informative with your marketing and create a more personal relationship with your customers. This ultimately brings further traffic to your website, creates increased brand awareness, and can help your business build an authentic brand image. 

Takeaways

While Medium may not be the most traditional platform for blogging and marketing, getting out of your comfort zone and joining Medium may just up your brand’s marketing game. Marketing on Medium is the next up-and-coming thing, and increasing your digital presence in 2021 is more critical than ever. Medium will provide a new way for your company to communicate with customers from around the world, increase brand awareness, build your brand image, and share relevant and informational content for current and potential customers.

Do you need more in-depth guidance on how to start marketing on Medium? Take the next step toward your brand’s goals and sign up for a complimentary strategy session! Simply click the link below to get a jump start!