Medium blogging platform: A detailed usage guide for marketers. Television series medium essence, criticism, about the film television series medium buy Translation made by the company

The team behind the social media posting service Buffer described in their blog how to use the Medium blogging platform for marketing purposes. What is Medium, why is it worth using this resource and what are the main metrics of the service - the number of visitors, the optimal title length, and so on.

The CPU publishes the translation of the note by the Interweb Pro team.

Suppose you have a desire to create a blog with zero budget. Imagine an online service where you can publish your thoughts, tips, knowledge gained, share them with regular readers and get viral traffic. Imagine a really good blogging app.

Ctrl + Alt + 0 = Start a new paragraph;
Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Transform text block: Apply Heading 1 style;
Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Transform text block: Apply Heading 2 style;
Ctrl + Alt + 5 = Transform text block: Highlight quote;
Ctrl + Alt + 6 = Text Block Transformation: Formatting in HTML code;
Ctrl + Alt + 3 = Transform text block: Apply Heading 3 style;
Ctrl + b = Make text bold Ctrl + k = Add new link;
Ctrl + i = Italicize text;
Ctrl + e = Align text to the center (this keyboard shortcut seems to replace the removed keyboard shortcut Ctrl + 7);
Ctrl + := Loads a menu with most (but not all) keyboard shortcuts.

In expanding the network, Medium has done a great job of sharing tips and tricks with bloggers on how to succeed on their site (we often refer to their material on the optimal article length).

Although there is no word limit on Medium for any story, articles of 400 words or more tend to be the most popular.
Write a title that best captures the essence of your story.
Post high-quality photos at the start of your story (900px minimum or 900×900). Horizontal images work better than vertical ones.
If necessary, use text formatting: two levels of headings, footnotes for notes, hyperlinks, section highlighting.
Get feedback on the draft of your story, check text for grammar, punctuation, and formatting.
Post to Medium Collections (now called "Posts").

Should You Use Medium for Content Writing?

If we take a closer look at the statistics of Medium, we will see the following: the audience of Medium has more than 650 thousand users.

(All users, by default, become subscribers to the Editors Picks, which has about 651,000 readers. Therefore, we can assume that the number of Medium users reaches this figure.)

For those just getting started with blogging, Medium can provide a huge amount of loyal readers. This is a big plus. No need to spend energy on creating and maintaining a blog. The already assembled readership makes it easy to achieve viral traffic.

Medium is a great choice for those new to blogging. For those who already use blogs, you should pay attention to this service as a new option.

One of the most interesting discussions I've heard about hosting resources is sharecropping (Julie Neidlinger's term). Sharecropping is posting notes to a place you don't control.

The question of using owned media (a blog on your personal server) or earned media is always worth it.

I like the way Ann Friedman answers the question of where she publishes her "free" work.

I try to publish works for which no one will pay me, only on platforms that are personally owned by me. I'd rather publish something on my blog than post it for free on some Huffington Post or Medium. After all, I want people to see my name at the top of the site and then look at my additional work. Here is a plus that is not there when I publish an article for free on some other resource.

Should you use Medium if you have a separate personal channel for keeping records? I would definitely use two options. And as you will read below, there are advantages to this approach.

Medium Guide for Marketers

The amount of traffic you can expect from new content

What kind of traffic can you get from Medium?

The actual number is rather difficult to determine. I looked at the statistics of the posts that Buffer posted on Medium. It will help you get an idea of the possibilities of Medium.

Some of the articles we posted got more traffic than others. Their success is well represented in the table below. Take a look.

Is content doing well on Medium? Should I publish my material on Medium? The answer most likely depends on what you can get on your personal blog as opposed to Medium.

Platform user and marketer Mike Essex checked the results of his published article on Medium and concluded that publishing on it was worth the time.

Within six hours, my post on Medium had surpassed the number of views I could get in my entire life on my personal website. Within 24 hours, the numbers quadrupled.

How to write a title in Medium

Another unique feature of Medium is headlines. SEO title is not common on Medium compared to other blogs. Due to the fact that content is searched by users within the network, it is important to come up with a title that will resonate with the reader.

For this reason, the list of the top 100 entries on Medium has a wide variety of titles:

headings containing advice;
titles with full sentences;
very short titles;
very long titles.

I counted the number of characters in the top 100 stories in January and found that the average headline length was 42 characters. For reference, the title shown below has 41 characters:

I Almost Let My Failed Startup Destroy Me

And, of course, one of our top headline writing tips (anywhere - blogs, Twitter, etc.) is that the first three and last three words of a headline will always be the most prominent. Take note.

Average length of most read stories

In addition, I also calculated the reading time of the top 100 stories (medium-length stories) for January. Since the time factor plays an important role on this service, it would be nice to know how many minutes a medium-length material should take the reader.

Average length of the top 100 entries: 7.25 minutes.

The materials varied greatly. In the top 10 there were articles for both three minutes and 28.

In addition, the best advice on the topic of the length and time of the material is voiced by the Medium team itself. There is a direct correlation between how much time people spend writing notes and how well a post performs. Quality is above all.

1. Repost your content on Medium

One of the most obvious tricks - which we used at Buffer - is reposting content on Medium. You expose material to a new readership, which makes it possible to re-increase momentum.

2. Add a link to your website or blog

Medium gives you a huge amount of creative freedom in taking notes. One interesting technique that is often used when publishing is to leave space for a link at the end of the material. Specify a call to action and add a link with a transition to your blog.

5. Track visits to your site using UTM parameters

Another great tip from Chloe Mason Gray at KISSmetrics is to use UTM parameters to see which Medium content is driving the most traffic to your site.

With this material, we open a whole series of publications about interesting devices that can serve as an excellent gift for a person in love with photography. After all, today photography is not only a camera or a lens. This is a whole world of tools and accessories that open up new creative possibilities or simply make life easier for a photographer.

Most often, a graphics tablet is perceived as a tool for an artist, illustrator or graphic designer. However, it can also be useful to the photographer. The element of tablets is small and precise handmade work with images.

The desktop graphics tablet is an input tool on par with the mouse and trackpad. Working with a tablet and an electronic pen at a computer is like working with a brush or pencil on paper or an easel.

Let's take a look at how a graphics tablet differs from other input tools on a PC.

Using a tablet gives you more control over your brush and other editing tools.

When working in graphic editors, the tablet can be configured so that depending on the degree of pressure on the pen, the opacity of the brush and its size change.

By tilting the professional Wacom GripPen or ProPen, you can control the shape of the brush.

Additional customizable keys are available that allow you to work on pictures without a keyboard.

Any actions related to drawing, selection, are much more convenient to perform with a pen. In Lightroom, this is drawing masks on gradients, Adjustment Brush and Spot Removal. In Photoshop, the tablet comes in handy when using the Dodge & Burn technique, stacking exposures, gluing layers, painting masks and retouching.

There is only one nuance. When you first try to use a tablet, your hands tend to tremble and it is very difficult to position the pen correctly. What to do? You need to continue to use it, and not only when processing and drawing, but also during the current work on the computer. After a few days, you will notice that the pen is much more comfortable than a mouse.

The size of the tablet should be selected taking into account the tasks and the size of your monitor. The larger the working area of a graphics tablet, the more precisely you can position the pen. However, if it is much larger than the monitor, moving the brush from one corner of the screen to another on the tablet will have to cover a relatively large distance. To avoid this, you can set up a mapping between the tablet and the monitor.

Appearance

The Wacom Intuos Pro Medium is a rectangle slightly larger than an A4 sheet: 380 x 250 mm. Under the working area, a plot of 224 x 140 mm is allotted here. Its borders are highlighted with luminous markers. The tablet is light (0.97 kg) and thin (12 mm).

Connection to a computer is carried out either using a small Wi-Fi module located in a special compartment on the tablet case, or via a mini-USB cable.

Wacom professional tablets come with a pen stand with interchangeable nibs at the bottom: 5 standard nibs, 1 flexible nib, 1 brush nib (Stroke), 3 felt-tip nibs (Felt).

8 control buttons on the tablet, a four-way Touch Ring and two keys on the pen are available for customization. The buttons are collected in two groups of 4 pieces - above and below the Touch Ring. They have notches of various shapes, easily distinguishable by touch, so that you can work without taking your eyes off the monitor.

The tablet adapts to the right or left hand.

All controls are customizable for different applications. And the information display allows you to get quick access to a particular group of settings.

First, you determine for which application the setting is being made, then you choose what exactly you will configure, and set your own commands for each button.

In addition, the Circular Menu is available here - an on-screen menu that organizes access to frequently used application functions. Each button or item of the radial menu is assigned a command for a combination of hot keys. Thus, from the tablet, you can access any commands or menu items activated by hot keys. Also, by pressing a button on the tablet, you can call scripts or Adobe Photoshop scripts, perform batch processing.

Let's move on to setting up the tablet to work in the main photo editors.

From time to time, Fox (Russia) and Fox Life (Russia) channels show the TV series "Medium" on repeat. In 7 seasons of the series, you not only solve crimes together with the main characters, but also follow the life ups and downs of the main character's family. The husband loses his job and finds a job, the children grow up and you and Allison Dubois (played by Patricia Arquette) solve the problems of the transitional age of her eldest daughter, rejoice at the success of the middle daughter and have fun looking at the youngest daughter.

The family of the main character is simply charming, although "poor dad" periodically comes to mind - he lives in a house with four blondes and each of them has "cockroaches in their heads." The series develops around the supernatural abilities of the main character to see prophetic dreams and communicate with the dead. According to the plot Medium Alison Duboisworks as an independent consultant in the prosecutor's office of the city of Phoenix, Arizona and sees dreams about murders and kidnappings, talks with the ghost of her father-in-law and an FBI agent, the dead periodically move into her body to restore justice and take revenge on the killer, and in one of the episodes she stopped hearing, just like a completely deaf girl who was kidnapped. Alison works with friends - Prosecutor Devalos (played by Miguel Sandoval)and investigator Lee Scanlon (David Cubitt).
In each episode, Allison wakes up in the middle of the night from a nightmare she saw in a dream, and her faithful loving husband Joe DuBois (played by Jake Weber) consoles her and tries to help in interpreting the dream. Joe Dubois is an engineer-inventor, so he tries to explain any dream and any situation simply and logically. As a rule, before Allison and her friends pin down the criminals, we have to view several dreams, and each next one brings us closer to the solution.

By the way, not only Allison has the gift of a medium, her daughters also have it in various forms. From time to time, either the eldest daughter or the middle daughter helped her mother in the investigation of criminal cases. Each of the daughters has a gift of its own and each of the girls treats it differently - it prevents the older one from living, just like her mother, and the middle and younger ones simply accept life as it is. Brother Allison Dubois, who periodically appears in the series, also has a gift, but he has it in a "lighter form" - he helps him to be lucky.

Periodically in the series, Joe Dubois' mother appears, who loves her granddaughters, but nags Allison and Joe. There were episodes where Allison worked behind the scenes for a missing persons agency. And somehow I got a job in a very cool company.

In general, a very nice series, in which, apart from mysticism, there is a lot of humor and descriptions of life situations that we all face in one way or another.

The site, which is known throughout the world for the quality and completeness of the presentation of thoughts, now allows you to read absolutely all the content without using a browser.
To begin with, it’s worth talking a little about the Medium resource itself. This is a blog platform where smart and interesting people write about their thoughts, ideas, experiences and achievements, about how they solved their problems, advise how to behave as a novice businessman or programmer. There are a lot of articles, they are constantly updated by writers, but at the same time, the main requirement for all content is preserved - it is easy to read, the idea is expressed in a very large number of sentences and at the same time everything is correct, without errors, both grammatical and semantic. For some, the resource will be difficult to master due to the fact that all the content is in English. After the site gained popularity, the creators decided to develop a client for iOS, because it allows you to show much more beauties of graphics and animation than a web page in a mobile browser. Now it's time to try this miracle, to feel all the cool things that the creators have added here.

Item quality

Probably, many are accustomed to the fact that blog entries on web pages of a mobile browser are a wall of text, which is sometimes not even formatted in paragraphs and such text is perceived very hard. Another thing is when Medium has excellent headlines in large font, from which it immediately becomes clear whether the thought is over or not, what will happen next. In addition, the platform allows you to display quotes in the client in the form of beautiful inserts, images without frames and large indents. We also really liked the fact that the pictures always look high quality, clearly inserted. Sometimes on websites, images are stretched and do not fit into the screen. There is no such thing here. There are regular links that open immediately in the browser, there are inserts from unique fonts. By the way, they are always displayed correctly, even if it is exotic. In the browser, unique fonts do not always work correctly.

Entries

The content of the resource is not in vain compared in quality with Habrahabr - here is only the best, most interesting, voluminous. Users who have worked in a particular area for many years write about their experience, about what mistakes they made, what literature is better to master for a particular profession, describe interesting moments from their lives or world news. These are not short entries where nothing is disclosed, but large entries of 3 thousand characters each. Moreover, not everyone can write here, and as a result, the content is exceptional.

Chips

The application allowed the creators of the product to design their brainchild in a very beautiful way. For example, here instead of vertical scrolling for viewing news, there is horizontal scrolling - they swiped their finger and saw new news. Also in the title of the article is a full-screen image, but when reading the news further, the image passes, slowly becoming transparent. The same thing happens when viewing a writer's profile. Each element is drawn to the pixel, each letter looks nice. No one says that this is the main thing in this type of product, but still, a nice user interface is better than an ugly web page.

Outcome

The program began to be used along with other news applications from other resources like iphones or appleinsider - these applications consume less traffic, work faster. If you are a fan of the Medium project and constantly read articles, then why not make reading more enjoyable and easier? After all, the program is free, does not require any subscriptions - just read, send to friends on social networks and become a little smarter. The ideal solution.

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