Not everyone has the time or interest in running their own blog, so it’s exciting to see new tools like Medium growing in popularity.

The team at Medium describes the site as, “A better place to read and write things that matter.” Our take is that it’s a blog collective that groups articles into broad categories.

Creative professionals often manage their own sites to showcase their portfolio, but blogging often gets overlooked. Medium offers a platform to write, but one that puts less pressure on you to pump out frequent posts.

There’s a psychological weight that comes with publishing your own blog. No one wants to see a blog with the newest post being something you wrote 6 months ago. With Medium, your content isn’t front and center unless it’s 1) new and 2) trending with readers. It’s a lower pressure place to test your ideas. So it doesn’t matter if you write something once a week or once a year.

In terms of mechanics, Medium may be one of the easiest writing platforms we’ve ever seen. They passed on having all the bells and whistles of Wordpress to make a CMS (Content Management System) that’s incredibly clean. It’s simply a pleasure to use.

From a marketing perspective there’s certainly a trade off to using Medium versus your own site. Blogging on your own site will potentially help improve the search ranking of your website, which ultimately may lead new customers your way. On the other hand, writing on Medium may make you more discoverable, and linking back to your site may help boost your rankings too.

CentUp isn’t something that you can implement on Medium (yet) but we hope some day they consider adding us all into the fold as they evolve their product. In the meantime, we fully support the wonderful community Ev Williams and team are building and encourage you to join them. They’re still technically invite-only, but find some of their folks on Twitter and ask them for an invite. They’re pretty nice about letting in interested parties.