I write to share my ideas and to build brand recognition, I don’t write for SEO or SEM. What I want and need are eyeballs on my work — as many as possible, especially amongst the influencer class. Duplicate content doesn’t worry me so I have agreements with Business2Community, Social Media Today, SocialMedia.biz, The Social Media Monthly, and when I am lucky, I get picked up on Yahoo! and other network affiliates.
The More the Merrier
Next week I’ll discuss how I use LinkedIn’s new writing platform to get my ideas to my business network; this week, however, I’m showing you how you can tap Medium’s social network, friend network, and import tool to take your under-read and unappreciated articles and shoehorn them into the hottest and most chic writer’s platform ever invented.
What’s best about Medium, however, is that it takes your boring WordPress posts and makes them not only as beautifully-rendered as all the top global online publications, but it makes your work easier to read, more compelling, completely mobile-friendly via a responsive template, it offers readers an idea as to how long each read will take, and even enforces citation to your source blog if you import your article directly from your home site via their URL importer.
The URL Importer
I like to think it’s my 4.7k followers who really make Medium exciting to me. No. The secret weapon is what Medium calls “Import story.” It’s the silver bullet. It’s the bee’s knees. Why? Well, how many of your blog posts are evergreen?
How many of them are upwards of a decade old and mouldering — but still proud moments in your writerly life? How many of them still hold up, how many of them still make you feel just a little bit smarter, like a soothsayer who predicted the future of social media, the Internet, and the United States.
Well, until now, what would you do? Copy and paste? Share your old content via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and maybe Pinterest? Yes, there is LinkedIn Publisher, but even that requires that you copy-and-paste your work and then sort out images and formatting.
With Medium, however, all you need to do is click “Import story” et voilà!
Then, you have the opportunity to make any formatting changes, refreshes, updates, and editorial re-introductions, then upload a banner and background images — a featured image — and then you can let her go.
It’s very simple and actually uses an inline, HTML-free, click-to-edit method of adding new images and changing font, size, headers, and title that might be counter-intuitive for us old-timey bloggers who are used to hack-hack-hacking through HTML, CSS, and IMG tags until things worked out. Medium does the heavy lifting for you.
What I like very much is that every single article, column, post and blog I import will be cited and linked at the end of every article, thusly:
A Blogging and Social Sharing Platform
Medium is very cool right now. It’s the next Tumblr, minus the porn. When you join Medium, you have the opportunity to link up your Facebook and Twitter accounts. The benefit of jumping in is that you presumably have spent the last decade building up your Facebook and Twitter reputation and you’ll be able to very quickly leverage your personal brand popularity immediately on Medium.
Your fame is pretty much baked in. I really don’t know how I have 4.7k follower-readers on Medium but there you go. It’s 100% my social media cred (or, it could be that I have been farting around on Medium since May, 2014 — Medium was born in August 2012). Medium’s only really hit its stride in the last six months.
That said, I must credit my friend Raman Frey, proprietor of Good People Dinners, who has been writing on Medium since July, 2013, for compelling me with this most compelling of platforms. And that’s saying a lot. Why would I write for some completely democratic platform when I could align myself with a strong brand like Huffington Post or AdAge? Well, the proof is in the pudding.
So, since Medium’s so integrated into Twitter and Facebook and has its very own build-in community, all of whom are already connected to you via Twitter and Facebook, are already aware of you on Medium, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you can just bring some or all of your previous posts to them, where they live, and where they like to read. You immediately can become a part of their favorite past time: reading, reading people they know, and reading long-form pieces about anything and everything, not simply marketing, PR, social media, etc.
Recommendations, Publications, Tags, and Editor Picks
When you write for Medium or import a story that you have written from another site, that’s when the fun — and magic — begins. Once your article enters the wild, you’re actively visible.
First, to your followers; then, to your the social media folks you know who are on Medium, then you can become the victim of the ever-present “Recommend” button.
If your article is popular enough, through some hearty mixture of recommendations and visits and reads, then you’ll get the attention of Medium editors and you can be looped and grouped into a publication or into a tag association (can you define tags when you write the article? I have yet to discover if tagging your post is a feature in Medium the way it is in Drupal, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc) that can then rekindle or accelerate interest in your article.
If you start trending on Medium, through favorites, shares, views, and reads, then you’ll continue trending. And even if you don’t catch fire, Medium’s a very appealing way of giving second life to evergreen content that you just don’t feel like constantly reworking, rewriting, and reposting on your own blog.
Use Medium to bring your good old work to a younger, newer, hipper, cooler, more intelligent, and more passionate crew than you’ve ever had had in your entire life (unless you’re Dorie Clark, that is — she’s always been super cool and already writes for all the wildest publications, though even she could really benefit from importing all of her diverse articles, posts, and columns into one place, Medium).
Medium Stats
Once all is said and done, I really don’t get much feedback at Biznology or anywhere else. I never know how many people read my stuff, how excited people are, how much I am tapping the zeitgeist. I get a little bit better insight from Medium. They stats tell me how many views my articles have received, how many reads, the read ratio (viewers to readers — how many people have bounced before getting to the end of my posts), and also how many Favorites I have received. I also get my referrals. I get to see from whence my reads came. Here’s a smattering of Stats you can look at from my Medium:
Let me know what you think. Are you already using Medium? Is Medium holy to you, a place you would never cross-post? Well, if it makes you feel any better, this feature is built into the fabric of the application platform, so give it a go!
So, the moment this article went live, I imported it to Medium, check it out!
Good luck and go git ’em tiger!
