Why not to use Medium for your blog

Decentralization - the word on everyone's lips in the blockchain community, the reason so many are invested in and creating amazing projects. Decentralized content is simply a case of self hosting your created value.

Medium = Centralized content platform.

We love Medium, we use Medium for content amplification, but we know how to use Medium and we're here to explain why and how this is important for you and your investors.

Don't choose Medium over hosting your own blog - DO BOTH!

Content Ownership

As you read this post, focused on why not to use Medium for your blockchain blog, it's worth considering where you're reading it and who owns the content that's providing the valuable information that's here to help the future of your brand. There's no need to provide a link, you're already on our website.

Medium is a powerful and valuable platform for content amplification, but not for content ownership. It's time that blockchain projects, ICO's in particular, start adding more value to the their businesses for long term growth. Why not to use Medium to host all your content...

[embed]https://youtu.be/rGrlP1AmWSA[/embed]

1. Medium will own ALL your content, which means this is no longer owned by your business. It's anything but a decentralized content platform.
2. Medium will own the value your content created, web visitors, back links and even brand association. They read that great article on Medium, not on your website.
3. Medium can and will do what they want to do in the future, with your content.
4. $170m needs to be recouped for the Medium investors...
5. The Medium terms of service clearly state - Medium granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Medium may enable advertising on the Services, including in connection with the display of your content or other information. We may also use your content to promote Medium, including its products and content.
6. Custom domains are no longer possible and were removed in 2017. This is so value and content ownership cannot be taken back from Medium.
7. ICO's are funded by investors, many investors, who require the business to be successful in the future. Long term organic growth makes up a huge part of online business.
8. Analytics and tracking are not fully possible through Medium, making re-targeting impossible and fully understanding audience behaviour across digital assets extremely difficult.
9. It's important to understand the audience on Medium is not yours.
10. Look at the history of centralized content ownership.
11. Flikr sold user created content to Getty, with no reward for users.
12. Vine shut down, along with removal of all user created content.

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Why content marketing is important for your ICO

An ICO is purely a funding vehicle for a much bigger, more valuable business, which will require influence in new and existing industries and market entry with significant competition either now or in the future. It's important to understand how the business can and will add value in the long term, get in front of new audiences in existing markets and add value to digital assets.

1. Industry authority. Creating high quality, informative content brings with it significant authoritative value for the business and the profiles of those involved.
2. Brand awareness. Your brand will gain significant visibility with highly targeted audiences with content that is relevant, high quality and well optimised from what the audience data suggests.
3. Lead/Customer generation. The above two points are the perfect platform for a successful content marketing campaign, where targeted visitors are directly interested in not only your content but the services and products that you offer - if your content strategy is relevant and optimised.
4. Audience growth. With the creation of valuable content comes a growing audience. This provides significant opportunities for additional brand messaging and influence throughout your chosen market.
5. Value. Every quality piece of content adds value to your digital assets, providing content for social media, community outreach, earning brand reputation and authority and earning back links, citation and long term growth potential.
6. Advertising. Have something to say? No one can stop you promoting, selling and advertising what you want and how you want, when it's on your own platform.

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How to migrate from Medium?

Unless you have some amazing content on Medium, you can simply leave the content there but moving forward with new content on your hosted content platform ie /blog. (Avoid using a sub domain unless absolutely essential, such as blog.domain.com) This is the simplest option, but not always the right one.

Keeping Medium and it's content, hosting new content on-site

1. Create your hosted blog on /blog or similar on your own domain
2. Post new content to your blog
3. Ensure content is indexed on search engines - ie wait a week or two
4. Import content into Medium using their specific Medium Import Tool

Moving content from Medium on to new hosted blog

Custom Medium URL

The benefit of having your Medium blog in a custom url, such as a sub domain on your own brand, is you own the value that's been created on the urls, although you do not own the content while it is on there.

1. Create your self hosted blog - domain.com/blog
2. Import all content into your new blog platform in a staging or offline environment
3. Create a redirect file (or use a plugin) for all links from your blog.domain.com website to the new url structure of the new blog ie domain.com/post-1 or domain.com/blog/post-1
4. Ensure all links within the blog are updated to new urls
5. Set new blog live
6. Return the Medium account to a Medium hosted domain ie medium.com/brand
7. Post new articles to new blog, post to Medium using Medium Import Tool once indexed in Search.

Medium.com URL

There's little that can be done here in terms of retaining value and bringing this back over to your own domain. What this means is backlinks, authority and search engine ranks will be lost for the existing content on Medium. Essentially moving the content back on to your own blog, would require it to start again and could be a fruitless process.

Our advice is to simply keep the Medium setup and content, but start posting new quality content on your self hosted blog moving forward.

How to post content to Medium successfully?

This has been touched on above but the process is very simple but also very important and very powerful.

1. Post on your own blog first!
2. Give the post time to be indexed by Google. This ensures that the article is attributed to you.
3. Use Medium Import Tool to bring the content over to Medium. This will add a canonical tag to the post with a link back to your original content. Now, any links that are earned for the Medium post, will bring value over to your own blog and content.

The take away from this article should be that you should not use Medium for your blog and self host your content instead. Use Medium for content amplification through the correct method of content importing. This simple change in content marketing strategy will support long term organic growth for your business, making market entry easier, quicker and for more efficient.

For help with your marketing strategies across Blockchain, ICO's and post ICO's projects, please Contact Us.