by: AskPat 764 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey what's up, everyone? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 764 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
And now here's today's question from John.
John: Hi Pat, this is John from MoneySmartGuides.com and in a recent SPI podcast you were talking about using Medium for guest posting and my question is, in terms of guest posting, would you treat Medium sort of like a web 2.0 property where you would place links back to your main blog within the content or is there another way that you would really be using Medium for your guest posting services? Thanks a lot.
Pat Flynn: Hey John, thank you so much for the question. For those of you who don't know what Medium is, it's an amazing website that a lot of people use to start writing. Whether they have a website or not, they treat it like it's almost their own property. I actually wouldn't, John, treat it like a “web 2.0 property.” Where John is coming from is, there was a strategy that I had used and I had talked about that I had developed from somebody else back in the day when I was creating niche sites back in 2010, where you could actually game Google by building new websites then linking to your own website to increase the authority level you have in your own website.
I wouldn't even worry about doing that kind of stuff any more, John, and everybody else. What you want to do now is naturally post things to help people, provide value, naturally link to wherever you feel you need to link to in order to best help the people who are reading that content or absorbing that content in some way. On Medium, which is a great website and I recommended using Medium as a place to, even if you don't have a website but you have a topic of interest in mind, just to use it to start writing because it's very easy to set up.
You get your own sort of editing platform there to be able to start posting things and you can start to begin to learn what it's like and experience what it's like to write something and post it online without having to build your own website. Are you going to make money from Medium? Probably not. Are you going to build an incredibly massive fan base on Medium? Probably not, but what you can do is just get started and you can start to get noticed and you can start to just learn what it's like to post stuff on the web that you write.
That alone is a skill that you need to know how to learn to do and even before you have a website you can start learning to do that now using Medium as the content platform. Now obviously pick topics that you're interested in, that you know a little bit about or that you want to dive into, but it's open reign there. You can write whatever you want, which is great and it's an amazingly well put together website. It's easy to use. Now if you have a website and you want to help it out a little bit, you can write posts on Medium, but what I wouldn't do is take a post that you've already written and post it there and link back to your website.
I wouldn't do that because they'll check and they might ban your account because they want unique content on there. I wouldn't post content on there that you've shared anywhere else, like on another website, a guest post that you may have posted somewhere else. You don't want to take that and put in on Medium as well. I would hardly even say that you could consider repurposing content that you've already written. You really want to treat Medium as if it's an extension of your own website and create unique stuff and share amazing information that might be shared.
Yes, you can link back to your website but I wouldn't start writing content specifically on Medium to start gaming the system and building authority for your own website. What it is, it's a practice ground for you and your writing skills. It's a place for you to extend where your blog is and to potentially start to make some noise. Hopefully that helps, John. I want to wish you all the best and thank you so much for your question today. I'm going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.
For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to askpat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much, I appreciate you and as always, keep rocking it.
And here's a quote to finish off the day from Henry Ford. He says, “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” Thanks for working with me guys, I appreciate you and here's to you and your success as well. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.