If you are reading this after the United States Presidential Inauguration, there is a strong chance that you have come across the term “a new era” mentioned in countless news and opinion articles posted online. Hundreds of these articles were published on Medium, a blogging platform that has gained considerable significance in the last few years. The beginning of a new era is always an exciting time, and perhaps you should take this as a hint to make your Medium publishing efforts more effective.
What Do You Want Out of Medium?
Writers choose Medium for various reasons, but we are going to get traditional blogging out of the way first because the reality of Medium is that it is not the best platform for a traditional blog. Online journals are better off hosted on WordPress and Blogger, and this is a bit peculiar because Medium was initially developed with blogging in mind, but it has organically grown into a place where good writing can be enjoyed without having to conform to the internet diary format.
Reading this Medium article will give you a good idea of what Medium is all about; it presents information about health literacy and the challenges it presents to community and political leaders around the world. Moreover, the article offers thoughts and potential solutions to this problem. This is the kind of content that is highly adequate to publish on Medium; therefore, you can certainly treat this platform as a way to speak your mind and work towards establishing thought leadership.
Alternatively, you can also use Medium as a pure content platform that can help you drive web traffic. Should this be your intention, you will be competing against thousands of writers who are pursuing similar goals, and some of them have succeeded in going viral. Getting noticed and increasing readership are the most common reasons writers flock to Medium, and this is a good starting point for formulating a strategy in 2021.
The Medium Article Format
Medium has been around for more than eight years; since its launch in 2012, it has been transformed from a place where you can publish a blog to a content publishing platform where readers have certain expectations. As of early 2021, here are the factors that make Medium articles interesting:
* The writing is friendly and tells a story.
* Specific emotions are elicited at some points of the article.
* Either the overall theme or some sections of the article are controversial.
* The author injects some personality in the content.
* Readers get to learn a lesson.
The topics that Medium readers enjoy the most have a personal touch; they seem to enjoy reading about how technology is transforming our lives in ways that we may not always agree with, and they also like actionable content presented with evidence. During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, for example, fitness articles about working out with calisthenics and without going to the gym were very popular on Medium, but only if they included instructions and photographs showing results.