There are many ways you can set up a blog, but first we are going to talk about how to blog with Medium. Medium was co-founded by Ev Williams of Twitter fame and launched in Beta in August 2012 and has turned out to be very popular with a wide range of different writers.
What is Medium
There has been some contention over the years as what Medium actually is because it’s very different from anything we have used before. It’s not really a magazine, or a discovery site like Scredible its not even a media site or a blog website like WordPress but it is a blogging platform of sorts. In a very far-fetched way, I might liken it to Tumblr, with the same sort of themes but Tumblr as a microblogging platform has mostly gone visual now, whereas Medium is for words, you can add some images but it’s mainly for reading and writing. For bloggers, writers, journalists or anyone that wants to use it to tell their story, or have something useful to share. Medium, however, encourages quality over quantity with their algorithm so the best posts will be seen first as chosen by editors picks. You can upvote posts like you do in Reddit, similar to likes in Facebook I guess and these posts appear amongst the most popular blogs among readers.
Medium is different to a blogging platform such as WordPress because there are no sidebars, plug-ins or widgets, there is no branding so nothing to customise. Medium software is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get WYSIWYG user interface which has all the formatting you need to make your posts look wonderful but not too much that is distracts you from writing.
You don’t need lots of friends or followers to get started with Medium, everyone is in the same boat, writing with each other. You have no commitment to post every day, every week or every year even, you can write when you feel like it, without fear that your posts will not be seen if you don’t keep posting to keep your website alive. This is why we thought you could be very interested to find out how to blog with Medium.
How to Blog with Medium
Right lets get started – Sign up to Medium using either your Twitter account, Facebook account, Google Account or an email address. Note: if you sign up with Twitter or Facebook your followers and friends will be imported if they are using Medium so already you will have a network or friends. I signed up with Twitter and from my 15k followers 2k are already on Medium. Also your image and bio will be taken from Twitter but you can edit these by clicking your profile picture and clicking edit.
Once you have signed up you will see at the top – HOME TOP STORIES BOOKMARKS where you can read other blogs and on the right hand side is Search and Write a Story. To start a blog posts click on Start a Story, this takes you straight into the editor.
Click Title – to add the title of your article
To start writing your blog click Tell your Story.
Formatting on Medium
When you highlight a word or a selection of words you get a pop-up selection where you can
- Bold
- Italic
- Link
- Create an H1 headline
- Create an H” headline
- Quotes
or write a private note
Adding Images
Click the at the side of the editing page
Here you will see a pop up which enables you to
- add an image
- add a video
- add an embed
- or add a new part – which means line breaks.
You also have some Keyboard shortcuts.
Keyboard Shortcuts
| Ctrl + Alt + 1 | Bigger headline | ||
| Ctrl + Alt + 2 | Smaller headline | Ctrl + B | Bold |
| Ctrl + Alt + 5 | QuoteTwo styles of quotes | Ctrl + I | Italic |
| * Space | Bulleted list | Ctrl + K | Turn into a linkWorks for text and images |
| 1 . Space | Ordered list |
When you are happy with your content you can click Publish in the top right hand corner. Don’t forget to add your tags as this is how you will be found on Medium
If you realise you’ve made a mistake then you can edit – by clicking the edit button in the top right hand corner of the post.
Blogging on Medium is really as simple as that!
You can also reblog your own posts to Medium as a whole or as a reblog (as per wordress) where only part of your content is shown with a link to the rest on your website – I created this one just to test out how it works for the purposes of this post, it looks pretty nice, although I didn’t add any images. Make money with your influence
There is a lot more to Medium than I have posted so far – this post was really just to show you How to blog on Medium and as you can see its really simple and easy to do.
Please share your Medium links here with me – so that we new users can get to see how the professionals do it.
Thanks for reading.
