BLOGGING | SOCIAL MEDIA

The blogger & writer dilemma: Medium or LinkedIn?

Considerations for content creators and bloggers, plus my publishing strategy revealed

Let’s keep this short and sweet. Blogging is living a new life. The number of active bloggers in the United States is forecast to hit 31.7 million in 2020 (Optinmonster, 2019). That marks a 12% increase in the five year period from 2015 to 2020.

In 2019, the average blog post was 1236 words long (Orbit Media, 2019). And if trends are a good indication to go by, then you’d also be interested to know that this is 53% longer than it was six years ago.

In fact, most content marketers seem to be investing more time and effort into producing longer blog posts. The latest blogging statistics show that the number of blog posts over 2,000 words has increased from approximately 2% of the total blog posts published in 2014 to 12% in 2019.

Burning question and scope

The number one question I get from people that are getting into blogging is:

Where should I post?

LinkedIn? Medium? Tumblr? What about my site?

Let’s start with an important assumption: if you are wondering how your website / Wordpress / etc. blog play into this, please note this is not in scope of this article.

Any content strategy involving a personal or business website implies too many specific considerations, in order to understand visitors volume and behavior. Plus, the average internet user doesn’t have a website. In terms of blogging, Medium & LinkedIn combine the best capabilities with the lowest entry barrier.

Plus, I’m not a Tumblr expert so that platform is also not in scope by design.

Know your objective(s)

The answer to the burning question is: do what you need to achieve your goals.

If you don’t know what your goals are, then I suggest you take a moment and ask yourself why you want to start blogging.

• Do you want to practice writing?
• Are you trying to make money?
• Do you feel like you need an outlet?
• Are you working on your personal brand?
• Do you feel your business will benefit from thought leadership you can share?
• Are you trying to help others by sharing something you learned?

Of course you might have different goals, or a combination of the ones above. Just note them down and move to the next step. If you feel like you can prioritize the top three and give each one a timeframe, it will help you tracking your progress.

The answer: pick the best value prop

At this point you need to evaluate the unique value(s) offered by each platform. Get back to your goals list and reference the value exchange offered by the two sites.

Which one is a better fit?

But also ask yourself: is one of those platform not a good fit?

Medium

• Offers a bigger and growing audience of all types
• Allows readers to follow you, but your profile page is minimal and mostly consist of a short bio +social links
• Created the Partner Program to earn cash based on views and attention time, but looks 90% of content creators get less than $500/year
• Allows popular publications to feature articles (sometimes only unpublished content)

LinkedIn

• Better suited for professional topics
• Focuses on networking, with rich profile pages to showcase your expertise and achievements
• Offers (paid) targeted campaigns, to make sure that your article is proposed by the audience you want
• Aggregates different formats of user generated content: the newsfeed algorithm combines articles with status updates, images and video posts

To help you out, I summarized everything in the image below.

Have you matched your prioritized goals with the value prop? What is the final choice? If you’re curious to know what was the outcome of this simple process for me, keep reading

This is my approach

In case you want to know how my overall content push strategy, here you go. Let’s start with my goals. I wanted to:

1. Refine my writing skills to become more concise
2. Challenge myself to find at least four interesting point of view to share in a year
3. Extend my reach and make sure every kind of reader could understand (and appreciate) my articles

I’ve already posted on LinkedIn, so I turned my focus on Medium and was very surprised by the content quality. Plus, I loved their philosophy of rewarding content creators with real money based on readers engagement, instead of leveraging their reach to earn from sponsored campaign.

So as of today what I do is:

1. Listen to podcast, read articles, think about the projects I’m leading until I found an unconventional topic to develop
2. Check if anyone else has ever done anything similar, and decide whether I want to proceed or find another idea
3. Start a draft on Medium and iterate on that, possibly creating visuals to highlight, summarize or simplify the key messages
4. Ask peers or colleagues to provide feedback on my final draft
5. Create ad-hoc feature image for the article, and develop consistent visuals for social post / stories
6. Identify which Medium publication would be a good fit for my article, and propose it (if I’m already a writer for that publication, I’ll simply send it for review)
7. Share my published article link on my Facebook page, X (Twitter) and LinkedIn
8. Publish a summary version of my article on LinkedIn, including a link to the full article on Medium at the end (see in the image below the footer I created to bring readers to Medium in case they want to know why the full content is not available on LinkedIn)
9. Reply to comments and questions

That’s pretty much how my entire strategy of publishing my content looks like. That’s my magic! In my case, both platforms still serve my objectives but my preference has clearly shifted to Medium. If you believe I’m cheating… let’s discuss in the comment! 😜

Resources

Some articles that inspired this post.