Once in a while an article shows up that is so timely that it demands an article in response.
I had just revised an article on my main blog to include an updated realization about how I'd start a website today. I had been a hardcore “you need to own your stuff” kind of guy first and foremost but was just dipping my toe in to write on Medium.com.
The next day, this article from Brendan Charles shows up in my Medium feed. He announced that he's ditching his WordPress blog and going all-in on Medium.com after less than a year on the platform.
This article explains why I'm not doing this.
Why I'd been hesitant to write on Medium.com
I'd been avoiding writing on Medium because it was someone else's website.
So much as visiting a website subjects you to their rules. And their rules can change without notice.
I've seen all too many times that people find out the hard way that they've lost ownership of, and control of, their creative content. Or people will pour their very lifeblood into making something beautiful and then watch as someone else reaps the financial rewards from it.
As I saw it, having my own domain and my own hosting lets me rest easy in that I own my content.
Why I decided to write on Medium.com
I've been reading articles on Medium since August 2020. Most of the articles I've read are self-improvement articles and side hustles or online business articles.
I've devoured articles from the likes of Ayodeji Awosika and Eve Arnold each of whom has built both influence and substantial wealth from their tribes on Medium.
Fairly recently I was able to register my name for my domain without paying a squatter thousands of dollars. (They eventually gave up and let it go, and I happened to catch it when it was available.) I planned to publish articles there that would reflect more self-improvement and productivity kinds of topics.
Writing on Medium, for me, would accomplish a few things:
- I'd see how Medium works from a writer's perspective.
- I'd be able to write about different topics that didn't fit the topics of my current blogs.
- I'd be likely to get more interaction on posts to see what topics resonate.
From an ownership standpoint, I'm currently publishing the posts on my own blog and using Medium's canonical link feature to specify that link as the authority for search engine purposes. That set my mind at ease as to ownership of the posts.
Why I may never ditch my blog
In short, there's a lot on my blog and I've been doing it a long time.
I started blogging at Mighty Bargain Hunter in 2005. Before that, I created some articles in raw HTML and uploaded them via FTP to my hosting.
I used Blogspot for all of a week before I found WordPress, which even back then was slick software. (The current version of WordPress is 6.4. The one I installed was Version 1.5.) Much more flexible than Blogspot and way more flexible than my HTML skills would allow.
So, although I'm new to writing on Medium, but not new to writing online. Over the twenty years I've been online, I have published well over a thousand articles and hundreds of thousands of words of varying quality.
That's a lot of content. It took me nearly 20 years off and on to create it, so it's not the concentrated volume of content that leading writers on Medium have created, but it's still a chunk.
It's a body of work — one of only a few I have — that I can point to and say that it's mine.
The content can be updated and repurposed
Is all of my work great? Not by a long shot. Some of my early posts were little more than world-view extended comments on an article that's no longer available, or they read like a vaguely money-flavored diary.
A few of the posts still give me enough traffic that I get an AdSense deposit every few months or so.
I can update any of the posts at any time so they are more search-engine optimized. I consider SEO to be a skill that's worth learning, and I'm learning more with each post I revise.
In re-reading my old work I can get fresh ideas for articles. Or, I can repurpose the best pieces into different content, like a YouTube video, a short or reel, a tweet (whatever they're called these days), or even an article on Medium.
Medium will be one piece of my online presence
The one thing I've learned from what I've read on Medium is that to be successful, it's absolutely necessary to be consistent. It's not a guarantee, of course, but showing up regularly, for a long time, makes success far more likely.
Even as easy as WordPress has (always) been to use, I have to admit that Medium is really easy to use. Like Mr. Charles wrote: “Medium removes the friction.”
What may not be super-obvious, though, is that it's not difficult to do both. I've come to develop articles in Obsidian. This I can largely copy-paste into the WordPress block editor, and from there I can copy-paste that into Medium's editor. Not a lot of formatting changes to be made.
This, in my current thinking, lets me have the best of both: (a) an authoritative article on my own domain, and (b) the built-in community and all of the trimmings on Medium. That, and with only a small amount of extra work to format things.
Medium is a conduit for writing more.
I may never fully get rid of the content on my WordPress sites.
What is clear, though, is that Medium encourages and rewards great writing.
Medium is a place that also provides relatively quick feedback in the form of reads, claps, follows, and comments. It was quite a while before I got any feedback at all on my WordPress blog. By contrast, three articles on Medium (this makes number four) I already have gotten some of that feedback, which is great!
For someone who's written a lot like myself, over a fairly long time, Medium is proving to be a great tool and an exciting new way to publish, and I'm enjoying the experiment!
(Header photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash)