How Medium Works in 2021

Forget the Paywall. Leverage Medium.com for easy SEO

I wrote an IndieHackers post a while back titled "How Medium.com works in 2020", and thought I would polish it up and update it for 2021, since Medium seems to be trying to get back in the game, and stop squeezing every last cent out of readers 😅.

A bit of background: I've been writing on Medium for about 6-7 years, have a few million reads, and have earned around $5k from the partner program.

But to be honest, if you count the work I did on Medium to drive SEO and content marketing to products I've made, every dollar I've made on the internet in the past 3 years has been tied to Medium in some way or another.

Leveraging the SEO benefit of Medium.com is something I've done with decent success, seen other people do, and is probably the easiest way to jump-start interest in your product or business (that I don't hear being discussed today).

I also put together a Related Post a few months ago on my writing process:

👉 Writing for profit on the Internet, even if you're not a great writer

Without further ado, lets proceed:

Here's how Medium works in 2021:

1. You paywall your content, and Medium promotes it to their members.
   a. If you go this route, you need to find a relevant publication to post your content to. The bar is fairly low at this point, don't worry too much about getting rejected, as long as it's relevant to the publication, and the publication is large.
   b. You can't repost duplicate content to get more exposure, Medium will penalize you (and take down your articles).

2. You don't paywall your content. Assume Medium will never promote it to anyone on the Medium platform. They just use your content to suck in traffic from Google and social, to promote the Medium platform.
   a. Medium has 100/100 Pagerank in Google. So if you go this route, you do some SEO research, and you're basically going to get a huge head start in ranking for any keywords you want that aren't super competitive. Google loves Medium articles.
   b. Your Article title is important. Get it right before you publish, because it's also in your URL.

Either way, You should build a funnel and promote something in your article, or just hope to gain Medium followers. Also, your other posts will be promoted at the end of your Medium article. Articles should be 1,000 words or more. Include some images and styling.

You should work hard on making quality content that is incredibly relevant to the topic you're writing about, or the question you're answering (think of every Google search as a question). This is where a lot of people mess up. Their content is quick and spammy and engagement is bad, so Medium & Google stop promoting it.

Also, Keywords are important. Pick 3-5 that are relevant to your article but also have a ton of followers (you'll see this stat when picking keywords). I'm not 100% on whether this has changed since the big update a couple years ago, but it's part of how they recommend articles to people who browse the app / website, and generate bottom of page recommendations.

If you have another blog somewhere, publish it there first, and then Import it into Medium. This will give you a bit of both worlds (SEO + Exposure on Medium in the footer). A lot of people recommend this, but I've basically only gotten it to work with long-tail keywords where there wasn't a lot of other relevant content.

I've gotten in the high xxx,xxx views using method 1, and >1,000,000 views with method 2. They both work, you just have to experiment with both of them, and figure out which is a better fit for the type of content you're publishing.

A general rule of thumb, if the audience you're targeting is already on Medium (browsing a specific publication, browsing the app, or browsing the Medium homepage) -- you can go with #1, provided you find a large publication. If your audience is searching for something on Google with lots of search volume, go with #2.

TLDR;

If you approach Medium with the right strategy, aligned to what you want to accomplish, it works really well. You can't mix and match strategies though.

Goal: Traffic from SEO? Post to your blog, and then import it under the Medium.com domain for rel=canonical.

Goal: Earn Money Writing? Research your audience, and post directly to a publication, behind the paywall. You can make it free after a few weeks, when the revenue stops.

Goal: Traffic from Medium.com? They pretty much broke this. You can publish it behind a paywall and they'll promote it to their users, but it's not going to yield amazing results anymore.

Resources:

Where to find Medium publications to submit to: https://toppub.xyz/

Import a Post from your own blog: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post

• Update for 2021: You can now “import” an article (& add rel=canonical) after publishing.