How to build an audience using Medium.
Scribbled by: @stvmcg
Content is king when you are marketing anything from a startup to a worm farm. (Dumb and Dumber reference)
Write cool shit, and people will share it.
Don’t sound “pitchy” or “salesy” and you will to develop a strong following of readers, fast.
Medium is a great resource to start building your audience. It links directly through Twitter and allows “collection owners” to tweet your content. (If its worth Tweeting in the first place)
Data behind this post:
Medium is a great community stocked full of active bloggers.
The intended functionality behind Medium (as well as Quora) is to have bloggers write something and promote it to other readers. These two sites are extremely powerful tools for content marketing and driving traffic, if you can utilize them correctly. (Separate post on Quora)
The trick behind Medium is to create compelling and interesting content that is aligned (somewhat closely) with other bloggers on the platform. Once you have that done, you submit your post to other users for a cross post, and have them share your work with their following. Virality. (Awesome buzzword)
How do you do this? “Collections.”
Collections are the key ingredient to using Medium for marketing purposes.
After you finish writing your blog/critique/rant/thesis/love letter, or whatever you are using to promote your startup/website on Medium, you can choose from thousands of collections to submit your story to.
Keyword Variations
When I published “How did I get 1,000,000 views in 7 hours,” I wrote it in about an hour, then spent 3 hours submitting it to collections with various keywords. So I would recommend keeping a 1:3 ratio comparing time spent writing vs submitting your story to other.
(Keyword examples. Startups, Marketing, Analytics, Hackers)
The keywords for submitting your stories to collections have to be very precise, and require a shit ton of different variations.
Variations of similar words and phrases are important for submitting your story to ALL the possible relevant collections. (I try to submit to over 100 collections per post.)
For example, If you search the keyword Hacker, an entirely different group of collections will display when you type in Hack. The same goes for some plural and singular keywords. (Hacks to Hack)
Take a word like Marketing, and place words around it creating different variations. Repeat that over 100 times. (Examples for Slingbot posts. Viral marketing, Startup Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Advertising and Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Business Marketing. Ect.) Get creative with the variations. It will pay off with the amount of views and reads you get.
Submitting Stories
Each collection will have the option in the top right hand corner to submit or remove your story. Submit it. Repeat. Like I mentioned before I submit to over 100. It all depends on how much repetition you can take. (Submit all of your related stories at once, given the amount of collections you will go through.)
After you go through and submit your story to every collection having to (vaguely) do with your post’s content, you can then post the same content to the other sharing platform giant Quora.
Examples and Linking.
Always include examples with your startups link in your content on ALL the blog sharing platforms. People want to read deeper into examples.
Read my recent Medium post to see how I gave examples in my post and drove traffic to Slingbot.
Simple examples that don’t seem pushy, but get people interested in what you are doing. The people on blog sharing sites are the people you want on your startups site. Plain and simple.
32 people recommended this article in 2 days because I was not pushy.
Readers on Quora and Medium are smart, and will provide valuable feedback.
Why? Because just like you, they know the struggles of driving traffic to a site (their blog) and creating a brand worth a shit (their personal brand)
Reading Times:
Make your posts “reading time” between 3-7 minutes. Readers want to read something they can consume quickly and move forward with, not a novel.
Notes:
Be active in responding to “notes” people leave on your post. Make them all PUBLIC so every reader can see that you are responsive. (Example, I left a public note on this line of copy to the right >>>>)
Readers are more likely to share your content if you are pleasant and give everyone straight forward honest answers.
Moral: Don’t be a dick, and make all comments public.
Thanks for sharing,
@TheSteveMcGarry
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