Writing on Medium vs. Writing for Your Own Wordpress Blog
Which is better?
Now that I’ve been writing on Medium for three months, I can say that I definitely prefer writing on Medium over writing on my own blog.
On Medium, you can write about any topic.
I’ve had two Wordpress blogs over the years. One was about film photography, and one was about movies. What was reassuring about them was that I knew exactly what topic I was going to write about. I didn’t have to worry that readers — if they existed — weren’t interested in a post. In theory, only interested readers would have found their way to the page via Google search results.
The reason I didn’t keep either blog going for long, though, is that I quickly became constrained by the blog topic. I eventually wanted to write about a broader variety of things, but I didn’t see how I could do that within the framework of the blog I’d created.
Medium solves this problem. I can write about anything. It doesn’t necessarily mean that someone will want to read it, but that’s another matter.
A Medium blog is easy to set up.
Another reason I didn’t keep my Wordpress blogs going is that the technical work of keeping the blog going became a distraction from writing. Both of them were self-hosted installations of Wordpress. I enjoyed choosing the theme and tinkering with images, HTML, and CSS. It’s exciting to plan and set up a website.
It can also be tiring to keep it going once created. You need to install updates to Wordpress and your plugins. Wordpress security is always an issue to stay on to date on if you have a self-hosted blog.
Medium is totally different in that all the technical work and hosting is already done. There’s no need to install anything, think of a blog name, or buy a web domain.
I like the simplicity of that and the clean, visually pleasing aesthetic of Medium. I also appreciate features of the interface, such as seeing my draft stories’ read time.
Medium’s community is a huge plus.
A great strength of Medium, and something I truly value, is its community. Medium gives you access to a strong and vibrant network of writers and the chance to comment on their work, follow them, and make connections. You also have access to a large bank of readers. It’s more a matter of diverting their attention to your story than trying to get random Googling readers to find your Wordpress blog in the vast internet sea.
The Medium mystery — who are the readers and what do they want?
I think Medium is a great place for blogging. However, I’m still figuring out what a good Medium post is and what makes people want to read it. Now I have freedom and I’m not constrained by topic — but with the freedom also comes self doubt.
Are most Medium readers also writers? Are most Medium readers returning visitors, or do they read one story and migrate away from the site? I don’t know yet.
Conclusion
I can see the utility of a Wordpress blog for someone who has an established audience or wants a website to host their own writing outside of Medium. For someone building an audience from zero, though, I think Medium makes a lot of sense.
I’m happy to be able to give the technical website maintenance duties over to Medium and grateful that this community exists. And I’ll keep on working on figuring out how to write for this platform.
