Why Your Business Should Use Medium and 5 Useful Medium Tips
We all know that every business needs a website to be successful these days. Utilizing a blog to share content and drive traffic to the website is the next step to fortifying an online presence, but there is another way to gain even more! That’s Medium!
So What is Medium?
Medium is an online publishing platform launched in August 2012 by Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger and Twitter. The platform is an example of social journalism, boasting a hybrid collection of amateur and professional authors and publications, as well as blogs and publishers that are exclusive to Medium. The platform is, in a general sense, a blog host.
Now you know what it is, right? But why I use Medium?
Take my company — NIFTIT — as an example. We are a tech agency that develops SharePoint solutions for all sizes of businesses. As a B2B agency, we use some unique techniques to approach our leads.
The idea of creating a NIFTIT blog on Medium came from my former marketing manager, and after three years of following this approach, we are impressed by the positive results we’ve seen. Let me share with you how we at NIFTIT use Medium as a marketing strategy.
How NIFTIT Uses Medium
We created two Medium accounts to upload our content. Why two? Since Khoa Quach — the CEO and co-founder of NIFTIT — is a good writer with a lot of knowledge to share, it made sense to provide him with an account that was not limited to marketing-driven content. So, besides the company account, we created a Medium account for him to share all of his articles that don’t necessarily fall within the topics of NIFTIT’s marketing mission. You can read all of his posts here: https://medium.com/@akquach
Stats of our 3-Year Medium Strategy:
As you can see, we get more than 1,000 views each month, and up to 7,000 views with Khoa’s account. The read ratio ranges from 53–56%. Pretty impressive, right? Let’s go deeper to find the source of this traffic. For this investigation, I randomly chose a past article titled “step-by-step guide to setting up SharePoint server 2016.”
From the chart above, you can see that the article has 42,000 views. Only 1% of the traffic source is internal, and 99% of the traffic is from external referrals. If you are unfamiliar with that terminology, let Casey Botticello (also a Medium writer) explain the difference between internal and external traffic:
“Internal traffic refers to the views from Medium article distribution. This can include stories featured on the homepage, views through the Medium mobile app, emails sent from Medium, and from Medium’s own social media accounts.
External traffic refers to all traffic your article receives not through Medium’s distribution channels. This can include stories shared on social media, articles found through a Google search, or accessing the article through a direct link in a writer’s newsletter.”
Most of our external traffic is from Google. We’ve had 36,000 clicks from Google Search leading to our SharePoint server article since its publication (without running any ads), and most of our other blog posts have over 1,000 views each. So, in addition to our main website (https://niftit.com/blog), Medium provides one more channel with which to market our business and drive traffic from Google to our content.
If you want to know more about other external referrals, follow this post: https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-views-by-traffic-source-61f2cbfdc0e4
To fully utilize Medium as the powerful channel it is, you can’t just upload your posts and wait for people to click on them; some growth hack strategies must be implemented to increase your content’s reach. Keep reading to know how we reach up to 7,000 views per month!
Before I share with you our strategies on Medium, let me remind you that we do have our own website for blog posts about SharePoint, Microsoft, Office 365, and more. You can take a look at it here and contact us if you have any questions: https://niftit.com/blog
How to Maximize Your Post’s Reach with Medium
You will see the five methods below are very popular because it’s once mentioned before in Neil Patel’s blog, but I would like to build-up by putting some examples to show how effective they are. Now let’s find out!
1. We repost our content on Medium
As previously noted, we have a blog site on which we post articles, tutorials, and news related to all things Microsoft (SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, etc.). So, when we began using Medium, it was easy to repost our content to this platform.
Why you should do that? Posting on Medium means you are reaching new audiences for your content. Moreover, if your website isn’t gone well with SEO, uploading blogs to Medium will increase the chances of being seen on the internet.
For example, this blog post is not doing so well on our website (it only had around 200 views last year). When we published it on Medium, however, we easily hit 2,000 views and 1,300 reads on the platform, 93% of the external referrals were from Google. How cool!
2. We created a publication for NIFTIT
We built the publication “NIFTIT SharePoint blog“ on Medium to share all of the articles from our team.
A publication can make your brand appear more professional, and it can help people quickly find their topics of interest, too. For example, if you are new to SharePoint and want to learn about its offerings, you should follow a SharePoint-focused publication on Medium to save you a few minutes of searching for relevant articles. If you follow a publication like the NIFTIT SharePoint Blog, you will have a plethora of related SharePoint material ready for your perusal.
3. Spend time on visual content
Medium is genuinely easy to use, it such a user-friendly and simplistic platform with its bright theme (but sometimes I really don’t like it when reading in the night :D).
So why not put that to your advantage and incorporate fun artwork with your posts? Add pics and banners, or embed videos into your posts to gain attention from your audience.
With the blog, we do simple, colorful designs for our posts. We create a banner for each article, which appears as a thumbnail on Medium. They look like this:
With our publication, the NIFTIT SharePoint Blog, we have simply changed the background color of the top header to red to reflect our company logo. There are so many options, though, and we encourage you to incorporate visual aids and graphics to entice readers. Grab your designer and delegate him some tasks. 🙂
4. Add tags to your blog
Medium allows you to add tags to classify your content. Relevant tags can help make the blog more discoverable throughout the platform; you can add up to five tags per article, so make them count!
The tags will appear at the end of the article, as shown below:
5. Drive traffic back to your website
Well, this is a basic — but very important — tip that every content writer should follow when writing an article. Medium allows you to link content from other sites, so you should use your Medium articles to link back to your website or company’s social media.
Adding links or CTAs to your website at the end or in the middle of your article can help you get some referral traffic to up your business’ appearance on search engines. I do this by adding a few sentences to promote our Office 365 services at the end of each article, and some clients have reached out to us thanks to this small addition!
Final Thoughts
Medium is a very helpful marketing channel, and it can be especially useful when you feel you’ve exhausted traditional marketing methods. With its offerings, Medium can help you approach new audiences in your business industry. It is a great tool and it provides a lot of bang for your buck.
Thank you for reading this article in its entirety; I appreciate your interest and readership. If you have any experience with Medium and want to share your feedback with us, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment!
References:
https://buffer.com/library/how-to-use-medium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/medium_(website)
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-views-by-traffic-source-61f2cbfdc0e4
https://neilpatel.com/blog/marketers-guide-to-medium/
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214741038-tags
Written by Truong Nguyen
Read More: 10 good reasons to implement enterprise social network
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