The written word has helped mold and shape the internet from day one. Sometimes even mere ideas presented by anonymous users with pseudonyms have launched entire new segments of internet technology, solved major problems, created useful systems, and spawned legions of devotees.

But, the way we write on the internet has also evolved from black and white bulletin board systems, to small personal websites, to live chat rooms, to blog platforms, to daily short posts on social media platforms, to long-form super in-depth content – the users of the internet have continued to demand new ways in which to consume the written word from brands, thought leaders, friends, and family.

These are the platforms, new and old, you should consider writing on in 2021. Some of these may help your content writing find a new audience, some of these might be used to generate revenue directly, some can be used to gain valuable links for your link building, and others can quickly and more easily rank your content in search engines.

1. Substack

Substack is an incredibly useful merger of a blogging platform and email newsletter system. The platform allows anyone to create a simple blog where they can post content and pairs it up with a slew of email newsletter options including the ability to only allow paid subscribers to see certain content. The ability for anyone to instantly have a blog, email newletter, spam-free comment section, and potential revenue stream makes Substack one of the best new writing platforms on the web.

There are also quite a few versatile ways to use Substack. Here are some of the usage cases we have come up with in our testing:

• Secret Coupon Club for Ecommerce – Get your most devoted customers to pay you for deeper discounts automatically distributed by Substack’s newsletter system. [see an example we built here]
• Local Independent Journalist – Small town and even big city reporters are facing reduced pay as the web cares more about sensational clickbait. A local journalist can us Substack to get paid by readers who care about City Hall, Local Governance, and other issues that impact specific communities.
• Round Up Newsletter – You can use substack to separarte your ’round up’ style content or post monthly / quarterly roundups of your blog content to ensure it only gets sent to those who want this specific style of cotnent.
• Creator Support – Similar to Patreon, Substack can be used to gain small monthly subscription donations from your fans in exchange for periodic content. One musician, Wu Fei, pubishes a new track every weekday to their audience.
• Content or News Curation – Substack makes it extremely simple to curate very niche news and content. This can help a brand hyperfocus on one target demographic or open up an entirely new revenue stream.
• Ad Free News – Because Substack allows the writer to determine if free or paid subscribers can see certain content it makes the platform extremely attractive for an out-of-the-box solution to one of the most perplexing problems in publishing today: How to write news content for ad-free, paid subscribers only.
• Secret Knowledge Clubs – Scarcity of information is rare on the web, but also profitable. If you wanted to publish about the next big thing or share secrets to success in a certain vertical, you might want to get paid for it. Substack enables this with very little setup or messyness.

Substack comes with a slew of useful features / settings on top of what I’ve already mentioned including:

• Ability to add a custom domain for only a one-time $50 usd payment
• Tags for a publication to help new users find it more easily
• A “Writer’s Library” which contains useful information to help writers succeed
• Podcasting capabilities
• Automatic milestone emails to help celebrate success
• Google Analytics / Tag Manager integration
• Capability to verify publication on Google Search Console / Google Publisher
• Facebook Pixel integration
• Twitter Piexel integration
• Parse.ly integration
• Capability to verify publication on Facebook
• Publication settings (i.e. bylines, cover photo, etc…)
• Theme editing

I rarely get this excited about a hosted writing platform, but Substack has so far shown a determination to ensure independence of their publishers and a willingness to add more useful features to ensure publisher success. If you have a website with a publishing platform already (i.e. WordPress), Substack could make a valuable secondary website for a segement of your customer base or useful content marketing platform.

Get started: https://substack.com/

2. Hacker Noon

Hacker Noon is an editorially reviewed, UGC blog hosting platform and community focused on technology. Hacker Noon seeks to separate itself from other similar offerings by hyper-focusing on the tech community and empowering all types of tech writers to contribute to their increasingly active community. Every post written for publication on Hacker Noon is reviewed by a human editor before being taken live claiming approximately 50% of stories are rejected (and I assume all edits are also put through review). While the editors do make small edits or likely reject junk content / spam, the platform can be a great way to convey tech-heavy topics or ideas and get them in front of a receptive audience.

Users on Hacker Noon can subscribe to stories via hashtags, bookmark stories for later reading, post comments, and use one of the 4 emoji reactions on each article. Every publisher on Hacker Noon also gets a big call-to-action link on their profile to help drive real value out of publishing content.

Hacker Noon is also different from other platforms in that it invites Brands to publish on the platform in order to enable open conversations between tech brands and the tech community and rewards the best ones with valuable links. Instead of trying to replace your website’s current architecture or help desk soltuion, Hacker Noon offers itself and their community as a different way to communicate to the tech community at large. One example of this is the Velo brand by Wix which has published 25 articles on the site since March of this year often times republishing content from their help site. The Hacker Noon versions tend to outrank the Wix Help Center versions.

There are a handful of great ways to use Hacker Noon for you business, but keep in mind it is a technology-focused website so lifestyle brands, fashion, etc… will have a harder time finding ways to contribute than tech companies will.

• Technical Content Alternative – If you have a non-techical audience or you have content should speak to a more technical audience than your main customer segment, try publishing that content on Hacker Noon instead.
• How to Guides to gain Customers – If you have a SaaS or technical solution that could solve a variety of problems, publish unique how to guides here to ensure they rank highly in the SERPs.
• Technology Content Curation – Write mid-sized articles about breaking technology news and trends related to your industry.
• Out Rank a Big Competitor – If you are a smaller entrant to your industry going up against large competitors and there are technical topics to be covered, publish about those on HN isntead to have a better chance at outranking your competition. Yes, that means the traffic goes to Hacker Noon and not your site, but they do provide plenty of ways to help you convert that traffic in to potential new business.

Here is my Hacker Noon profile to help you see how we use the platform: https://hackernoon.com/u/joeyoungblood

Get started: https://hackernoon.com/

3. Reddit

Reddit is one of the oldest surviving “social bookmarking” websites and has really transformed itself into its own social media community. Part toxic wasteland, Part incredibly useful content, Reddit today serves as one of the last bastions for written social media content in an industry dominated by augmented visual aesthetics and video. While Reddit’s new design seemed determined to kill off downstream traffic to third-party websites (especially Imgur) and destined to force the platform to be more visual with large photos and a video player, so far the users of the website have continued writting out long-form posts, questions, and helpful content on the tens of thousands of niche communities that use the service.

One of those communities is the WallStreetBets subreddit which is now known for the explosive rise in stock price for Gamestop, largely done with written content and of course memes. There are various subreddits dedicated to writing on Reddit and many niche subreddits that require or prefer written content over other types of content. Some SEOs even, incorrectly, believe that they can write a little bit of content in a subreddit and then gain a valuable link for SEO. In most cases (depending on the subreddit) this is considered spam and will be removed if the content isn’t helpful/useful or does not follow the rules for the specific community.

Reddit has slowly but firmly been planting itself as a must-use social media platform for brands for a decade now, and if you are looking for somewhere to write content it should be extremely high up on your list.

Because Reddit is a collection of UGC communities, there are a lot of ways to use the site for writing content. As an expert Reddit Management / Marketing agency, here are some of our favorites.

• Branded subreddit – Create a branded or personal subreddit where you write or log information about your business / software.
• Write guides for a community – Find a subreddit community that fits your niche / target audience (but one that isn’t filled with your competitors) and publish full guides to accomplish something related. These do not have to include a link to your site to be valuable as Redditors are known to view the profiles of posters (known as OP) or may ask questions where you can post links to answers on your site.
• Take Over a Dead Subreddit – One of the downsides for Reddit being a collection of UGC communities is that often times a community founder or all of the mods will abandon the group. These can be taken over by a new user via the Reddit Request system. If you find an abandoned subreddit that fits your target audience you can publish useful content here and reach valuble users while driving increased engagement and brand awareness.

Get started: https://www.reddit.com/

4. Steemit / Hive

Steemit is the original crypotcurrency based social media website and Hive is a fork of the Steemit system by users unhappy with a recent take over. There is a lot of debate within each community about which one is alive and well and which one is about to die, but they both work essentially the same way and for that reason I will focus on Steemit for this portion but encourage you to check out Hive if you are interested.

Steemit looks incredibly similar to Reddit or other upvote-based websites. With one catch, each post can pay whoever made the post in cryptocurrency. Recently purchased by Justin Sun, a young Chinese cryptocurrency founder who created the TRON token, Steemit pays users in either Steem or TRON tokens for posting quality content enjoyed by the community.

Because Steemit is based on the Steem blockchain users who signup for the service need to have Steem tokens to pay for their account. Recently Steemit has begun covering this small fee, likely in order to get accounts created faster, but could revert back to the old method at any time. Once an account is created users will have access to a Steemit Wallet where anything they earn will be placed. To earn revenue users can post into existing communities or write on thier own blog. When other users upvote on your content the system pays out tokens.

Steemit is largely home to Chinese and Korean users but there are also large and growing communities devoted to Italy, Venezuela, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Japan, Bangladesh, the Phillipines, and a small community of Texans. The service is mostly used to discuss Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, DeFi, and Steem-based dApps which should not come as much of a surprise; but users also appear interested in travel, cricket, soccer (football), cooking, stock photography, and music.

There are a few downsides to using Steemit.

1. Complexity of setup – Getting started used to be quite complex and using the service still is more complex than a normal social media website. You have to realy commit to the Steem blockchain to full usage out of this platform.
2. No promotion of blog content – The blog content on Steemit is not promoted by the service in any fashion. While bloggers can gain followers to then gain tokens, they will have to promote their content or profiles on their own.
3. Bad SEO – Steemit is riddled with horrific SEO best practices which makes it difficult for a blogger’s unique content to even be found via search engines like Google.
4. Pay is Often Pennies – Sure you can get paid for posting content, but it is a lot of work for what will likely be meager payment. Unless Steem Power, Steem Dollars, or TRON tokens have a massive surge in price, users in more established countries are unlikely to turn a profit or make even beer money posting here. There are exceptions and this could always change in the future.

Steemit and cryptocurrency powered social media has a lot of promise, especially for writers. Here are some great ways to us this service for your marketing.

• Write Blog Posts and Get Paid – Use Steemit to write blog posts and earn money. Do this by adding your blog posts to popular hashtags and driving new followers. It appears to take roughly 1,000 followers and about 30 engagements to earn much revenue but one Bitcoin writer makes about $3 to $385 usd per blog post and those numbers appear to be rising as of lately.
• Create a Community – Steemit does not have a lot of communities, this is probably because each one costs 3 Steem tokens or roughly $1.95 at time of writing to create. The communities are also not promoted by Steemit until they gain several hundreds of subscribers. While making a new community might difficult, it could pay off big if Steemit gains even 1/4 of what similar sites have in userbase.
• Contribute to Communities – Like Reddit each community has at least one moderator who has paid for the rights to control a community and each one also has a set of rules to follow. Find a community that matches your brand or target audience and start contributing within the established guidelines.

Get started: https://steemit.com/

5. HEY World

HEY World is a feature of the newcomer email service “HEY” from the makers of Basecamp. The service allows any user to automatically publish content on the public web just by sending an email. This is only available to HEY email users which costs $99 / year for an email address. There are incredibly few features with this service that you might expect from any other blogging or writing platform, but it does a wonderful job of making the task of publishing less painful. Just write and format your email, send it to ‘world@hey.com’ and it will be published on the world.hey.com website using your email handle.

You can send your users or customers to your HEY World URL where they can read your blog posts, subscribe directly with their email address, or access your RSS feed.

Due to the incredible simplicity of using HEY World, it makes an extremely conveniant personal-public journal or log that manages to be both powerful and minimal simultaneously. And yes SEO fans, links are formatted accurately without any restrictions, which means you can quickly and easily publish content about your products, your research, new hires, etc.. and include valuble links back to your main website.

HEY already comes with a ton of great email features you will not ever see in public ad-supported systems like Gmail or in server-side email systems like Roundcube, but offering up what is possibly the most easy to use publishing platform bundled in makes it an extremely attractive offering. The only downsides here are that your blog posts are not on your own subdomain (it appears even if you pay HEY) and I was unable to see how to edit a blog post after publication to HEY World.

Here are some great ideas for HEY World usage

• A Private-Public Work Journal – Have a CEO, or Founder, or other major staff member of your company post their work thoughts publicly.
• Public Recaps – Public entities can quickly recap meetings to meet any legal requirements with just an email.
• Thinking Out Loud – If you’re an idea person quickly jotting down ideas is always a pain. This would give you a near instanteous publishing experience like Twitter, without all of the limitations and toxicity that comes with it. This may even help inspire your team members or customers.
• Company Updates – If you are using your website blogging platform for content marketing, then you could use HEY World to publish quck company updates or even press releases. This is a great budget-friendly option for a small, growing business.

Get started: https://www.hey.com/world/

These are some of our top picks for a writing platform in 2021 beyond obvious choices such as your own website. This article will be continually updated as new platforms are built and older platforms become less useful or are taken offline.

Of note, my team and I do not currently recommend these platforms for publishing written works for a variety of reasons:
– Facebook Pages
– Facebook Groups
– LinkedIn
– Medium
– Blogger
– WordPress.com
– Google Drive Docs
– Web Forums

Did we miss any of your favorite platforms? Do our rankings make you happy or angry? Have any questions? Hey, that’s what comment sections are for. We would love to hear from you! 🙂