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Building an audience through medium and publications?

I have started writing on my blog and recently started to syndicate via a medium publication.

I'm super excited to see whether this helps me to build an audience and the general effects of this.

Anybody here has some experience to share?

Here is my first article:
https://mediu

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    Hi Michela - building Audience on Medium is not easy, however; if you are determined and you stick to it it's amazingly rewarding. I started writing 4 months ago and now have over 1k followers and reached over 100K people. You need to be committed to writing. Some stories especially early on will have little to no reads and it's very easy to give up. Stick to it! Once you have a few stories that get curated by Medium, you will start accumulating the following. For me publishing is essential. I write 4 -5 blogs a week (at night). I write about how to help startups since I have launched many and have a passion for helping others to not make the same mistakes I did :-). I focus on getting published on other popular publications such as The Startup and Hackernoon. I also have a publication, so if there is any way I can help you please let me know. I am happy to lend a hand and support the community!

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      Hi @tomerdi, thank you so much for your feedback. I just published my first article with freecodecamp (a medium publication) and I am very pleased with the results. I am not managing to write so many blog posts. I write 1-2 per month, but they are long and solid. I hope that will be enough to build an audience.

      Can you publish one article with several publications? Like, can I publish with Hackernoon and Freecodecamp at the same time?

      Thanks a lot for your insights.

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      Do you prefer publishing on medium vs your own site (self-hosted or hosted somewhere like Wordpress)?

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        I do both and i change the blogs so they are not duplicates. blogs on the site are great for SEO )we use goast) medium is a passion to help, it gets more exposure and little traffic

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    An interesting thing, a writer emailed around 300 journalists after an article went live, to:

    1. See if they were interested in republishing the article (according to the piece, it was republished 7 times).
    2. The writer asked to write for them.
    3. The article grew from 500 to approx. 5,000 views through contacting journalists.

    Here's the article if you want to check it out: https://www.influencive.com/how-to-create-real-social-influence-organically/

    Disclouse: Our company was briefly mentioned in Influencive today in the article that mentioned the stats above, which caught my eyeballs (and we were pretty rapped).

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      Hi @Speedy
      thanks for sharing this approach. Very interesting.

  3. 1

    Hey, Michaela

    If you're building audiences for your blog I suggest create a facebook group and join a group related to your niche add email subscription on you website push notification too for when you update your blog people can find you easy... make your business blog name short for remembering your blog/website name...

    Thanks

    1. 1

      Hi @buzzc
      Thanks a lot for your feedback. Facebook groups are actually on my todo list. I am just a bit hesitant, as I have so many things to master and start that I feel overwhelmed with moderating and creating that.
      My blog is actually my name, which is Austrian. I am a bit worried that this isn't in my favor.

  4. 1

    Syndicating through Medium publications has been the best thing I've done to grow my audience. I've got over 400 people on my mailing list now, up from 6 last year :)

    I have a free email course about web accessibility. I wrote articles about accessibility on my site, and then syndicate to places like freeCodeCamp, DailyJS, and Hackernoon. At the end of the article, I include a little plug for my email course. That's the main way Ive grown my audience over the past year, it's been very rewarding.

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      Medium is a channel I want to experiment with. Can you describe the process to get a post published by big publications?

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        Most publications have info on how to submit on their about page. For instance, freeCodeCamp includes a link to more info on their about page: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/about

        Usually, the process involves creating a draft post of your article in Medium, and sending a link to the editors. Then they will add you to their publication on medium, which let's you submit thru the medium UI. They typically review and make editorial suggestions, and then they publish!

        Once you've been added to a publication, you can submit articles directly to them again in the future, which makes the process go a little quicker.

        I definitely recommend making sure you post your article to your own blog first, and then import it into medium and submit the imported draft to a publication. That creates a canonical link back to your site and you can end up with a TON of backlinks due to Medium's suggested posts feature.

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          Hi @benjamingrx,
          thanks so much for all the details. I also started publishing with freecodecamp and even the initial results are very good.
          Can you publish the same article with several publishers, or are you selecting which publisher fits best for each article?
          Thanks so much for your insights.
          Michaela

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            A single post can only be published with a single publication. I've just been experimenting with a few different publications to see what works. So far the best audience builders for the kind of content I'm working on have been DailyJS and freeCodeCamp.

            I've also published a couple times with Hackernoon but my content has not resonated as well with their audience.

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              Yes, that's how I understood it as well. Thanks for sharing your insights. Can you send me a link to your articles? I'd like to subscribe and follow you on medium.
              Mine is here: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/@michaela.greiler

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          Thanks! 🙏

          Medium links are nofollow so I wouldn’t count on that. SEO aside, let us know how it goes! 😉

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            I've been following this strategy for the past year and it's been working very well, it's the primary way I build my audience.

            I'm not an SEO expert, but I think you are mistaken- when you import stories into Medium, Medium assigns a rel=canonical url back to the original url, which tells Google that your site is canonical source. More details here: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/217991468-SEO-and-duplicate-content

            Webmaster tools lists hundreds of links from Medium back to articles on my domain, presumably because people are linking to the Medium version of my article but Google sees my blog as the canonical source. Not sure on that.

            Anyways, like I said I'm not an expert, but I do think there is a difference between a regular old link on Medium and the rel=canonical attribute.

            I also have noticed when I search for the title of my more popular articles that I have syndicated to Medium, Google returns the link back to my domain and the Medium article is no where to be found in the search results.

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              If the links are coming from third party websites to the Medium version of the article, that's good because canonical can (not always) pass link juice.

              But if the links are coming from other Medium articles they won't help your SEO.
              This is because those links are nofollow (canonical isn't relevant here) and also because what really matters is the number of linking root domains, not a lot of links coming from the same domain.

              Anyway, you did a great job building your audience and wish you luck 😉

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                Ah interesting, good to know. Thanks!

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    I've not succeeded with this, I have only half heartedly attempted though. Let me know how you get on!

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      I published my first article with freecodecamp last week, and I have over 4000 views and over 1000 reads. I am quite happy with those numbers for it being the first article.
      I'll keep you updated how it will progress.

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        Ah yes, definitely better to submit to other publications rather than a standalone thing for your own account. Good job!

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