Should I use Wordpress or Medium?
I'm launching a new product in a few weeks, it's focused mainly on digital marketers and bloggers.
However I am in doubt if I should set up a blog using wordpress or medium. How was the experience with you? What would you do and why?
Start out with Medium to build traction. As your traffic grows, redirect it to WordPress.
To add more details for those who haven't done this before--
Start on Medium because it's easy to get going and you can get a decent amount of "discovery" traffic. Of course, make sure to add a CTA a the end back to your website.
When traffic grows and/or you have more resources, create a Wordpress blog on your own domain so you can leverage SEO to get inbound traffic directly to your website.
Email Medium's support staff and ask them to redirect the canonical links for each of your original Medium posts back to your Wordpress blog. The canonical link basically tells Google who has the original content and which link should appear in search results.
In the future, write all of your posts on Wordpress first. Then use Medium's import tool to import that post to Medium so you can benefit from traffic via Medium's discovery feature. The Medium import tool will automatically add a canonical link.
Loved this. Did you mean to publish on WordPress first in #4?
Yes, thank you! Just edited it.
Medium doesn't support custom domains anymore :-( So, I don't think the redirection strategy works any longer.
Put your site on WordPress and syndicate every post to Medium.
Agree with this. Hosting all your writing on Medium is risky because you don't control it. However, it's a good distribution channel. Using syndication gives you the best of both worlds. Use Medium as a distribution channel (unless you want to build equity and an asset for medium instead of yourself).
For WordPress you need a hosting, for medium you need to just pay. Personally, I do not support Medium so I will tell you to go with WordPress.
You do not need to pay for Medium...
You are right, my bad, the subscription only allows you to read more stuff apparently. I still stand by my statement that I would go for a self-hosted platform.
Depends on what's more important for you. With Medium you are part of a community immediately. This may help reaching more people right from the start. OTOH a Medium blog is not your property. Medium may be cancelled tomorrow or they change in a way it isn't useful for you anymore. (E.g. they stopped the custom domain service recently.) With Wordpress (assuming you're using your own domain) you are the owner of your blog.
So, if you value short term success go with Medium. If you're after long term values use a Wordpress blog on your own domain.
Good Points. When you write on medium, always have one backup copy of your blogs.
I saw that few companies have their own wordpress or ghost blog and also published on medium blogs.
Excellent points.
I haven't seen it mentioned here but Medium Lost my trust when thet retied their their custom domain option for new sites. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003053487-Custom-Domains-service-deprecation
WordPress because having a blog on your own domain is good for SEO purposes and Medium is declining as a platform.
What do you mean by declining? I was actually recently considering I should think of jumping on it since it seems quite active.
It may be active but the quality of articles has been going downhill for a while.
Do you have any data on this? My knee-jerk reaction is to think the opposite
Only anecdotal evidence: before it was mostly useful, now it's mostly fluff except for a few good blogs that are using it as an engine (like Signal v. Noise). Check the home page right now: it's filled with opinion pieces and speculation.
With self hosted wordpress you'll get the SEO juice all to your own domain ☝️
I like Ghost.org. The simplicity of Medium, but the benefits of self-hosting like Wordpress.
We are using medium for the blog. Definetly it will be useful since you can focus on content rather than hosting and design.
But we could not use our own domain(blog.leadmine.net), they are not allowing us to do it even though we are ready to pay for it. They have disabled custom domain feature. So you will not get any SEO benefits of the content that you write. All of the links will have 'nofollow' attribute.
There is a tendency to run out from Medium I see for the last time due the lack of brand and content identity. For example guys from Baremetrics moved their blog away.
Wordpress. Owning your own web property is always better IMO. If you have your own website you can do whatever you want with it.
I remember reading an essay by Andrew Chen and he was talking about how he built up a lot of traffic on Bloggers platform but lost it or how his own website allowed him to keep his traffic when a lot of people lost theirs.
If you by chance are a PHP or Laravel developer, I’d check out statamic! Amazing CMS that looks amazing and is very developer friendly. statamic.com
For context I am using medium for now and landen for my landing page but after I launch I’m going to build out my marketing site on statamic and use that for my landing page and blog.
Use Wordpress and own the entire stack and content. You can use Medium for extra visibility or additional blog posts that point towards your main blog. Good luck!
Instead of WordPress, have you considered a static site generator?
WP has always been a headache for me re: deployments, security, backups. Static site generators (Jekyll, Gatsby etc.) have been like a breath of fresh air with easy deployment/hosting on Netlify (free).
Do both. You can have the best of both worlds.
Post your content on your own self hosted Wordpress site. Own your own content! Then you can copy and paste across to Medium, and add a canonical link to each post pointing at your site.
You know have the SEO benefits of having your content on your own site (as well as owning it! Did I say that already?)
Plus you get the benefit of reaching new people with Mediums audience.
Depends on your primary goal and what content you plan to publish. Medium has a built in community and some writers have leveraged it to build big followings, for example: Benjamin Hardy. I haven't seen a product brand on Medium generate a massive following, but there are probably some examples. I'd use some combination of both. Content marketing and how to's would be good for Medium. You can include some of those on your Wordpress blog in addition to product updates.
why not both ?
Wordpress
If you are starting out I would go with Medium in essence of time. Start writing content and worry about technical aspects later.
I don't support Medium, WordPress has become tedious bloatware equivalent to running Windows XP with every available IE toolbar installed.
Ghost ftw.
Medium. If you plan to market your product then you need to be in a marketplace which medium is. Medium help get the views for you. It best to start at medium and make a wordpress and drive users to your site.