Why all bloggers should be on Medium – Thomas Kuegler

Today’s post and podcast interview is potentially a game-changer for many of you. Thomas Kuegler is a Medium master who stops by to dive into the potentially HUGE benefits of publishing original content on Medium, as well as simply re-publishing your EXISTING blog posts! Enjoy 🙂

Most bloggers know what Medium is, but don’t really know how to use it.

Whenever I used to think about writing on BOTH Medium and my own blog…I’d shudder.

• Who has that time?
• What’s the purpose anyways?
• Why should I

Well, Tom Kuegler is here to save the day and show us why and how we could all benefit from using Medium.

Keep scrolling for the blog post…but in the podcast interview, we also chat about:

• When Thomas learned interning at Disney
• Building a freelance client base through Upwork
• How to “package your content” better for each platform
• How to utilize Medium, of course
• and more.

NOTE: Before we dive in, I want to promote a few things:

1. Thomas also has an entire course on using Medium to grow a following and monetize it. Check out Medium Mastery.
2. That’s actually it 😉

Ok let’s dive in.

Show notes and referenced links

• Finding Tom – A Millennial Travel Blog
• Tom Kuegler – His Medium channel
• Medium Mastery – Tom’s AMAZINGLY thorough Medium course. Use “oriels” for $100 off 🙂
• Adventurous Kate – travel blog
• Smedian | 300 Publications
• SEO and duplicate content – Medium Support – This is important if you want to republish existing content on Medium.
• Tiffany Sun on medium – misstiffanysun.com

Why all bloggers might want to get on Medium today:

Tom said it right away:

“If you have your own WordPress blog, definitely get on Medium right away.”

Tom was adamant about this, and after spending about 2 weeks researching everything he said on this episode, I gotta say…

I agree with him.

There is literally no downside in my eyes.

First, you can republish existing content.

1. Medium makes this so dang easy.
2. It takes all of like, 90 seconds (plus a few more minutes to reformat if necessary)
3. You can reach a whole new audience with surprisingly little effort.
4. It doesn’t hurt SEO (you gotta use the import feature though)
5. It doesn’t cost you a THING.

Why not?

(Honestly, I couldn’t find an answer to that question)

Here’s how to import stories on Medium

1. Get a Medium account if you don’t have one already
2. Click “stories” under your profile image.
3. Click “Import a story”
4. Enter the URL of the original blog post
5. Update the formatting a bit to look better.

More than likely, the line breaks, subtitles, and images may not look the best right when you import them…so you’ll want to play around with them.

Second, writing original content on Medium is easy, fun, and potentially great exposure…

…for not a lot of work.

Again, there’s no need to SLAM SEO, Pinterest marketing, or hustle to get eyeballs on your content early on.

(Though it’s important to note: You WON’T be getting a ton of views right off the bat by default. You’ll still have to publish regularly before you see ANY traction.)

It’s an odd platform when it comes to marketing…

You will have to show up consistently with great content and get on a few publications (which is extremely easy by the way)…but for those of us constantly obsessed with driving traffic from XYZ platform…Medium is a breath of fresh air.

It forces us to focus on the content.

Use Smedian to quickly and easily apply for publications

This is surprisingly simple.

1. Head to Smedian and sign up (it’s free)
2. Your main dashboard will be smedian.com/pubs
3. Heck, just start click the green buttons to app lol, or search up in the top right for publications.

Note: Some of the more established publications will make you answer a question or two to make sure you understand the rules, etc. It’s worth it 🙂

The bottom line:

It’s totally weird that you could sign up on Medium, write a few small but heart-felt posts over a week or two, get on a few publications with 10 minutes of work, and potentially publish a post to thousands of eyeballs.

It still requires good content, but it’s still weird. 🙂

What type of content works best on Medium?

Read the next sentence twice:

NOT HUGE HOW-TO POSTS.

I.e. my upcoming blog monetization post (which is already around 4k words and is halfway done) probably wouldn’t be a home run on Medium.

However, my The hardest part about writing every day post did quite well, and it’s a 2 minute read.

According to Tom:

• Lessons learned posts can do well
• 750-1,000 words tends to be a sweet spot for him personally.
• Emotional, vulnerability, or opinion based posts tend to perform well.
• Lots of line breaks (Follow the 1-3-5 rule of blog post formatting. 1 main idea in roughly 3 sentences spread over 5 lines on the page).
• Great looking images (btw, you can insert pics directly from Unsplash IN your Medium post. Really cool).

Final thought: Don’t abandon your own blog

This should hopefully be a “duh” moment, but I am in NO WAY suggesting you “start over” on Medium and abandon your own domain, WordPress, etc.

Please don’t do that.

1. Instead, sign up on Medium today (it’s free and takes 60 seconds?), and try republishing your next blog post.
2. Make sure to use the built-in import feature so as not to screw up Google juice (in other words, don’t copy and paste your entire article).
3. Then, if you feel so inclined, produce an original piece of content or two. It’s fun, and you are free from sticking to your main blog’s niche as well.
4. Make sure to add a Call to Action (with a link back to your site, landing page, etc) at the end of each post!

(Personal finance blogger and want to talk about marketing? Or your dogs? Or a movie? Medium is your go-to if you don’t want to cross-pollinate on your own site!)

One more takeaway from my chat with Thomas

“Package your content for the platform.”

I love this idea.

Tom was talking about how some of the GIANTS on Medium, who regularly reach massive amounts of people…were reusing their Medium content on LinkedIn.

And bombing.

LinkedIn requires a totally different type of content than Medium, your own Blog, Twitter, or Facebook…even if that content essentially SAYS the same thing.

It’s important to “package” your content to best suit the needs of each platform.

For LinkedIn, I’d probably avoid using the term “blogging” and instead use “content marketing.”

It’s more business-y, legitimate sounding, etc.

The same holds true for republishing on Medium.

When I take my already-snarky content and republish on Medium, I have to do a bit of formatting and language work to make it fit in a bit better.

Also, if one were to add a “how-to” style post to Medium, one should probably attempt to make it more of a personal-style read.

This could include removing some of the hard-tactics and replacing with personal stories or opinions.

Mold your content for the platform.

Drop me a comment below. Are you on Medium? Want to be? What do you think?