Benefits of Writing on Medium

1. Medium Allows Writers to Easily Earn Money

There are many ways to monetize your blog content. And many are far more lucrative than posting your content on Medium.

Still, Medium’s biggest benefit to most writers is that it enables a simple and reliable monetization system, with little to no effort on the part of a writer.

This allows writers to focus on writing and not get bogged down with all the other technical, strategic, and entrepreneurial decisions required to otherwise make money from their content.

While Medium has introduced some requirements to join the Medium Partner Program, they are all very easy to meet and essentially allow anyone to start earning money from their blog posts since they press the publish button.

While there are a few other platforms that offer a similar monetization system, none are as well known, have a record of timely payments, nor have paid out the same amount of money to writers. Medium has even paid periodic bonuses to writers.

For example, I’ve received several of the $500 bonuses awarded to writers:

There are thousands of writers who earn over $100 per month, and thousands of writers earning in excess of $1,000 per month. No other blogging platform can make a similar claim. Below is a screenshot of my Medium Partner Program earnings from the corresponding month in which I earned the $500 bonus. So, from my normal Partner Program earnings I made $934.04. When combined with that month’s $500 bonus, I made a total of $1,434.04 for the month.

While making money on Medium requires hard work, there is a pretty clear framework to follow for writers that are willing to invest their time and have interesting content to share.

2. Medium Offers Writers Access to New Readers

Most writers struggle to find readers for their content. Medium addresses this problem by bundling your content with that of thousands of other writers, and offering it to readers, as part of a monthly subscription.

By getting your content in front of new readers, you not only have the chance to increase your Medium Partner Program earnings, you can start to build an audience, which is essential for new writers.

You may eventually decide to self publish a book on Amazon KDP or choose to submit your articles to more exclusive publications. But neither of these efforts will amount to much if you don’t have some level of an established audience.

Medium is constantly working to improve the reader experience on its platform, and a big part of that involves helping readers find content that they enjoy from new writers.

3. Medium Can Help Writers / Marketers Build Their Personal Brand

Unlike most blogging platforms, Medium has a social media like quality built into the platform. Similar to Twitter, writers are encouraged to increase their followers. Like Facebook, writers can comment on and respond to content posted by other people.

This makes Medium the perfect place for someone who is trying to build their online brand.

Medium allows you to write about pretty much any topic you want (provided it’s not an explicit advertisement).

Many writers, entrepreneurs, and product developers use Medium as a space to share insights about their external projects that they are working on or share personal experiences that may make readers more inclined to follow you outside of the platform.

4. Medium Articles Tend to Rank Higher Due to High DA (Greater Content Exposure)

Most bloggers who write on their own blogs struggle to rank in search engines and attract organic traffic. This is partially because their sites typically have low Domain Authority.

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority is measured on a logarithmic scale from 1-100.

Because it’s logarithmic, there’s a ton of sites with low DA, relatively few sites with mid-range DA, and very few sites with high DA.

Medium has a very high DA score of 95/100, allowing content to rank much easier than on other platforms:

While more external traffic does not translate directly into higher Partner Program earnings, it certainly leads to greater exposure.

I’ve had numerous articles rank on the first page in Google search results (sometimes even as the featured snippet) due to Medium’s high DA.

For example, my article on How to Form a Super PAC has generated hundreds of thousands of views. Most of these views (~83%) came from organic search traffic:

5. Medium Can Act as a Freelance Writing Portfolio

If you are a freelance writer, Medium is a great place to showcase your writing.

When I first started publishing on Medium, I was just writing for fun. And even then, I found myself receiving lots of replies, comments, and emails inquiring about my services as a freelance writer or content marketer.

I now run a profitable content marketing business.

The best part?

I have never had to spend a single penny or a minute of my time looking for freelance writing jobs.

For many freelance writers, this is how they spend upwards of 50% of their time (I know this because I am constantly getting pitches from freelance writers looking for work, and I do occasionally hire them if they have a decent portfolio and style of writing).

But even with these writers, if they do not have content published on Medium that I can easily review, I am not likely to consider them at all.

6. Medium is Great for Networking

Medium is a great place to meet other writers, online content creators, and interesting people in general. Because Medium is a quasi social network, there is definitely a sense of community among writers on the platform.

I’ve personally made friends, found a business partner, and connected with other individuals in the creator economy space, that I never would have otherwise met (even though we frequent many of the same online forums/platforms outside of Medium).

7. Medium Saves Writers Time by Making Article Formatting Effortless

The Medium editor (the tool that you actually write your content in) is extremely easy to use, and makes publishing polished content far simpler than most platforms. This is important because on some platforms, writers may end up spending more time entering and formatting their article than they did on writing the actual content!

Medium’s editor tool has a robust range of functions to format each part of your article. This includes everything from image formatting tools to text styling tools. Medium also integrates very well with media from other platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

By simply entering a link to your content on one of these sites, Medium will automatically create an embedded version of the page or content, within your article:

I personally use 10+ different blogging platforms and writing tools, and Medium is my go to when I need to quickly draft and format an article (even if I ultimately end up publishing the content elsewhere).

8. There is No Exclusivity Agreement When Posting on Medium

Medium allows you to instantly publish your content with no approval needed and without any exclusivity agreement.

Why does this matter?

On many blogging sites, you may be asked to sign an agreement that basically states that “you can only publish this article on our site, it cannot be republished anywhere else.” But the internet is an ever-evolving network, and you may want to republish parts of your writing or even entire articles.

Medium does not require any exclusivity agreement, and you can remove your content immediately from the platform at a moment’s notice.

This gives you optimal creative control over your content.