Blog vs Medium...Which drives more traffic to a site?

Josh Pigford just did a great write up about this! https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog

Running most of your content on your blog is the best because you get the traffic and potentially convert them to leads.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says: “Content is King, but Distribution is Queen – and she runs the house."

Medium is great for distribution, but it's soooo important to focus on owned content. For SEO purposes and also as @MattEhr said if medium shuts down you're screwed. Post on your blog, and use Medium to syndicate content.

Hi Mike, I have a blog and I also post on Medium.

My experience with Medium in the past year has been sub-par for me, even if I have 400 followers my stories do not "go viral" 😄 and I have a lot more ROI in writing blog posts, because that's my platform and that's where I can do what I want.

Medium is not my platform, which is bad, but here's what I do: I write on my blog first, then I import the posts on Medium with their import tool, which sets the canonical tag to my blog (to avoid content duplication SEO issues). Then, I don't publish them on my own Medium profile, but I look for publications that might be interested in publishing my post, and I reach out to them.

Those publications can drive thousands and thousands of eyeballs on your posts.

I posted a story on my profile a week ago, I got 27 views.

I posted another story on a publication yesterday, I got ~6K views.

I get my name out, some people that read the article choose to follow me on Medium and the publications I know allow a couple backlinks to my blog that some people follow, so things pay off pretty well overall.

I heard this strategy on a podcast this summer but I can't remember which podcast unfortunately! Maybe it was IH or another one.

Oh about hosting - my blog is a static site, I host it on Firebase, which is free forever until a certain traffic tier, and until they take down the service.

My 2c!

Note one thing - a blog is part of your domain, e.g. example.com/blog.

Article on a Medium is part of their domain (medium.com).

If someone links to your post, if this post is on your own blog, it's a plus for your domain.

If someone links to your post on Medium, it's a plus for Medium.

So, to build your domain's reputation, it's better to host your own blog.

However, you can re-post articles from your blog on Medium after few days (once Google gets them from your domain) using the canonical link, as @fla suggested. This is getting best from both worlds - visibility of your domain and getting traffic from Medium.

I wonder why no one has mentioned the option to host your own blog subdomain on medium? So you own the content, it improves the SEO rankings of your domain but you still have access to all Medium's audience and cool features etc. That's what we do for our blog at https://blog.zeroqode.com - and we don't have the pain of importing articles to medium after we post them on our blog with canonical links etc. Does this approach have any downsides (except the risk that Medium shuts down which I doubt will ever happen) ?

Each has its pros and cons. Medium is great for exposure for your ideas.

Your own blog is better for brand awareness and lead generation.

Whenever you read something on Medium, you'll think - that's a great article I found on Medium. let me explore other publications and authors.

When you read something on a website, you'll think - that's a great article I read on just_mike's blog. Let me check out the other ones.

Medium lets you shortcut the slog of building your own traffic and audience. That's a good thing. It also prevents you from being recognized as an independent author. You tend to become a "medium writer."

You also don't have as much control over lead generating and sales activities. For that, you need to send them off of Medium.

Don't get me wrong, there are exceptions to the rule. You can build an audoence on MEdium and they may even buy stuff from you.

I have just under a thousand followers and I use Medium as another avenue to promote my work. Not the place where I publish initially.

Medium does a better job for promotion. The platforms make very little difference. It is the quality and value your content provides. I have found a very new and cool tool you should look at. It provides a more complete and versatile platform. It has a free option which is both cool and powerful. www.mavio.co Tell me what you think

I host my own blog. It's honestly a pain. It's cheaper up front (especially if you already have some version of web space), but the overall costs are high. For example, I need to pay to get myself listed on Wordpress.com, I need to pay for spam filtering (you don't have to, but spam comments waste so much of my time that it's stupid not to), I might want to pay for a designer theme. And my hosting plan is super cheap: If I write a good article that gets any real traffic, it's going to be slow to load, so I probably need to pay for that.

You can do this all on your own, but it's a time and money sink. And then you're left with a blog that few people ever see. It's a lot of work getting people to actually go to your site.

If you just want readers and traffic, get yourself on Medium. I've actually found posting here has been super helpful for traffic. Hosting your own blog is good for customization, and once you get name recognition. I have neither of those things, so I'm hosting my own blog for hubris, really.