Medium: Why Bloggers Should Consider Publishing on Medium

Want to position yourself as an authority on a specific subject?

Have you considered publishing your blog posts on Medium?

To explore how Medium can benefit bloggers and marketers, I interview Dakota Shane.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Dakota Shane, a social media columnist for Inc.com. He co-founded Arctiphi, a social media agency for breweries and restaurants. He's also a top writer in the social media category on Medium.

Dakota shares how to maximize your content's reach using Medium.

You'll discover tools and tactics for building your email list with Medium articles.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Medium
Dakota's Story

Right after Dakota graduated from college in 2015, he and his brother launched their agency. Dakota was learning all he could about marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing from podcasts, books, and client experience. Dakota comes from a family of creative people and grew up writing stories. In his career, this writing bug stayed with him and he wanted to write about what he was learning as a marketer.

At the time, his two choices for housing content were the blogosphere and LinkedIn. Although the blogosphere was the gold standard, Dakota felt that the landscape was saturated and it would take too much time and effort to gain a following while also working a full-time job and running a business. The articles Dakota wrote on LinkedIn flopped, and the platform also seemed a little too formal for his voice.

When Dakota found out about Medium, he was excited because it looked like a place where he could talk and write the way he wanted. Based on everything he'd learned since college, Dakota wrote an article titled 200+ Podcasts, 100+ Articles, and 20+ Books in 11 Bullet Points. Then he dug up the personal Twitter handle of the editor of his favorite Medium publication (The Mission) and sent him the link. The editor replied, saying the article looked great and would be published in the morning.

The next day, Dakota woke up to a slew of notifications: hundreds of people shared and thousands of people had already read the article. He saw the power of Medium as a platform and realized his life and business were about to change for the better.

Dakota has been seriously writing on Medium for the last year and a half, and his consistency on the platform has led to opportunities with niche social media blogs. To get those opportunities, he gathered links to his highest-performing works on Medium, wrote a pitch on why he would be a good fit for their publication, saved it as a draft, and kept sending it out.

After landing spots on bigger social media blogs, Dakota used those credits as leverage to get his first speaking gigs and podcast interviews. On his third try pitching to Inc.com, he landed a column and has been writing for them for the past few months.

Listen to the show to discover who shared Dakota's first Medium post.

Why Write on Medium?

There are four reasons to write on Medium. First, Medium provides a ready-made audience that most writers, creators, or marketers don't have and that would take years to build.

Second, and most importantly, Medium presents an opportunity right now because it's at that sweet spot between an emerging platform (which could be a risk) and an established platform (which could be saturated). Since it's in this position, Medium can open doors for a creator, writer, or marketer to brand themselves as an authority on a specific subject.

Although Medium has kept recent metrics to themselves, as of late 2016 there were 60 million monthly use...