Using Medium to Boost Your Brand

October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 / David Wilson / 1 Comment

What’s So Special About Medium?

So many businesses make the mistake of only representing their brand on visual social media. Medium.com can change all that.

If your brand specializes in any topic, from politics to raising guinea pigs, you can utilize the Medium Partner Program to create a subscription reading program. The good new for writers? It’s all about content. Content creators get paid by the time users spend reading their content. So you can’t simply create fluff – it’s got to be the real deal.

And this is great for your readers! They know that they can trust you to provide them with quality content. With the August 2021 update, you will have to be active enough on the platform to get 100 followers, but it’s really quick to achieve this, so no worries!

Still wondering why you should write on Medium when you already use WordPress? Check this article out from Aamir Kamal: Blogging on WordPress Vs. Blogging on Medium.

Boost Your Brand with Medium – Influencers

Medium is such a great place for influencers who either specialize in a topic (growing bonsai trees, fictional storytelling) or portray an engaging personality (funny, wise, educational). When you consider yourself an influencer, generally you have a trait and topic that take center stage. The benefit of being an influencer over a small business is that you can bounce around from topic to topic, while maintaining your product – yourself! If you are funny, write funny stories about your day. If you enjoy poetry, use that as for your articles.

When you post an article on Medium, your name, brand, and content gets pushed to Google for indexing. So your standard SEO approaches from other platforms still apply. You can still focus on your keywords as you craft a story that will get your name out there.

Partner with companies and programs to promote your brand and the company you are partnering with through a blog post. Believe it or not, this is one of the best ways influencers can make lasting connections. If you nurture these types of relationships right, you can form long-lasting business partnerships that you can take onto other platforms like YouTube or Amazon products.

Boost Your Brand with Medium – Small Businesses

While you cannot promote your brand through ads on Medium, what you can do is to try some of the following suggestions:

Embed links to your website as you write on a topic so people will know how to get to the rest of the information on your brand.
Backlinking from your Medium profile and content to your website will boost your SEO overall.
Backlinking will also increase your public visibility and let consumers know that you are an expert in your area, so they would benefit from following your brand online.
Import your old blog posts from your current site to Medium! There is an easy import system built right into Medium and after your post is imported, you simply need to update some of the layout and content (please don’t forget to update your “…Secrets in 2015” to the current year!).
Networking – you can reach out to authors directly from their pages. Most of them will have either a website or email address listed and you can request an article be written about your brand, products, or website. You can return the favor and ask if you can write about their brand as well. Either way, you both benefit from backlinking across sites.

Best Practices on Medium

There are a few best practices to take note of on Medium.

Make sure you craft your headlines in a way that captures the total content of your article. Focus on the first three and last three words, as these are what reader’s eyes latch onto.
Images must be a 2:1 ratio with a minimum size of 1500 x 750 px, although Medium suggests larger image sizes
Publications on Medium are just what they sound like – groups of writers team up to deliver content on a given subject. Try to join a publication group that can help boost your visibility. Or if one doesn’t exist yet, create it!

A note on Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are allowed on Medium.com. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you want to see Medium’s full policy, check here. Bury your affiliate links deep into your post. Not only should your article have a need for the link, it shouldn’t distract from the creative content.

The “Don’ts” of Medium – And Suggestions

Medium is about content, not marketing, so you need to limit your affiliate links to 1-3 depending on the length of the article. A better approach is that you can talk about the resources you use and link back to your own website or social media platform where you have the affiliate links.

Don’t share product reviews. Again, you want to create content that is engaging to readers. If all you do is write reviews, then you are likely not using your time wisely. YouTube is a better platform for that.

No calls to action, please. The content should draw people in out of curiosity or a feeling of, “hey, I’d like to try that.” People do not like to feel like they are targets for marketing. So make them feel like they are a part of your brand. Invite them to contact you to co-write an article or to form a publication. People often read what they already enjoy.

Analytics on Medium

Medium offers the following analytics for you to gauge the performance of your work:

Time read on your blogs
Views of your blog posts
Number of followers
Reads ratio of how many people continue reading your post to the end
The amount of times your story is recommended

When you are first getting started on Medium, don’t worry too much about low numbers or leveling out. Just keep creating content that provides value to your readers. You will eventually break through! That’s when you can start to dig deep into your analytics.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that YOU are capable of boosting your brand’s image as a professional in your field. Medium is just another source you can utilize if you focus on quality over quantity. And there is more to the platform than the brief overview above. Make sure you head over to the site and check it out for yourself: medium.com

Quality Vs. Quantity Blogging – Now We Know

October 18, 2021October 18, 2021 / David Wilson / Leave a comment

When I started blogging, one of the hottest topics was which is best: quality or quantity blog posts? I have tested several “web traffic tricks” in order to learn the answer. And the results are in!

But first, let’s take a look at all of the tricks that so-called gurus have claimed will get you better traffic. Because this is exactly how I found my answer to the quality versus quantity question.

Blogging Tricks that Work… Right?

Since you are reading this blog post, my bet is that you are a blogger yourself. Great! And so it goes without saying, you have tried to figure out how you can get more web traffic. Here are some of the tricks I found online, from worse to best.

5. Add Attractive People to the Image

I got on Canva, Pexels and Vecteezy and found pictures of attractive people that were expressing emotions. I started some posts out with these photos and even went back and changed others. I saw zero response from this. It just didn’t seem to work.

4. Add an Abundance of Keywords

Like some of the blog posts I personally found, I tried the whole “just copy and paste a ton of keywords” approach. Basically, you use a free SEO tool and find some of the closes related phrases to what your blog or blogpost is about. Then you paste it into your post. If you want it to look somewhat more natural, you convert each of these into a sentence that may or may not make coherent sense, likely it won’t. This produced zero results.

3. Reposting Old Blog Posts

Another suggestion was to take your old blog posts and remove them, change the picture (or don’t) and repost them to your blog. And the web traffic results were…. Nothing. I barely received any traffic from doing this. What traffic I did receive was likely due to chance and the WordPress Reader app.

2. Linking Other Blogs

Not to be defeated by the other setbacks, I tried a tactic I stumbled upon. A user had linked to my blog post in a list of “Similar on Other Blogs” and it sucked me into seeing who in the world had backlinked to me. Turns out it was just a gimmick to get more traffic.

Well, it kind of worked because I did visit the blog post and I was exposed to 2 or 3 ads. So I tried it out myself. I did not receive any traffic from this that I am aware of (and I kept checking for a few days). So this one is in the air. But it is a nice way to help others out by making backlinks.

1. Reposting Other Blogs

The last tactic is that I simply reposted others’ blog posts. I read a blog post that I thought was legitimate and I shared it. Sometimes I would even find the same image and attach it to the blog post. Other times I would find a better one. When I thought the title wasn’t catchy enough, I edited that as well. And for the times that I felt like being a go-getter, I even added several paragraphs on my opinion of the post or the topic at hand.

The Results

This one produced more traffic, but it was mostly on WordPress in the form of Likes. Here’s what I mean. For the month of October:

That’s the stat for every single post on my blog in October up until today. There’s one golden, labored over post and the rest have barely had any traffic. Now, look at this:

This is the insane amount of Likes that I have received compared to Views and Visitors – it’s nearly double!

So what does this mean?

While quantity will get you a lot of attention on social media WITHOUT notifications, quality will get you traffic. No, I haven’t received a lot of traffic this month, but neither have a lot of others.

And NO, getting likes does not correspond with web traffic. I have only made $0.02 this month so far. Do not let the WordPress app deceive you into thinking you have won this month because you will likely have 500 likes total. You need to realized that WordPress works like a social media platform as well.

What Next?

So the next steps are to test out the lengths of quality posts, as well as removing the poorer quality posts. I’ll be sure to include you all in the next update!