Dec 2, 2018
Look-back on 2 months of Medium Blogging
Two Months ago, I started posting on Medium, the goal was for me to document my thoughts, get some motivation to write some training material and overall become better at writing. The aim has been to post on very specific topic around analytics and data.
In the past two months, I posted 24 times, which have generated 7000 views, people have spent 4500 minutes reading them, my publication gained 47 followers and mine personally reached 87. Posting frequently helped me get a better understanding of how the Medium platform works, how content gets viewed, read etc, what type of content gets distributed more easily and through which channel.
Distribution
5 out of the 24 blog post I have created were re-distributed on curated topic lists on Medium. Most of those re-distribution happened in only the past month, in November 4 out of 8 were redistributed. They were re-distributed across 3 topics Data Science (4 out of 5), Marketing (2 out of 5) and programming (1 out of 5).
Topics that tended to be re-distributed were fairly broad, not setup as howtos format. The read-time for these posts were between 4 to 8 minutes. Topics that ended up being distributed generated quite a large share of my posts’ views as well as claps. I suspect that the reasons that claps are quite focused on these topics, to not just because of a factor of quality in these posts that helps them get redistributed but that it is also due to subscriber of these topic being already logged in users.
Channels
Channels were readership originated from outside of Medium has been surprisingly focused on alternative Search Engine — DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Yahoo and Bing notably. The ranking algorithm in these specific search engines most likely favor Medium posts quite a lot.
Another channel that brought readership has been third party apps or aggregating websites — Skimfeed, Feedly, Algolia. Medium p ost consumption seems to be quite externally focused
SEO
Unlike for curated list purposes, for driving traffic through Search engine having very narrow topic is key to success. Topics involving esoteric tools fare well in getting a high ranking on google, sometimes even with a single search term. Without knowing it, my posts became quite high in searches for Tag Management system. Combination of key terms in the Blog post titles can help drive some traffic.
At the moment the overall traffic and readership for these kind of post is very much on the low end, I am however curious to know how it would develop over time.
Summary
Looking back at 2 months of blog posts, I certainly got a better grasp as to what interests readers on medium, got some experience writing posts and have been able to get feedback on what I wrote through hard data. Some of my post have been appreciated and some of them faded in oblivion, there is still much to experiment on this platform and hopefully I will get a better grasp of it. Looking forward!
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