I wanted to test out Medium as a traffic source.. Here is what I did!
I frequently hear people writing Medium posts for generating traffic to their youtube channels or other places, so I decided to give it a try -
I created this post - https://medium.com/@sanjav/top-10-pokemon-cards-to-buy-under-30-may-2020-absolute-best-bfb1373024a1
- It's full of keywords and meta, so should be picked by search engines pretty easily.
- I kept the distribution setting to 'on', so that medium can promote it outside of my follower network.
- I spent an afternoon curating and ranking content with images, badges etc.
Views/clicks so far - Very few.
Questions for the community -
- Any ideas that have worked for you?
- Do you recommend medium or have used it? How was your experience?
- Do you recommend any other channels for driving traffic like this?
I'll keep updating this post as I get new information. Thanks for reading!
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I have 3 medium posts and they have total +300K impressions. Recently I put Landly (my side-project) link as a shameless plug to the end of the articles. So far it only generates a few clicks, and I don't expect more since context is not related, and the article impressions were decreased. But if I put since the beginning, it would boost dramatically.
But I advise to use Medium, they have great SEO.
Do you use medium in addition to a blog or medium only?
I am going to use both of them. Before I was using Medium as my personal blog, but will create another one for my side project.
I run an entire publication dedicated to understanding Medium, (Medium Blogging Guide--https://medium.com/blogging-guide). I'd highly suggest checking it out if you continue to pursue Medium.
Some thoughts:
*Medium has very high Domain Authority. But you need to include more original content to truly help your article rank well. More specifically, written content. I would try to write 2-3 sentences about each item. Medium is less visual, more about written content.
*Your article contains very obvious affiliate links (which is fine and Medium does technically allow) but this does render your post ineligible for curation.
*Articles do better in publications (even smaller ones). I would consider submitting future articles to pubs or creating your own (https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-to-create-a-medium-publication-9c7af3dc0344).
*I would tag your article more broadly. For instance, you might use the tag "gaming". as it is one of the tags that is eligible for top writer status (https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-article-tags-eligible-for-top-writer-status-bc760f9671e9)
I have only skimmed over your article, and there isn't really anything to read there from what I saw anyway. I think this is exactly, where you missed the point.
The audience on Medium likes to read. They are not interested in an article with a list of images, which are aligned like products and link somewhere else.
If you want to succeed with your content (no matter what platform), you should prioritize quality over quantity, which seems not the case here.
Great advice, I completely agree. Thank you.
I discovered that it's almost a must to add your work to a publication. Otherwise, it's more being lucky that you get a lot of readers without followers. I have one article performing really well, which is on the Hackernoon publication back when they still used medium.com. It has something like 2.3k reads and I only have 40 followers.