Susan Gilbert
May 9, 2016

Improve Your Content Marketing Reach With Medium

Social media provides a great outlet for businesses and brands to connect with their audience and spread the word on their content. Now Medium has come along as a helpful complement to your blog where you can further grow your subscribers and followers online.

Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams, began the publishing platform in 2012, which according to Wikipedia, “has evolved into a hybrid of non-professional contributions and professional, paid contributions, an example of social journalism.”

Today there are quite a few big brands all the way to the solo entrepreneur who write about various topics that can include business, personal development, entertainment, technology, and much more. The main attraction of Medium is high-quality content that is presented in a simplified format, and engages others in conversation. This is also a place where brands and journalists can host a magazine style blog, like this example from the technology magazine, Backchannel:

Backchannel

One of the benefits of publishing to Medium in addition to your business blog is the ability to track your content and the number of readers, which includes clicks, recommendations, and views.

Medium-Stats

 

How Does Medium Work?

Medium includes a WYSIWYG editor for headlines, text, images, video, and links. The design is clean and responsive to mobile views, which makes it very appealing to your readers.

The format is social-media ready and includes collaboration tools through Notes, where you can invite other team members to add their information to your post in private for editing and corrections. Readers can also include their feedback, which you as the business owner can moderate and make either public or private. And just like other traditional blogs a comments section is at the bottom of your post, which you can manage as well.

Medium works best as you publish regular content and connect with other members of the community in your niche. As your recommendations increase your articles will become more prominent in the top stories feed. Since Medium is connected directly to your Twitter feed, you have the additional benefit of increasing your network.

Medium Top Stories

If your business is needing to build more connections with faster communication and feedback then you may want to consider posting to the publishing platform in addition to your regular blog.

Grow Your Online Network

The following features can help your business website and visibility grow:

Cross promotion – As your business chooses your niche focus and publishes content from your blog on Medium you can include any links to your website and any other reference sources. Thousands of readers are congregating on this platform each day, which makes this a perfect place to bring in new subscribers. You can easily check your statistics right from your Google Analytics account under the Source/Medium menu, as shown here on TechApple:

Source-Medium

This method can also increase your social media fans and followers, especially when you include high quality images and videos to share. It’s interactive format, which includes green highlights, makes this a very “social friendly” platform for both desktop users and mobile readers to congregate.

Content curation – If your business needs fresh ideas for articles then there are a large number of posts in your niche where you can glean from and help improve your content marketing strategy. You will notice a lot of catchy headlines and in-depth discussions on the most popular posts as well as how your readers are responding to your articles.

Here’s a good example from one the tags that I follow, Entrepreneurship:

Medium-article

IFTTT integration – If your business tweets and posts from IFTTT (if this then that) you can now add Medium to your recipes. This additional exposure online can help generate more traffic to your website and as well places like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Setup is straight forward once you have created a free account with a number of different options to choose from:

IFTTT-Medium

When considering to add Medium to your business marketing mix it’s important to publish interesting and original content that your readers will love and want to interact with. Use your own blog and press releases for your brand’s promotional articles in order to add value to your community. This platform works well for building your brand story and establishing your business as a leading authority in your industry.

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Online Marketing with Focus - Let Susan Guide you to Online Success. Especially loves to help Authors, Speakers, Coaches & Entrepreneurs. Susan Gilbert uses her laser focus knowledge to coach and provide online marketing and social sharing programs. Author and publisher of several books including “The Land of I Can,” and “KLOUT SCORE: Social Media Influence,” Susan combines online marketing with strategic thinking. Follow her Digital Marketing Tips at her blog: www.SusanGilbert.com