There are many great platforms out there for starting your own blog. They include sites with customizable HTML and CSS for those with more advanced skills. Medium is a place to share your thoughts and writing with a wide audience. Unlike some of the other blogging platforms, Medium has a built-in audience, which makes it often debatable whether it’s a publisher or a platform.
Signing Up
Individuals or businesses can sign up for a Medium account since it’s free. Those individuals or businesses can publish their own posts, add their voice and style to other publications or curate posts or publications. Publications are collections of posts that are curated by users and Medium itself.
Posting and Commenting
Readers can comment on other’s posts, recommend posts and follow and share their favorites. The process is like many other blogging platforms except Medium has a slight twist on the commenting process. Readers can highlight and focus parts of the text and make their comments in the margins.
Embedding
Medium allows third party embedding from other sites around the web. Creators can embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo. They can add content from Twitter, Vine, Instagram and SoundCloud.
Traffic and Views
On every post, readers get to see how many minutes it would take to read a post. They’ll immediately know whether they have time to read through the story or whether they should bookmark it for later. Another feature on the front page for viewers to see is how many views it’s gotten on the platform. Recommendations and reads are also available to creators. The dashboard allows creators to see where traffic originated from too.
Best Practises to Create Posts
There is no minimum word count for posts, but Medium suggests that content over 400 words are popular. The headline should be compelling and clickable, but should also stick to the topic of your content. They recommend high quality photographs for the content as well.
Great for Beginners
The platform is a terrific starting point for beginners to the blogging world. It’s simple to use and doesn’t require coding knowledge. It’s also used by brands to recycle their content onto another platform to gain further reads and new readers of their content. A highly recommended free blog site for small business owners and freelance professionals.