I would like to open a blog with a bunch of technical posts about meteor, node.js and the cloud. My main goal is to advertise myself as a consultant, very much like @arunoda is doing with kadira.
Since I have free hosting, and I’m knowledgeable about deployment for me it would a no brainer to deploy my own solution.
Anyhow I see that a lot of wise people are using medium instead, maybe because it boosts your popularity by sharing your content in a large community, maybe due to the ease of mind of not having to think about deployment.
What’s your take guys? I guess this a popular subject among freelancers, would you use medium or roll your own? and why?
What I have done in the past, and see a lot of other people doing is both. I recommend using your own blog to manage an actual following, get an emailing list going, etc, but use Medium to get a broader reach.
it’s up to you, I would probably use multiple sections if arguments are at least slightly correlated (deployment vs HR interview), or use different blogs if correlation is none (IT vs cooking).
What would you use medium for? the more technical topics, or the light stuff?
Depends on what kind of articles you are writing. It seems like Medium is best used for small, single bit of technical advice type things, such as “Here is how you use promises with meteor” or “here is how you optimize your meteor methods”.
Personal blogs are usually a bit better for long-term, multi-part, sequential series.
I’m a big fan of Medium for thought articles, but I do wish they had some better code support so that might leave you a little annoyed!
Medium does have its own powerful marketing engine that spreads the word like you suspect, but you still have to do your own marketing also. I believe they measure you for “quality” and will push your articles somewhat based on that. I recall reading some articles about them doing this somewhere but I can’t find them.
Perhaps you can do a mixture of both? Or maybe using Medium + gist?
I would use medium. I think for me I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s more smart (as a business) to use the blog to write about business related stuff/updates and on medium about general stuff that’s losely (last line: hey i do x, check me out) tied to you/the business.
It should help your SEO when you mention and link to your site though imo. It should a lot, shouldn’t it? Medium has a huge domain authority, so links from medium give you a big backlink boost. That’s why I mentioned the last line in my post.
I’d embrace medium anyway for the light stuff and keep the core on the blog where to build a mailing list.
At least, that’s my plan.
Medium is an awesome outlet to expand your reach and can’t be ignored imho.
Like Quora, reddit, twitter, facebook, etc. everything has its advantages. I don’t believe in repurposing existing blog articles as many suggest, though.
I think that each media outlet has its own type of content/interaction and you should fit in if you want some results.
Finally everything should point to your blog either follow or no-follow
I use Medium extensively mostly because I am super lazy. That being said, I know of a lot of good people using Ghost. I believe it was created by one of the former Wordpress creators, and you can get a lot more customizability out of it than you can with Medium.
It’s kind of like halfway between Wordpress and Medium in terms of flexibility. That way, you can maintain control without the hassle of building things out from scratch (as much fun as that can be, it can be annoying to maintain). Ghost has SEO features built-in for you, just like Medium does. No need to configure your own open-graph tags.
! Nevermind, ship everything to the blog then 
