Cross posting content on medium
For anyone who has written content on their product/personal blog and cross posted it to medium, do you have any tips for driving traffic toward your product without just shamelessly plugging it?
Something just feels dirty to me about being like "by the way! I really only put this article up here so I could put a spotlight on my product at the end."
I'm personally thinking of not mentioning it and if anyone likes what they read they will click my profile to follow/find out more.
Curious how others weigh in on this.
Hi Nick!
Are you talking about cross-posting to medium, by using their import tool (https://medium.com/p/import)?
If so, they automatically link to the original source (your product/personal blog) at the bottom of the post. However, it's pretty unnoticeable. Scroll to the bottom to see how it looks: https://medium.com/@cspags/productivity-habit-own-the-first-hour-of-your-day-7c851b5034cd
I've found this to be a negligible source of traffic. I think if you were able to naturally work in a link to your product in the content of your post then you'd see better results.
Side note: I wouldn't think of it as "shamelessly plugging" your product. I'd reframe it as "helping people who have a problem" that your product solves.
Any downsides to import tool?
I don't believe there are any downsides, it is the recommended way to syndicate content on Medium.
One tip, if the import fails, it won't give you a reason why. This was happening to me and eventually, I discovered it was due to my robots.txt being overly restrictive.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing this. Gonna try out the import tool some time for sure.
I actually didn't know the import tool existed, that definitely can't hurt.
Reading your post, I like that you made yourself available before your product. Definitely less gimmicky than "the only way to do what I just above is to sign up to x" which seems to be a common theme in articles I read on there haha
Noting this for sure. I appreciate the insight!
Awesome, happy to help. Would love to read the post when you have it up.