How To Use Medium To Promote Your Blog

Let's face it, it is hard to drive traffic to your website in a cost-effective way. Especially when you are a start-up or just launched a new website. Fortunately, there are demand generation strategies that smart marketers can use to drive traffic. Let's take a look at how to get traffic from Medium!

Using Medium to drive traffic is hard without knowing the basics. So let's start by explaining what Medium is all about.

Watch the video or continue reading.

What is Medium?

Medium is a blogging platform launched in 2012. Since its incubation, Medium has been categorized as an online magazine and blogging platform among other things. The fact of the matter is that Medium has disrupted the personal publishing market. The market share of Medium has grown significantly over the years.

Medium was conceived for individuals like you and me to publish content online. However, more and more organizations are using Medium as a tool to drive traffic to their websites. Ranging from startups to enterprise organizations, the corporate world is smartly using Medium as another way to deliver content in front of their target audiences.

Why are companies using Medium to drive traffic?

People that are currently visiting your website represent a tiny fraction of your total target audience, also known as the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). There is enormous untapped potential out there, the Serviceable Available Market (SAM). You need to analyze where your target audience is consuming content on the internet and use this to your benefit.

In the images above, the Serviceable Obtainable Market would be your website. The Serviceable Available Market would be using channels such as Medium to drive traffic to your website.

Medium is one of the hottest content platforms out there today. Your target audience is reading posts on Medium, guaranteed. As mentioned earlier, Medium does a lot of things in the background to promote quality content to its readers. For good reasons, every website owner only wants to provide the best quality to its readers and keep them satisfied.

This means that Medium has a great business model. People are visiting Medium because they know it will be high-quality content, and people publish on Medium because they know their target audience is on Medium.

As a smart marketer, it is your job to leverage that and using Medium to drive traffic to your website; also known as content syndication. Sometimes marketers think that creating more content has a direct effect on website traffic. Meaning that if you would create more content, you automatically get more visitors.

Creating content does get you more visitors if your SEO strategy is fantastic, but a general demand generation guideline is that 20-30 percent or your time should be devoted to creating content. The remaining 80-70% should be spent on promoting content.

When republishing your content on Medium, make sure to link back to your website. Also, make sure to use UTM codes to track the traffic coming from Medium. You can measure the backlinks to your website through Semrush. In addition, you can measure how much this is benefiting your website.

This strategy works very well in the SaaS market. Here are other tips to achieve incredible SaaS marketing growth.

Focus on quality

Before you start publishing on Medium, you need to know what sets it apart from other media websites and blog platforms. Medium is built to reward contributors for quality content rather than the popularity of its writers. Anyone could start writing on Medium, but that doesn't mean that your posts will become popular. You need to deliver high-quality content to be noticed. Behind the scenes, Medium works hard to deliver quality content through advanced algorithms to relevant readers.

If you are going to be using Medium as a tool to drive traffic towards your website, then first sit down and develop your strategy. Shooting from the hip won't work.

In this post, I'll give you some tips on how to use Medium to drive traffic to your website. You can these tips to add Medium to your demand generation strategy.

How to get traffic from Medium?

Below are 6 steps you can take get Medium Traffic without having any followers on Medium!

Reading time needed: 5 minutes

Republishing your content on Medium

Medium has a super neat feature that allows you to import stories into the Medium platform. After you have created a post on your website, you can import your post to Medium. People often call this republishing to Medium.

This is super simple to do and it will take you a couple of minutes at most!

Just create an account on Medium and complete your profile. Once you've done that, click on your picture and then on "Stories" as shown in the screenshot below. Import a story on Medium

Engaging with Medium influencers

Building valuable relationships is an integral part of almost every business.

Relationship building is also essential if you want to use Medium to drive traffic to your website. Loads of influencers in every industry are posting on the platform every day. Those people have a lot of subscribers and people consuming their content. You want those people to be reading your content.

You can leverage this by creating lasting relationships with these people. My tip is to identify top influencers in your industry and make it a goal to develop professional relationships with them.

Just like in a love relationship, in business relationships, it is also essential to give and take. If people notice that you are just being a leech, then you are not going to build relationships with influencers. It has to be meaningful. Influencers are often at B2B events, this is a unique chance to build relationships.

Commenting on articles on Medium

Another way to get Medium traffic to your website is by commenting on relevant articles. Only comment relevant and insightful comments. The key is to add value to an article. Comments such as "great post, keep up the good work." have no value in building a relationship with writers.

By adding valuable comments to an article, people will look at your profile and start following you. This way you will increase your follower base. Consequently, new posts will be visible to a higher audience. This will increase your Serviceable Obtainable Market share.

If your goal by commenting is to build relationships with influencers, give them constructive feedback. Add value to their articles. You need to be doing more giving than taking at this point.

Posting content to Medium Publications

Medium has a lot of publications with a lot of followers. Here are the top 100 publications on Medium. If you write quality content, you can submit your content to a publication. If it meets its editorial guidelines, they will publish your post on its publication. This gives you an opportunity to get your content in front of a lot of people without having any followers at all!

Never submit duplicate content to a publication. Submit a story that has not been posted anywhere before on the internet, not even your own website! Also when your audience size increases, consider A/B testing.

An extra benefit is that it allows you to earn some additional money without a follower base on Medium. I published a story to Better Marketing on Medium called The AARRR Framework for Startup Growth. This is a great example of content likely to get published to a publication.

Engaging in Social Media Activities

Another way to drive traffic from Medium to your website is by posting Medium posts to social media. Especially when you just released a post. The first hours of your post being live are crucial. The more "claps" or likes you get within the first 24h, the higher the likelihood of Medium editors to submit your posts into their editorial processes.

Also, post the content of influencers on social media. This facilitates building a relationship and they will start noticing you.

Include Medium in your content binging strategy

Content binging is a proven strategy to accelerate your marketing funnel and convert leads faster. You need to be including Medium in your content binging strategy.

People are using various channels to consume content and if you are successful at reaching your audience on various channels, the likelihood you will convert a lead is much greater. People can be reading your content on Medium in the Medium App which is very user-friendly.

A good demand generation strategy is to have long-form content types on your own website and write short-form content on Medium. Consequently, you have a valid reason to link back to your website and it lows the barrier for people to click on your link.

Content binging will reduce your average cost per MQL, meaning you will be able to do more marketing activities with the same marketing budget.

Just make your that your landing pages are optimized to handle Medium traffic and continue the marketing funnel on your website.

Why Google Won't Penalize You for Duplicate Content

When you were reading the paragraph about republishing content on Medium, you might have been wondering what Google thinks of this.

That is a valid concern. After all, we all know that it is not right to have duplicate content across the web and that usually, Google penalizes this. Nobody wants that!

Medium is a massive platform and they've got all the bases covered. When republishing content on Medium, Medium automatically adds a canonical tag. This means that Medium is telling Google that the content posted on your website is the original version. This means that search engines are pointed towards your website and that you won't receive a penalty.

Conclusion

Building relationships and driving traffic to your website through demand generation strategies explained in this post take time. Success is not going to happen overnight. It will take a lot of hard work and effort. Make sure that you are consistent with your efforts and soon enough you'll be reaping the benefits. Using Medium to drive traffic, is definitely a great growth hacking strategy.

The next time you write a post, set a timer for yourself. The time you spend creating the content represents 20% of your efforts. Now it is time to get to work and use the remaining 80% of your time to promote your new post!

Bonus resource: How to drive traffic through Employee Advocacy