Most marketers assume they need massive ad budgets or SEO dominance to reach new audiences. But HubSpot proved otherwise with a smart, low-cost experiment: publishing content on Medium.
They ran a test. Instead of relying solely on their blog, they republished and created new articles on Medium — a platform designed for high-quality content discovery.
The Results?
- They gained 160,000 readers in just 7 months.
- 89.7% of those readers were brand new — people who had never interacted with HubSpot before.
That’s tens of thousands of new potential users, all from a platform they didn’t own.
But here’s the best part…
The biggest traffic driver wasn’t even HubSpot’s own distribution — it was automated guest contributions.
So What Are Guest Contributions?
On Medium, when an article gets traction (reads, claps, shares), large publications — many with hundreds of thousands of followers — take notice. Medium makes it incredibly easy for these publications to invite you to contribute your post to their feed.
Here’s what happened to me — not once, but three times:
- I published an article.
- A few days later, I received a “Guest Contributor” request by email from a large Medium publication.
- I clicked “Accept,” and my article was instantly shared with new audiences — without needing to rewrite or reformat a thing.
One of my articles was picked up by Startup Grind, which has over 234,000 followers. As a result:
- My Medium content has reached over 40,000 readers.
- More than 1,000 people joined my email list — all without ads.
Why Do Big Publications Do This?
Because Medium makes it easy for them:
- Great content is easy to find — they can see the number of claps and comments.
- Inviting a writer takes one click.
- No editing required — the formatting and publishing are instant.
This means your content can scale far beyond your own audience if you simply show up, publish, and engage on the platform.
If you’re a content creator, marketer, founder, or writer — Medium is an underrated growth channel with compounding reach.
HubSpot proved it. I’ve done it.
And you can, too.