You can publish once through WordPress and automatically create a post in Medium. Genius.
Earlier I blasted everyone on my RSS feed with a crazy post of a lot of type headers.
The email, “Medium cross-posting test from WordPress!” was meant to be a test post of publishing to both platforms.
It worked… way too well.
But amazingly, it also got a ton of emails back in my inbox:
How did you do this???
Can you tell me how you set up the Medium cross-posting? Is it a WordPress plugin?
A lot of people ask me what’s better for publishing: WordPress or Medium?
Both have pros and cons as platforms (Medium is beautiful right out of the bat and you can connect with more people sooner; WordPress lets you own your content and collect email addresses).
As far as maintaining ownership over content goes, WordPress has always been the one I stick with.
And then I go back over to Medium and publish there, too.
Fed up, I finally asked the my Facebook universe for advice. I got an amazing answer: use a brilliant plugin to publish to both places at once.
Genius.
Now, don’t do what I did, though — I set up a test post and promptly blasted both my email list and my Medium list with a silly test post with styles and type. There’s a case of systems gone way too well: my WordPress post published on Medium, blasted to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, my personal page, Google+, and beyond. I spent a bit of time wandering around the social web to edit out the sample post.
That email, though, is stuck in your inbox forever.
Here’s how to set up your WordPress site to publish to Medium at the same time:
1 — Install the Medium plugin on your WordPress site.
If you installed WordPress on your own website (from WordPress.org, which means you’re not running a website through WordPress.com), then go to the plugins and search for “Medium.”
You can also get the plugin here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/medium/
Install the plugin, and then click “activate.”
2 — Go to your user profile (Users > Your Profile) and find the Medium section.
3 — Get an integration token from your Medium page.
Go to Medium.com and under “settings,” scroll down to integrations. Create a new token and copy it exactly and bring it back to your WordPress site. Paste it into the empty field that says “integration token.”
** If this doesn’t work for you — it didn’t for me the first time — log out of your WordPress site and then log in again. It worked for both websites I installed it on after logging out and back in. **
4 — Select the settings you want from the user profile, (even the publication!). Then go to your individual post and confirm when you publish that you want this piece cross-posted to Medium.
This is what the publications menu looks like within an individual post (left).
You can select whether to notify people about the post, what publication you want to add it to, and whether or not you want cross-links.
More notes — How to set up styles to work with Medium:
- The first line of your WordPress post should be an H4 to render as a sub-title on Medium.
- H1 and H2 styles show up as the large text (T) option in Medium.
- H3 through H5 styles should up as the small text option in Medium.
- A blockquote shows up as a small quote in Medium.
- I haven’t yet figured out how to make a big quote come through in Medium.
- Once you finish a post in WordPress and press publish, any edits you make to the post won’t update over on the Medium site.
