Why Blog On Medium?

Ok, confession #1 of this article:  I blog mostly from my iPhone.

This article is in fact being written from a real computer.  I just find it insanely easy to write a quick 200-400 word article on the phone while I’m waiting for an appointment, killing time in traffic, or even chilling in front of the TV late at night.  But this one is slightly different.

It’s currently 1:48 am on a Monday morning.  Right on, I can’t sleep.

I got up to just get a drink of water and of course checked Twitter where I found this incredible article from Paul Jarvis all about creating online courses (a guilty pleasure topic of mine for some time now), and couldn’t help but devour the several thousand word article.  Again, on my phone.   But that really is beside the point.

What the point really is though, is that it appeared on Medium.

For those of you who’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years, Medium is a social sharing blogging platform that’s founded by some of the same guys who brought us Twitter.  Thank you very much.

Medium is a great place to write content, in fact I’ve toyed around with it before, but never with any staying power.  What my little blogging streak here has taught me is that writing often, and writing in general is really, really important, and that I should do it a lot more often.

I’ve talked to other entrepreneurs recently about blogging on Medium, and they have varying responses to it.  One that I absolutely resonate with is that I’m a big advocate of Owning Your Racecourse.  By that I mean that you should not be too heavily reliant on other people’s platforms to conduct your work.

And make no mistake, a personal brand is maybe the only work asset you really have online.

KissMetrics gave a good breakdown of how to effectively use Medium for business blogging last year, and it really gives you food for thought more than a step-by-step approach to the practice.

I like it though, and am going to use it as a bit of a template for how I’m planning to roll out a Medium campaign all around sending traffic back here to craighewitt.me.  Because let’s face it, this whole thing is just a self-centered experiment in growth hacking, creativity, and expressions of freedom (in whatever form they need to take).

So what does my plan look like?  Well here are a few, moderately thought out, points to outline my plan for content creation on Medium

• Create content that will support my business and my personal brand – Everything on there will support entrepreneurism, productized services business models, and podcasting.  This stays true to my one overarching theme of consistency and alignment.
• Write articles weekly – I’m blogging here every days, and there’s absolutely zero planning that goes into these.  I’m just opening WP and writing the first thing that comes to mind.  Medium posts will be slightly different, but not necessarily longer.  I’m going to be shooting for the 500-700 word articles.  Let’s say an hour total of writing, formatting, and publishing.
• Promote wildly – I’m not just going to tweet about these once, but I’m going to ask friends to read them, link to them, and share them with their audiences.  I think of Medium as a sort of viral platform.  My own blog is too, and I hope to be able to launch from it one day, but for now I’m fair with myself and know that it just doesn’t get the kind of traffic that I’d need to have something go viral.

So that’s really the plan.  I’m going to use posting on Medium as something of a middle ground between this blog and guest posting on a really top notch blog.  That sounds just about like what Ev Williams had in mind for it when he created it, right?

Ok, off to work.