Why we started writing about our agency on Medium instead of on Grow and Convert
I know I’m going to be asked this question at some point:
“Why did you start writing the “behind the scenes” part of your business on Medium instead of on Grow and Convert?”
The simple reason: We wanted a slight separation between the Grow and Convert site (where we write case studies on marketing) and the Grow and Convert publication (where we share a our journey of us growing our business).
Now thinking of it, the simple solution to this problem would likely be to rebrand this publication project to a different name to avoid confusion…
But nonetheless…
Medium felt like a place where we could share a raw, more personal side of our business without the pressure of spending days editing posts, worrying about grammar, etc.
Our site is a place where we’re known for case studies that are lengthy and detailed.
We didn’t feel comfortable sharing short, unedited pieces of content on our site.
Writing here has nothing to do with distribution benefits, SEO, etc.
In fact, since I wrote my first post on going viral on Medium, I think the platform has since become saturated with a lot more writers, thus making it harder to see the same distribution effects as before. (The advice in the post still works though- you just have to be better at content promotion than you did before).
Going off topic for a second:
That’s the benefit of being an early adopter to a new platform — when you’re one of the first users/contributors, you get increased benefits for participating.
For example:
A couple of my friends own Pura Vida Bracelets. They were one of the first brands to really leverage Instagram as a marketing channel and one of the first brands to use influencers to drive growth. Because they were an early adopter of the platform, they’ve benefitted greatly. Month over month, they’re rated by Instagram as the top 5 most engaged brands on their platform. It’s was one of their main growth drivers in the beginning of their business, and without capitalizing on that channel, I don’t think they’d be where they are today.
Why am I sharing this? Because when I wrote that post on Medium, I attribute some of the large traffic numbers to being an early adopter and capitalizing on the smaller community of writers writing here.
Back to the main subject of this post — Medium vs. Grow and Convert.
I often hear that people want to move to Medium because it has “built in distribution.” I find it funny that people are always looking for shortcuts to content promotion.
If you’re using Medium because of it’s built in distribution — you’re likely not seeing any benefit from a traffic perspective from blogging here vs. another platform.
If you suck at content promotion on another platform, you’re probably still seeing dribbles of traffic here. The solution is to get better at content promotion, not to switch platforms.
I think Medium is a great platform for writing but I would never use it to run my company blog.
Here are the reasons why I wouldn’t use Medium for my site:
- I don’t truly own my traffic. SEO traffic generated goes to Medium instead of my own site where I can control the user experience.
- It doesn’t have integrations with tools that can help with conversion — therefore the traffic I’m generating is harder to monetize.
- It doesn’t help my site’s domain authority when I generate links.
- If for some reason Medium ever shut down, I’d be SOL on all of the content I’ve written.
My advice is to always own assets that are integral to your business.
Things that I think Medium is really useful for:
- It’s a clean place to write content
- It’s a great place to write content that you want to pitch to publications. This is because when you’re sending an article, it’s not coming from a brand/company you’re associated with. Medium is now synonymous with “good content” — there are a lot of great writers here and it’s becoming a trusted resource.
- It’s incredibly simple to set up. Setting up this publication took all of 10 minutes.
Because of these reasons, we thought Medium was the perfect place to share these lighter thoughts with you.
We don’t really care about driving traffic to this content — it’s more for us and whomever wants to learn from our constant spewing of thoughts/ideas.
It’s not really integral to our business. More just a place for us to share random thoughts and ideas.
And I find that I’m writing a lot more because I don’t feel the pressure that I do with Grow and Convert.
