Why Your Company Should Stop Blogging on Medium

Nowadays, content creation is one of the main tools for building strong company brands, selling a product, or accumulating an audience around your brand so your business can thrive. For those who want to quickly start a blog, platforms like Medium were born. They offer you a large audience and the ability to write and publish with minimal effort.

If you’re planning on starting your company’s blog—or you are already posting company-related articles—you should consider building the blog yourself instead of blogging on Medium. In this article, you’ll see the advantages and disadvantages of using the Medium blog for business. We will also cover Medium’s history and why it became so popular. Regardless of your programming skills, we’ll show you how to quickly build an SEO-optimized blog with any technology in just minutes. Once we’re through, you’ll have full control over your content and SEO strategy.

Blogging on Medium

Medium.com is currently one of the most popular places to publish articles. Let me walk you through its history and provide you with some useful information in case you haven’t had contact with it in the past.

What is Medium?

Medium is an online publishing platform where people can publish their articles for free. It’s used by both amateur and professional writers. Currently, most of the articles are hidden behind a paywall, which forces visitors to pay for an account. In this way authors usually reach a smaller audience but make a larger profit.

History of Medium

The platform was founded by Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, in 2012. Its initial goal was to allow people to publish a longer document than Twitter’s message limit. Four years later, Medium introduced paywalled content (available only to subscribers) and began paying authors. As articles became more popular and received more “claps” (Medium’s version of “likes”), the authors earned more money. Despite its popularity, Medium’s profits halted in late 2018, and since then, Williams has tried to raise more money for the platform.

Advantages of Blogging on Medium

Medium has quickly become very popular among authors because of some undeniable benefits from using it, including the following:

• Clear design - Nowadays, it’s hard to find a blog that is just a clean webpage with the text clearly displayed in the main section, without any annoying advertisements that make reading difficult. This design is unique, intriguing, and very friendly for both readers and search engines.
• Easy start - You can start blogging on Medium in less than five minutes. You just have to create a new account and sign in, and then the brand new, shining text editor is ready for you. All you have to do is to write an article, assign a proper category, and hit the publish button.
• Large audience - One of the biggest advantages of using any blogging platform is that you don’t have to build your blog audience from scratch. By assigning the proper category or tags to your article, you put your content in front of the readers who are interested in a certain subject.

Disadvantages of Blogging on Medium

Among the advantages just mentioned, there are some things about the Medium platform that make almost every writer think about starting their own blog platform:

• Lack of ownership - Your blog is not your blog at all! If Medium decided to turn off the platform, you would lose months or years of work. You’d also lose your whole audience if you weren’t running a newsletter or other social media account where people can follow you and see information about your newest articles.
• Poor branding - You just can’t be unique among millions of blogs that look almost exactly the same. It’s hard to say that you can modify your branding when all you can do is change the title or avatar of your Medium blog and put images inside the article.

• You’re forced to hide behind a paywall - If you want to serve free content, it’s hard to do if you blog on Medium because most of the promoted articles are hidden behind a paywall. Even if you receive a lot of “claps” from your readers, the platform promotion engine is not likely to promote your posts if they’re not generating income, which makes it hard for your content to be found.
• Blocked growth - It’s not possible to extend your Medium blog with any store module or useful widgets. Medium’s simplicity may be a blessing, but it’s also a curse, especially for writers who want to build something more than just a simple blog with a comment section.

Blogging on your own

If you’re satisfied with the limited features that Medium offers and the direction the platform is going, then there’s no need to change where you publish your articles. However, if you’re thinking about expanding your blog or turning it into a truly profitable business, then you should start thinking about a solution that you can have full control over.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with setting up your blog or if you’re wondering if you should invest your time in writing a blog on your own terms. Right now, I’m just going to show you why it’s a perfect idea for your company to blog on its own and how you can easily start doing this without worrying about the server configuration or blog system.

Advantages of running the company blog on your own

When you run a blog on your own, you have full control over its appearance and how content is presented, and you can analyze the traffic in many different ways. Here are some of the most valuable advantages of this path:

• You create benefit for yourself, not anybody else - When you’re running a blog on a platform like Medium, you do gain some great benefits for your company, but you also benefit the platform owners. And their main interest is to make money from the most valuable publishers—companies that might even be your competitors! If you run your own blog, you can be sure that only you will reap the benefits from the hard work you put in.
• You control the design - It’s hard to build a unique brand when your blog looks just like any other blog. When you run your own blog, you have full control over the design of the website, and you can make it the most unique place on the whole internet. You can also change it up whenever you want!
• You can view detailed statistics - For businesses that are serious about succeeding, it isn’t enough to just analyze the user count. With your own personal solution, you can have access to detailed data that will help you understand where your users are coming from, which articles are the most popular, and which design or writing approaches generate the largest number of visits.
• Your voice is the most important - You can decide how you want your blog to grow, which publications you want to promote, how to build an audience around your company, and even how to convert your site traffic into cash.

How to start blogging

So, would you like to know how you can easily start running your company’s blog on its own platform? The answer is a Headless CMS. It’s a flexible solution that doesn’t make you a captive of a given technology stack. And it’s so user-friendly that you can integrate the blog with your company’s website in just minutes.

When you’re growing a company, you have a lot of important tasks to do, and you probably don’t want to build another blog. This is the moment when you can take advantage of using ButterCMS, which will provide you with a fully working blog infrastructure and excellent SEO solutions. We can even set up a live demo to walk your team through ButterCMSs fast, easy-to-use interface.