One Of The Biggest Reasons Why I Chose Medium
And I don’t regret it even a bit.
Making a choice when you have hundreds of options available at your fingertips is difficult and time-consuming. But the choice has to be made, right?
A couple of months ago, I was amidst this situation where I was having a tough time selecting the platform on where I’ll post my writes. Not to mention, there were many — WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, you name it. Those are website builders but quite popular options *as per those YouTube videos* with a link to buy their premium plans. I didn’t understand that initially.
I was just going back and forth comparing features they offered, pricing, and a million more things like hosting, domain name, etc.
You know what, researching about these things is not too different from entering a labyrinth, at least that was true in my case. At first, it all seems too exciting and appealing but soon you realise that it’s of no use. Had you put that effort into writing an article, it would have gone a long way. But you’ll still not do it because it’s not easy and you want to procrastinate on the seemingly challenging part — writing.
To be honest, I wasted a lot of my time doing the same shit. It was worthless to wander that route and I’m grateful that I discovered Medium, thanks to Zulie Rane’s YouTube channel.
This is that one thing
SIMPLICITY.
Yes, it is the simplicity of this platform that makes it wonderful and appealing to me. I’m writing here for a couple of months now and it still fascinates me how simple and focused Medium is on writing — quality writing. It’s just slick.
I can appreciate it even more because I previously used a WordPress blog. Thank god, I left it in my early days!
- They show ads within your articles if you don’t buy a domain and hosting. Fortunately, that’s not the case with Medium.
- I was just not satisfied with the design of my website. Maybe I was not that good of a designer or they just had too many options. Whatever.
- It was getting more and more technical. Templates, okay. Plugins, wait what? Hosting. SSL certificate. In short too many distractions.
- “.medium.com” has a higher Domain Authority (or DA) than “.wordpress.com” That means pages that have the former domain ending might rank higher in search engines like Google than the latter. So without doing any SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you can expect some external traffic as well. Everyone loves views, right?
I can literally go on and on…
One more thing…
I discovered this recently through one of the tweets of Nicolas Cole.
So the thing is once you have written an article, you might — or will — want to promote it on different social media platforms. But guess what, their algorithm will push your post down because it contains a link that will lead to an external website/app. And which company wants to say goodbye to you when they can make some extra pennies showing you ads? That should be a no-brainer.
Yes, that’s real. I’ve experienced that firsthand… on Twitter. So now I don’t promote my writing that much — a big No to putting any external links in a tweet unless it’s too important. You might also have experienced this if you post links in your tweet or LinkedIn post.
So promoting your articles on social media doesn’t bring that much traffic to your blog. Since Medium already has that community and readers are waiting desperately to read your piece, you don’t need any external source to rely upon to bring that traffic to your blog. What’s icing on the cake is that you basically get paid more when you have more internal reads (in other words, the more members that pay $5 monthly read your piece, the more you’ll earn).
But with WordPress, you do need an external source. You do need to promote your writing to get traction or you will be greeted with crickets. And showing ads is the only way to earn money off of your blog — at least in the beginning.
That’s a big pro if you look closely.
Although, I can’t enrol in the Medium Partner Program as of now (I’m from India) but still I write here because making money is not that important to me right now — I’m just 15! Stripe is in the beta phase in India, so fingers crossed. 🤞
Okay, I’m just 15, but I do have a perspective:
