Should you blog on Medium or create a website from scratch?
I’ve decided to go with Medium but maybe personalising it and adding your flair may suite you better
Life is forever constant. When we reach such-and-such job, we ask ourselves: now what? then trail to reach such-and-such house and the cycle goes on. Like in the image, many things occur at once, albeit in our control or not, and we simply cannot stop it from happening.
Many of us turn to writing for solace — a space where we truly have control (of our thoughts) but when I started writing, I pondered whether I should write here on MEDIUM or create a site. Obviously I have decided which one already but here’s why:
Points for Medium 📒
Medium has a unique distribution channel, like Youtube, it’ll recommend articles to your feed if it matches with your reading history so you can easily find aspiring writers to well-known celebrities (Yes, I’m looking at you Barack Obama).
This is good for young writers who are just starting out since recently published articles by unpopular writers have the potential to be recognised. On one of my first few posts, I received one clap and I was extremely exhilarated. Someone actually found my writing useful ?!?!?
That seemingly unextraordinary clap encouraged me to continue writing. Generally, this close feedback loop can be a pat on the back for doubting and new writers to continue writing amid the grim statistics!
In addition, once the stars have aligned and your posts do extremely well in terms of reading time, you can earn money from Medium’s scheme (passive income woohoo).
Points for creating a personal site 📔
While Medium holds a lot of appeal, you actually give up a lot of unique design elements to it.
For an instance, I can’t change the font of this very article if I wanted to (except for Serif 1, Serif 2, Sans Serif 1 which are the default fonts available).
While creating a site from scratch can be time consuming and meticulous too, you can adapt it to your style (as cliche as it sounds). You can also have fun in growing your audience/ driving traffic to your site — a challenging yet somewhat exciting problem to tackle.
If you can’t code, here are some tools you can create your site with :
💡TLDR; All in all, Medium can be particularly handy if you don’t have a big following already so it’s easy to be exposed and have readers on your articles instantly. However, you do lose a lot of identity expression since you can’t design the font, colour scheme or image location and anything in between (unlike blogging on a personal site). You do would find yourself struggling to gain traction especially if you’re just starting out with a personal site since unlike having access to Medium’s unique distribution channel where random users can find random articles like your own — it could get tough but where’s the fun without it right?
Personally, I’ve decided to stick with Medium since I’m frankly too lazy to design and create my own site from scratch. Medium also has real-time statistics on how my articles are doing so I really appreciate that and as a result, has not forced me to leave Medium (yet)!
