Using Medium for Your Startup's Blog
How large is your online footprint? Marketing your startup is a matter of getting your information in front of more people. This means enlarging the size of your online footprint. You’ll need social media accounts, a newsletter, and a blog to use as tools towards this goal.
A blog, you rightly assume, belongs on your website. After all, publishing content regularly helps your website rank higher in search engines. There are other useful platforms—such as Medium — where sharing articles are effective. Medium is to long content what Twitter is to short content. The connection is even more profound seeing as how Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, is the creator of Medium.
Getting Followers on Medium
To gain followers on any platform you need to get and stay active. That means publishing articles regularly and interacting with other writers. After all, Medium is a social network. There are three things you should focus on in order to attract followers in Medium. They are:
- Writing quality posts
- Sharing on social media
- Commenting on other articles
You’ll be rewarded for writing engaging, shareable articles. Adding tags to your article will help it to be seen if a reader follows that tag. Medium knows how many people view versus actually read your content! You can access these details, and more, in the Status area.
Sharing your Medium articles on other social media is a great way to drive traffic toward your column. You have the added bonus of the potential shares on those platforms.
Commenting on a large number of articles is a great way to get a following. Make sure your comments aren’t boring but attract and would lead someone to click on your profile.
Spotlight the Call to Action
What good is having a blog if you don’t funnel readers to your website? Your website is the primary place from which you’ll make sales. The content explaining your product or service is already written. You just need to get potential customers there.
Experiment with putting calls to action in different places in your articles. It’s common for a call to action to appear at the end of an article; however, how many people are actually reading until the end? Try putting the call to action in the first paragraph to see if you get more clicks with this method. More people will see it there.
Getting Started on Medium
To get started, simply sign up for a free account. It only takes a minute! Here’s an important note: having a free account will allow you to read only 3 articles a month; however, upgrading to a paid membership will give you access to viewing unlimited articles.
When you sign up with Facebook or Twitter, Medium will import all your friends and make them automatically follow you. Once you’re in, you can head straight over the Editor and start writing. When you click publish, you’ll be prompted to add up to three tags such as “side project”, “business”, or “entrepreneurship”. Choose the tags which are most relevant to your article, audience, and product or service.
If Medium isn’t right for you, click here to see more blogging tools you can use for your startup.