Are there long-term downsides to posting on Medium VS your own website?
I'm a developer who's new to marketing and the world of SEO. I'm looking to start writing some pieces on productive Chrome extensions, and keeping your bookmarks organized. My goal is to drive traffic to my Chrome extension, Recollect.
I have a few ideas for topics to write about, but I'm not sure where to post my content! Is it going to burn me down the line to post everything on Medium? Will I be leaving traffic on the table by not having my blog posts hosted on my own website?
I'd like to hear your opinions! Am I missing something entirely here, or overanalyzing when I should just be writing and trying things?
Thanks in advance :)
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Publish on your domain first, then import into Medium.
Publishing on Medium does nothing to build your website's authority and provides no SEO benefit. The more pages you have on your site, and content you have tied to your domain, the more authoritative your site will be and the better you will perform in search results.
If you ever want to rank for "product keywords" then it is an absolute must to build up your own SEO.
Importing into Medium sets the canonical URL back to your original post, which tells Google your site is the original publisher. Medium can be helpful with distributing content and broadening your audience, but it is in no way a substitution for publishing on your domain.
Unless SEO does not matter to you, then ignore all the above advice :)
Thanks for the advice! Ranking is my main goal with writing content, so I'll look into importing into Medium later but focus on having my own blog.
No problem! Glad this is helpful and good luck!
Posting on medium would mean your own website doesn't get any of the SEO benefits I assume.
If it were me, I would always publish in-house on my own blog, hosted on my own website.
Re the SEO benefits, that's where using Medium's Canonical Link feature comes in https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033930293-Set-a-canonical-link
Which enables the Canonical Link i.e your original blog, to get the benefits - not Medium, but your article still benefits from being distributed and discoverable on the Medium network (it's just another channel essentially). HTH
Ah yep, that looks like it would do the trick. Good to know!
I second what everyone said about posting on your site first and then using a canonical from medium. You really want all earned backlinks to build up your website's domain authority.
One additional tip I'll add is that videos would be great for what you're doing. If you make a video accompanying your blog post, you can then embed it adding more content to the page. Furthermore, your video will also have the potential to show up as a SERP on Google.
Good luck!
A video is a great idea! Thanks for the tip :)
No problem! Especially if it is a product demo, people love seeing a version of what they'll download without having to download it!
@Ettore I took your suggestion and made a product walkthrough video! let me know what you think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGsSHrmEXgI&ab_channel=Recollect
I'm putting this in the chrome store listing for now. I also think I'll make all my help topics short videos as well and embed them in my help center.
Beautiful! Great explainer!
I think the chrome store listing allows for video too?
Here is a good post where it is explained why to stop publishing in third-party media and better to do it in your own domain: https://www.ecommerceandbeyond.com/23-reasons-you-must-stop-blogging-on-linkedin-right-now/
I'm about to launch GorillaCMS to make it easy and fast to create your own blog using WordPress Headless already implemented by our SaaS product.
When it's ready I can present it to you and it already includes an incredible design so you don't have to do anything other than start writing.
Greetings!
I think that I started a similar discussion. It depends on your content flow/stream:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-arrange-audience-flow-in-few-projects-b28030b5b4
What do you think?
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
I second your opinion and approach!
I currently have ~15-30K page views per month on Medium (https://dsebastien.medium.com), and I regret not cross-posting + using canonical URLs earlier.
I did the switch quite recently because I wanted to take back ownership of my content and bring more visits to my homepage, where I can also share other information about myself, my projects, etc
My advice is really to post to your own Website/domain, and cross-post everywhere else.
Echoing David and Sebastian here, I've been through a similar exercise but on the decision to wether start my newsletter with Substack vs others.
The 'mainstreams' platform also give you a better guidance on feedback. You can test stickiness around different topics in a more engaging and efficient way with these platforms.
So to bring a little bit of offline products strategy, better to have an omnichannel approach. :)
Thanks for the tips guys. I just started cross-posting my content on medium as well!
This is some great info, thanks so much. I'm going to interpret this to say that I should probably focus on posting content to my own site and sharing to different platforms, even though it will take longer to get things going - sounds like it's more worth it in the end.
I also agree to this approach. I prefer to host my own blog and repost it to Medium on all projects I start until my blog has enough authority to be self-sufficient. Once you have the blog running correclty, you can control your sales funnel to your Chrome extension much better, + branding, + upselling, etc are all in your control.
I second this. Medium is a good place for a start. However on the long run, you don't have full control of the page content once the posts start ranking higher on search engines which will limit the benefits that you can get.