If You Think Medium Is Hard, Try Blogging!
A simple shift in perspective can make all the difference
People love to complain about the Medium platform.
Writers love Medium when it’s working for them and complain until the cows come home when their views come crashing down.
The only thing more annoying than reading about how many people made on Medium are posts with complaints about Medium.
I have a feeling that most of the people complaining about Medium never blogged in the real world. The real world is the world of WordPress and Blogger before there was ever a Medium.
Although I had success with my non-Medium blog, it took years, a ton of effort, and lots of tears. I needed help; I needed technical expertise and a lot of luck. It took me years to build up a blog that people could easily find and read.
If you never blogged on a non-Medium platform, then you won’t know how good you have it now. Life as a blogger was a genuine challenge previous to this platform we are all typing away on.
These are just some challenges you had to deal with before Medium showed up on the scene. Once you know how much of a struggle it was out there, you’ll never utter a bad word about Medium again and sing the praises of this platform.
The Struggle Before Medium
Fighting for views
It was nearly impossible to get people to your blog before Medium. Where were you going to find readers? You had to out there and search for readers by commenting on other people’s blogs or finding them on social media.
Every post would languish in obscurity until you got more people to view it. You’d often publish a post and hear crickets. There would be no support and no interest when you first started blogging.
Unlike Medium, blogs never helped get your posts in front of readers. There was no powerful Medium algorithm helping you out.
Having to understand SEO
You actually had to rely on knowing SEO (search engine optimization) to get readers to find your blog. You had to learn SEO, use long-tail keywords, and hoped you ended up ranking for those keywords on the first page of Google.
Once again, you didn’t have the power of the Medium algorithm working for you. Medium also takes care of the keywords so you don’t have to. Your views on Medium are instant while SEO would take several weeks or months to kick in.
Practically speaking, it took people a long time to find your blog in the pre-Medium world.
Struggling for guest posts
Prior to Medium publications, you would have to go to individual blogs and ask the blog owner if you could share a guest post with them. There would be lots of unanswered emails and many requirements before you could break through and get a guest post published.
The results of your guest posting efforts varied. Some guest posts would generate a handful of visitors to your blog and others would generate hundreds of visitors. You never really knew if these were onetime visitors or people who would sign up for your work.
Many of the bigger blogs also didn’t take guest posts which made getting into one hard. If you weren’t a well-known blogger yourself, your messages would be ignored.
Struggling with the technology
You had to design each blog you owned. You had to buy themes, and you had to hire someone to help you customize the theme for your blog. You would have to hire a graphic designer or website designer to help you make your blog look presentable and attractive. This would also cost money!
In the world of Medium, they make it as easy and make the Medium page as attractive as possible. No sidebars and no clutter. Just a white page for you to share words. No font sizes to deal with, no HTML to deal with and no graphic design to deal with you. The design work is all done by Medium. The customizations on this platform are minimal.
Struggling to monetize
Ever tried to make a buck on your regular blog through advertising or Adsense? Good luck! You would need hundreds of thousands of page views to make any kind of income from your blog’s advertising.
You were always searching for ways to make money from your blog. Maybe you could offer a service? Maybe you could host a sponsored post? Or maybe you could ask people just to donate to your work.
Making money from your blog was not as easy as writing and hitting publish. You needed a strategy, a product, copywriting, and a plan to earn income from your blog.
Medium simply pays you for the views you get. Not very much more for most of us but a pretty penny for the top writers on the platform who publish a lot of viral posts.
Medium ushered in a new day
Medium provides the technology and showcases our work to readers who may be most interested.
Medium has a strong algorithm working to help promote our work. It’s easy to figure out the technical aspects of Medium and the options on this platform are designed to be simple.
The viewing experience is easy to read and minimalistic. Writers can earn on this platform simply by writing and publishing.
If you still have complaints about Medium, try starting a non-Medium blog for a week and publish a couple of posts. When you hear crickets and don’t see any traction, you’ll be back to Medium in no time.
We are in the golden time of blogging thanks to Medium. A place to write, be read and earn some money.
What more can you ask for?
How was your non-Medium blogging experience? Feel free to share below.