Moving LeadIQ’s Blog to Medium

So over the past few months, we’ve been blogging best practices for prospecting over at LeadIQ, and had some really solid results.

This post is the story on how and why we moved our company blog over to Medium.

The LeadIQ Blog is full of all kinds of awesome sales and prospecting content for SDRs.

Let me start by explaining the purpose of our blog. Our long term goal is to make prospecting suck less for both prospects and sales teams, and so our advice reflects that mission.

Think about it. If you have any buying power at your company, you probably get hammered with emails all day trying to get you to buy widget X, or talk about widget Y. Those widgets are great, but getting emails about them is a huge yawn fest.

Listening to our advice works two ways. If a SDR or sales rep writes wittier content, the prospect will enjoy it more, and reply. On the other side, work becomes a lot more fun for any sales team too because they can infuse creativity into outreach.

Our blog is focusing on sharing success stories and experiments we’re trying, and writing down some of our wisdom before we all worked at LeadIQ.

So how did we end up on Medium?

A few weeks ago, I saw someone tweet a link from Slack’s blog, and I noticed something. Their company blog wasn’t hosted on their site; it was hosted on a Medium Publication.

After seeing a tweet of a post, I was really impressed with Slack’s blog, being hosted on Medium.

I know Slack is a huge company now with all kinds of buzz, but their readership is impressive. Almost every post has over 150+ likes, and great comments that aren’t spam, and clean looking interface.

Out of curiosity, I made a LeadIQ Medium account, using our Twitter handle, and imported over some blog posts with their import tool. It was so easy, and it also looked way better than than our Wordpress page.

So what’s a publication vs. normal Medium account?

So we have a LeadIQ Medium account, but we also have The LeadIQ Blog, which is our publication.

A Medium account is great because followers from Twitter will automatically translate over to followers on Medium if you link both accounts. This is also great for us because as we grow on Twitter, folks with both Twitter and Medium accounts can follow us automatically. We won’t have to focus more effort on getting them to our blog.

The account is where we publish company blog posts that aren’t tied to one author. It also allows us to have ownership over a publication.

So why is there also a publication? Is this redundant with a normal account?

For our team, we have a bunch of employees who blog about all kinds of topics ranging from company culture, engineering, and startups. Having a publication allows us to feature their content, while allowing them to use their soapbox of followers to drag traffic to our blog. It’s win-win for our employees because they can promote themselves while promoting our company.

The other aspect that makes Publications amazing is guest writers.

Last week, we were able to publish a blog post from a sales expert who doesn’t work at LeadIQ.

We didn’t have to share any login details, give him a temporary password on Wordpress, or any of that funny business.

Chris Salisbury wrote a post and we were able to feature it without having him take it off his blog.

Chris Salisbury wrote a great post on how the Triangle of Influencers works for sales teams, promoted it to his followers on Medium, but then was able to syndicate it on our publication. His syndication allowed us to bring in more readers for his posts, and together it was a win-win situation for both of us.

So why did we move to Medium?

There are three main reasons we moved, and since everything is trial and error, we’ll have to see how it goes.

1. Distribution:

The exact number of Medium users is a little hazy, but I’ve seen figures that suggest there as many as 30 million readers a month on Medium. That means there are more than 30 million readers who could stumble onto our blog if they come in to read another blog first. The tagging feature is fantastic. Each post allows you to have up to 3 tags.

2. Promotion:

We love offering prospective customers special squeezes and promotions, and a lot of these promotions we’d love to host somewhere other than on our website. As we author more content, we can join other publications and cross publish work together. This will allow us to offer value to our customers, and find new customers we would have never reached. As we see sales posts we think would help our customers, we’ll develop relationships with the authors to share their content and promote it.

3. Layout:

Their team really did nail this part. Our blog looks way more beautiful than it would had we self published on Wordpress.

We’ll have to wait and see how our readership does vs. when we were just using Wordpress, but it’s an exciting time to blog for a company.

If you’d like to get some free sales and prospecting advice…go follow our publication on Medium here.

Regretfully and ironically published on Linkedin at first: www.linkedin.com.