Content Marketing : Medium vs. Self-Hosted Blog
For those of you doing blogging for personal / brand boosting / content marketing purposes:
Would you rather write your blog on Medium or Self host on your server?
My biggest concern with Medium is censorship and not being able to put custom content as i want it, but i can see that Medium articles have much better SEO visibility and therefore more potential traffic.
what do you think?
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I wouldn't go with only Medium. The backlinks are usually nofollow and you aren't gaining any increased long term visibility. I saw some blogs using it on a custom domain and having it turned off somehow. But I'm not sure how this works... You can use both tho - with syndication and getting a canonical link back...
Hey Nikola,
You can do both.
Write on your own personal blog and then import the article on medium. In this way, Medium uses the Canonical Url of your original article.
You will have exposure on Medium and also a bit of SEO juice.
I wasn't aware of that. Nice! But I think I still would only have a stripped down version on Medium and then direct people to my own site for the real thing.
Good stuff, will give this a try as well!
Oh wow thanks! I didn't know that.
This is a great question and something I still wrestle with. I do content marketing through Medium because it attracts so many viewers than my self-hosted blog. But the downsides are that Medium is connected more to me than my company and I can't ever really market my platform without adding competitors or talking about it in a neutral tone. But I do think a huge portion of my paying customers come from reading my Medium posts.
I also post my articles on my self-hosted blog but I just don't think it gets the same number of views.
What's worked for you?
I've been a huge fan of posting on dev.to and setting the canonical url to my hosted blog. For my development related blogs, I see a 10x increase over medium. I've gotten a huge response from writing them and I have seen a corresponding increase in traffic to my blog. Best of both worlds!
Medium is bad on so many levels - this would probably not be the right place to discuss. But you are right - it might give you more exposure. I am myself not interested writing content so only they can rank better. If I ever to use Medium I would for example just post a teaser and have the full content on my own site. I really don't understand people that just publish on Medium.
I would suggest a blog in your own site. If you’re promoting a product or service, you want to get traffic and links coming to that site.
In addition, you own the content on your site. If Medium decides to shut down tomorrow they could take down all that content with it.
I'm also in the middle of self debate, either continue on my own side project based on Squarespace or Medium. Would love to hear your opinion as well @Nikoisonfire
What exactly are you debating? Hosting your presentation SaaS or blogging about it?
Blogging. I don't have a regular content plan now. But my goal is to start doing it bi-weekly. My major concern is how's the traffic being facilitate. Medium or on Squarespace the best.
Those are two completely different platforms.
Squarespace is a hosting service where you can create a website using predefined templates in a toolbox-like-setting.
Medium is a sort of "blog network" where people can create their own personal blog space. Quite like Wordpress.com or Blogspot (if you remember that).
The main difference is, that Medium focuses on writing and publishing while Squarespace is more focused on making real websites for mostly small business owners and personal use.