Medium Vs Substack: Complete review of both the blogging platforms ... Which writing platform is the best ... Which Platform Is Best To Make Money Writing?
Aamir Kamal 🚀 ... Published in Menlo Blogging
Jun 15, 2020 (Accessed July 2022)
I and one of my friends have a healthy discussion about the benefits of writing on Medium Vs Substack. Substack is quite a new site compared to Medium but very powerful and you could make more money repeatedly on Substack. There are pros and cons of both these platforms, Medium and Substack, and we will discuss everything you need to know about both the platforms.
When you start writing on a platform, you look into many things. The benefits of any platform are relative to your goals or what you want to achieve with your writing. Obviously, not everyone is writing for making money, some startup founders are writing for promoting their brand so they are indirectly making money through the platform.
I started writing on Quora, then I started my own blog and writing about how-to topics and then I started uploading videos on YouTube and after that, I started writing on Medium. And, in the end, I started writing on Substack so I am fairly qualified to answer all your all questions about Substack Vs Medium comparison.
Everything you need to know about Substack:
- Substack is started in 2017 with the goal that the platform will offer something different from all other blogging platforms. They have brought something unique to the table and that was “Email marketing” Substack's blog design isn’t that great right now but their editor and the design of the User-interference is as great as Medium.
Here are some Pros of writing on Substack:
- You can write great, high-quality articles on Substack and build an Email list of interested readers by using Substack infrastructure. To collect emails, there are some platforms that cost money but Substack does it for you for free.
- When you build an email list, the list is yours and you could move to another platform and take the list of email subscribers with yourself. This is one of the pros that outclass any other blogging platform including Medium.
- Email is a more personal way to reach your target audience. Relying on just algorithms is a very bad decision you could make. When you publish content on your Substack blog, Substack sends that article in an email to all your email subscribers.
- Substack is designed in such a way to increase email subscriptions for your content.
- One of the best things about the Substack paid newsletter is that you can grow your newsletter and make money on a monthly basis.
- You can now get your own domain name and attach it to the Substack newsletter. Attaching your custom domain on Substack is very easy and you could brand yourself more effectively.
I can go on and add more benefits to writing on Substack. The company is new and still in the development stage, it will take some time where you could see some advanced options. They don’t run ads or any other promotional way.
And the most interesting thing about Substack is;
- Substack makes money when its user makes money.
- Their business model revolves around writers who publish great content on Substack. They get a 10% commission from what you make in a month from a user.
Here are some cons of writing on Substack:
- The structure of the subdomain: Subdomain takes a lot of time to get ranked on search engines. Take for example Medium, your blog URL look like “Medium.com/title-random-number” while in the case of the Substack blog address it looks like “yourname.substack.com/title” this type of the URL have a hard time getting ranked on search engines.
- Advanced reporting: You just get the total number of views on your Substack story. That’s sit. A basic question like where is traffic coming from? the geography of the readers and countless other questions, we still have no answer for that.
- The design of your homepage: Still, I didn’t find it as attractive as Medium. When a reader wants to read more of your articles on your Substack blog, the title and the image must be there to attract her to read more stuff.
- In the Paid newsletter, your loyal readers choose to pay on a monthly basis for reading your articles. Substack as an email marketing platform combined with a writing platform. Substack is good for people who can’t afford to pay for expensive bulk email marketing services like Mailchimp, or Aweber. I, myself use Substack as an email marketing platform.
I think the future of blogging is platforms like Quora, Medium, and Substack. They are going to pay you for creating content for them and at the same time, you can grow your following and make more money with every passing time. I was using Substack for quite a time but one thing I really didn’t like about it is their design for writers.
Building a brand on Substack through getting a custom domain:
- Recently Substack announced that you can connect a custom domain in your Substack publication. I think this is one of the best things for any writer on Substack. All you have to do is to buy a custom domain and then pay a one-time $50 to Substack and you can host your website and use Substack technology to grow your community.
Before introducing a custom domain they offer a sub-domain, now everybody knows that it is very difficult to rank a sub-domain on Google, now you can get endless traffic and hundreds of Substack newsletter subscribers. There will be a limitation of monetizing your substack blog but if you have a targeted audience then brands could approach you to give them space in your weekly newsletters on Substack.
This is all you should know about writing on Substack.
Everything you should know about Medium:
Okay, if you are already a writer on Medium then you might already know enough about the platform but let me discuss some very important concepts here.
- The medium business model is based on Subscription-based. You only can read unlimited articles on Medium if you are a Medium member. To read articles on Medium, you need to be a Medium member, just by paying $5 a month, you can access to read thousands of articles. Join Medium membership here and support me and thousands of writers on the platform.
- Writers get paid based on getting more read time from more Medium members.
- As a Medium writer, you don’t make money from reads of people who aren’t Medium members. The opportunity to make money on Medium is limited. How To Make $100 a Month On Medium Without Getting Curated or Published in Popular Publication
- Medium has a great domain authority which means that your article gets ranked for keywords with high competition. A high competition keyword often has high search volume so this means you will receive more traffic on your blog.
- Medium works based on Algorithms. The algorithm recommends your content similar to how Facebook, YouTube, and Quora have an algorithm to show content to a user that he/she might be interested in. This could be advantageous for some while not good for others.
Comparison between Medium Vs Substack
Medium has great search engine optimization while Substack is not that optimized for search because of the subdomain factor and the popularity factor. One reason may be that Substack is new compared to Medium.
The medium business model is completely different from Substack. Substack makes money when a writer gets a paid member, while Medium is a site where writers get paid based on Medium member read time.
Even though Medium also has a newsletter system but Substack is highly optimized for capturing emails from your readers. The function of sending emails is available in both, Medium and Substack, but Substack is more oriented toward email marketing.
As Substack now gives a custom domain feature, you can connect your custom domain with Substack which will help you building an audience for yourself. Even though Medium has a great domain authority but with your own domain name, you can achieve much more freedom compared to writing on Medium.
The flix: Write on Substack And republish that story on Medium:
- If you are deciding between the right platform to write then the first thing you need to figure out is; Is Medium or Substack is going to be the first platform where you will share your story? Publish on both writing platforms but you can also first publish your story on Substack then republish it on Medium by adding the canonical URL. The application of using the Canonical URL is that it tells the search engine crawler that this post is originally published in this URL.
I run a Facebook group targeted toward the Entrepreneurs and startups scene for a country I am living and Substack helped me reaching to those audiences. I am interested to generate up to 100,000 email lists for those Entrepreneurs. Even though I am not interested to monetize my writing on Substack for the next 5 years but still, I am hoping to build a community of people interested in my writing.
While on Medium, I write about Digital Marketing and Blogging to help people make money online.
In the end, I would say.
Try both the platforms, dedicate some time to each of the platforms and use it as a marketing tool for your writing, deliver good quality content and you will see a surge in your readers and email subscribers.
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