A growing Medium

Medium has just updated my collection of articles into its attractively redesigned look, an event that provides a good excuse to discuss a platform which attracted me on the basis of its founders’ track record, and that provided an opportunity to raise my profile in the English-speaking world by translating my Spanish-language blog. I currently have around 4,100 followers and a reasonably high readership, which would have taken much longer to rally had I gone out on my own.

The outcome has been more than positive, not just in terms of visibility, but as a way of promoting myself to publishers, English-speaking academics, as well as providing material for my classes, a significant number of which I deliver in English. Medium recently presented a collection to promote its Spanish-language pages, into which I logically do not fit, but it’s further proof of its growth, as is the recent decision by the White House to open an account.

What is Medium’s fundamental advantage? Aside from its growth and ever-increasing popularity, it’s the site’s policy of highlighting what you have written, to recommend it, and to sometimes include a piece in its regular compilations. I am fortunate in that this has happened to me around 10 times, and can say that it really has raised by visibility, sometimes by a factor of 20 or 30 times. Similarly, the publishers of other sites, Vice and Business Insider, have asked permission to republish entries they had originally seen in Medium.

I’m not entirely sure yet whether I will continue publishing my articles on two different sites. The alternative to sticking with Medium would be a single site with those little flats at the top indicating which language the user would like to read in. Medium works well for me: it is user-friendly, well-designed, provides good feedback on how access and whether articles are read all the way through. I have to say that I am so impressed with Medium that I now recommend to my students that as well as thinking about WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr, in order of sophistication, learning added value, and prospects, they also think about Medium and Ghost.

And if, at some point in the future I decide to put my English-language pieces on my Spanish language site, and leave Medium, all I have to do is copy my archive, paste it in the WordPress entry data base, and walk out of the door…

(En español, aquí)