How to blog on Medium — and should you? (A chat with Nicole Akers)

4 min readSep 20, 2020

Certainly we always want to look for new ways to get out our messages. One of those might be to blog on Medium. Medium is a blogging network. And you can set up your blog in seconds and get going in no time.

Nicole Akers joined me on this episode of the Business Storytelling Podcast to talk about how to use the network in your strategy, including:

when you don’t have your own blog
when you want to syndicate your blog and content further

Nicole wrote “ Make Money on Medium.”

Starting on Medium

We really don’t need a whole section to explain how to get started. You literally just go to medium.com and login through Google or another third-party or use your email and your account is set. Consider naming it your brand name so the URL has the right branding.

How to blog on Medium as your main blog

Nicole says that most of her content gets shared first on Medium and there are other people that follow that strategy as well. Katie Couric is one example that she mentioned. Katie shares personal content on that platform that connects with her audience, Nicole said.

Certainly it’s not that difficult to set up a website nowadays but if you don’t want to or need to this is a way to still share your though leadership content.

Simply log into your account and follow best practices to publishing blog content. One thing to keep in mind is that you want to have calls to action back to your own site so when people want to connect with you that’s easy enough to do.

Tips on blogging successfully
How getting on a blogging schedule will help you stay on track

How to import your blog posts into Medium

Of course I asked Nicole about how I can integrate Medium into my COPE strategy. I don’t necessarily want to get rid of my current site and add another channel that needs unique content. She mentioned I could easily use the import tool which allows me to share already existing blog articles in whole and with the link back to their original publication source.

It’s not quite automated like podcast distribution which pulls an RSS feed off my episode from Anchor to 16 different channels.

Once logged in simply click on Stories in the drop-down.

From there click on Import a Story.

Then add the link to your story.

Medium pulls the content over and links back to the original source. After that you’ll have to do a little bit of reformatting but it’s quite easy and a quick process. Here’s an example of one article that was imported from my main blog. Even photos pull over very nicely.

How to re-purpose old under performing content on Medium

Another idea to get fresh and first-run content would be to take your old content that’s not performing on your site and re-purpose an updated version on your Medium account.

What’s the easiest way to check which blog posts perform best in search and social referrals?

How to make money on Medium

Nicole explained that to make money on Medium you have to sign up for a paid plan which is five dollars a month. From there you can earn revenue for high-performing content paid out from user fees.

Blogging on Medium wrap

I think it is important to find ways to maximize our time as it relates to creating content for different channels. For now I personally will continue using the import tool to see if I can get my content to perform on Medium. It is literally seconds of my time to do that and I am interested to see how it will help my content strategy.