Why I Transitioned From Medium To My Own Blog

When I first thought I would like to write things learned from my experience as software tester I did not have any kind of a plan.

"Should I buy a domain? How should I name it? How am I going to manage all the stuff a blog requires? Do I need a theme for it? I don't even have a plan on what to write though." These kind of things were running through my head by that time. And by that time I refer to the end of 2016.

So, I needed something to quickly help me start writing, without needing to focus on any of the above aspects. And I thought Medium should be the answer. Simple.

I got so excited when I published my first article on Medium and when my first views came in. I was also excited by how easy is to write on Medium, having all the formatting you need to make your article look pretty. And after the first one, came the second, the third and I started to feel like a small blogger.

Publishing on Medium was from the first moment really enjoyable and effortless.

By that time I had no focus nor knowledge about SEO nor knew any ways to improve my reading rate. I started to read a lot on "how to get more views on Medium" stuff. The influencers teach you to read a lot of articles, to comment a lot on the articles you're reading to make you visible, to include other posts in yours, to submit your content to be published on big and prestigious publications. And I did almost all of these. I had some luck, much of it thanks to the publications I choose to publish on, but felt that this is not my way, this is not the way I would like to grow my blog.

And that was the moment I started to doubt my activity on Medium.

The moment when I did not quit writing, but kept my articles away from any publication. And the views went down again. Besides this, I realised I reduced my time spent on Medium reading various articles and that's also because of the Medium's featured articles policy and by the article suggestions which are not exactly what I'm looking for anymore.

On top of that, I wanted to create my own brand, so to speak. Reading one of my articles on Medium, almost no one would say that read something interesting on Testing Land, but read on Medium. It's like buying a brand from Amazon, instead of buying directly from the producer.

Will I stop writing on Medium? Definitely not. I am aware that there are people following me there and I want to keep them up to date.

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Photo by Larisa Birta on Unsplash.