Medium Is the Solution If You Want to Blog Without Any Overhead The service helps with hosting, design and building your audience. You're on your own for a steady stream of fresh ideas.
By Lesya Liu •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
HubSpot claims that it is essential for any business to blog. One of the reasons being is that B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67 percent more leads than those that do not.
If you're considering blogging but don't want to deal with hosting, design issues and building a new audience, Medium is here to help with your content marketing efforts. Medium is a sleek, beautiful social blog-publishing platform that allows users to start blogging right after registering. A lot of companies that were slow to add a blog to their websites found Medium an easy way to begin.
Related: Why Your Small Business Must Start a Blog
Medium was launched in August 2012 by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams (who also co-founded Blogger) and Biz Stone. The interface boasts a full WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) in all its glory. After posting an entry, the service encourages sharing content to Twitter and Facebook.
Since you can only sign up for Medium using Facebook or Twitter credentials, your followers on those platforms are automatically notified of your Medium. Every new blog on Medium comes with a nice "built-in" audience of your own.
Medium also borrows some great features from Reddit and Tumblr in that posts can be "upvoted" by "recommendations" (similar to Facebook's likes) and tagged to show under specific categories. When a reader highlights a portion of the article, they can leave a comment right next to it (it won't interfere with your writing but will help to have truly relevant conversations) or tweet that text snippet out (kind of like "Click to Tweet" button).
Related: The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Blogging
Medium's minimal design and capabilities force writers to focus on quality content without hiding behind calls to actions, fancy videos and color choices. Readers appreciate that the experience is easy on their eyes.
Medium is a good and growing platform. The audience is more focused and appreciative, kind of like Reddit of the past when the Reddit community was not keen of self-promotional posts. You can have occasional promotional posts. Medium allows you to import stories from other places on the Web (but please share your own content), so it might help you to give your main blog's content a boost. Yet, if this is all you're publishing, don't waste your time on Medium.
If you feel like you have lots of knowledge, tips and insight you want to share, give Medium a try. My best advice would be to focus on quality of your content and its usefulness. There are really not a lot of distractions, you don't need to know any code whatsoever – everything is taken care of for you.
Related: Why a Blog Gets You Further than an MBA
Treat it similarly to LinkedIn Pulse if you're publishing on there as well. Besides content marketing, Medium helps to build thought leadership and establish authority, not to sell two toasters for the price of one.
While Medium is very simple in its presentation, that doesn't mean you should not include any imagery in your posts. In fact, striking relevant images would enhance otherwise simple black and white appearance. So, the relationships between images and written content on Medium goes both ways -- images enhance the readability, and otherwise plain text makes the images stand out. Make sure that they're high resolution and choose photos that are at least 900 pixels, or 1000 pixels for the header image. Keep in mind that horizontal images work better than vertical as well.
The home page features the most popular stories as well as articles handpicked by Medium staff, so if your content ends up landing a spot there, the chances of it going viral are high.
Some people treat it as their personal blog where they share their thoughts, some treat it as another platform to build influence on by sharing industry insights, some use it as a collection of interests, posting DYI projects and recipes. Whatever you decide to focus on, Medium's non-invasive nature will help you get in the habit of blogging and creating long-form content.
Indeed, Medium found that posts with word counts of 400 and higher generate better responses. You can also receive feedback on your writing and submit it to appropriate publications or "Collections."
Overall, Medium is a great place for you to journal your thoughts, get into habit of writing, or push your content a bit further. Whatever your reasoning is, Medium creates awesome writing environment without any overhead.
