Does your company have a blog?
Yes? Okay. How many visits does its blog get in a typical week? A typical month?
Let’s face it. Your company blog isn’t the hottest Web property around. Sure, it doesn’t need to be; it’s not where you make your money. But you don’t want it to be a little-seen afterthought either.
After all, your blog can and should be a key piece of your content marketing strategy. It has the potential to do a lot better.
The problem is, it’s a lot of work to improve a company blog in an era of increasingly sophisticated, professionalized digital publishing. Driving loads of traffic to your blog is a lot more complicated these days than peppering some high-interest keywords into the copy and tweaking the metadata.
There’s another solution. Relaunch your blog on a platform that already gets tons of traffic, that’s already got the technical SEO thing down pat, that’s already visited by the sorts of people who you want reading your blog.
That platform is Medium, and it’s the blogging choice of thousands of companies with goals similar to yours. Here’s why you should start a blog on Medium right now.
- Medium Does the Technical Heavy Lifting for You
Medium gets more traffic than your blog.
Don’t feel bad. Medium is one of the most-visited sites on the web, according to Alexa. Your blog will almost certainly never earn the sort of traffic Medium earns — or even come close.
What this means for your Medium blog is that you don’t have to start your traffic strategy from scratch. People won’t find your blog right away simply because it’s on Medium (although, as we’ll see, this can happen over time). But a random Medium blog is much easier to find online through organic search than a random blog in the wild.
- Medium Tells Visitors How Long It’ll Take to Read Your Content
Looking for “one weird trick” to convince your audience to read to the end of your blog content? Medium’s “x min to read” feature is basically that.
Looking at the Medium page for Oceans Healthcare, you’d be forgiven for assuming a big, bold topic like “The Senior Mental Health Crisis” would take a long time to read about. But thanks to Medium, you know that’s not the case. Give Oceans five minutes of your time and they’ll tell you what you need to know.
That’s just one example, of course. Whether your Medium jam is stories about the way we work now, or business and finance news, or fantasy fiction, your readers will always know how long you’re asking them to stay on the page.
- Medium Gives You Feedback in Near-Real-Time
Medium wasn’t the first platform to popularize real-time user feedback. Redditors were upvoting things for years before Medium arrived on the scene.
Still, it’s nice to have a built-in feedback loop for your content. “Claps” aren’t a perfect measure of quality, but they’re a strong barometer of engagement, and that’s arguably more important.
- Medium Fosters High-Quality Discussions With Other Users (Not Trolls)
Medium’s comment and discussion tools facilitate conversations about posts right under the posts themselves. They don’t drive people off-page, whether to Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else. They keep more users in your Medium ecosystem for longer, and they drive people to engage creatively with your ideas in the process.
Relatedly, Medium fosters discussion among people who actually want to be discussing a particular topic or idea. It’s a high-quality group, largely devoid of trolls and agenda-driven folks. It’s the ideal place to build a loyal audience that cares about what you have to say.
- Medium’s Built-in Bookmarking and Sharing Features Help Promote Your Content
These features aren’t revolutionary either. They’re still worthy of note, however. Anything that helps your readers share and retrieve content they find valuable, right?
- Medium’s Algorithm Can Give You an Internal Bump Too
Medium is already well-optimized from an SEO perspective. But it also has its own internal “SEO,” or more accurately a complex algorithm that measures posts’ relevance and engagement.
This algorithm reinforces the value of high-quality Medium content, featuring the posts it considers very good on Medium’s homepage and giving others priority in internal search. The rules here are basically the same as for Google: Produce quality content and good things will come.
- Medium’s Multimedia Capabilities Are Surprisingly Impressive
Medium is not a text-only blogging platform. It has an impressive array of multimedia capabilities too. It’ll never compete with YouTube from a video pure play perspective or Instagram on the image (and image editing) front, but that’s okay. It has a lot else going for it, and the ability to embed and modify high-quality images in posts is more of a value-add than anything.
- Medium’s Text Editor Is More User-Friendly Than WordPress
No offense, WordPress fanatics. There’s a lot of love for the ever-popular blogging platform. We know full well that this is a controversial statement.
But, look, it’s true. Even if you have zero blogging experience, you’ll be able to figure out Medium’s interface and put together a quality post in a matter of minutes. That’s not an insignificant consideration for people who have better things to do than fiddle in the back end of their blog.
Start Something Amazing
You’re thinking about getting on Medium because you’re tired of putting so much effort into a standalone corporate blog without seeing the results you want.
But your Medium blog has the potential to be more than just a replacement for your corporate blog.
As we’ve seen, a well-done Medium blog can be the beating heart of a vibrant online community. It can be a place for people interested in what your company does to gather and discuss their shared interests.
It’s an exciting thought. Of course, it all depends on what you’re able to put into it and how far you’re willing to take it. Let’s see where you decide to go, shall we?
