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9 Comments

Is cross posting blog posts good?

I have an in-depth blog post I'm ready to publish, but not sure on what the best strategy is for posting.

Should I post to Medium where I have a following? To my new personal blog where I have a newsletter? To Indie Hackers as an article? All three? In what order?

Let me give you some context.

My goal is to grow my personal growth newsletter, Grit List.

I wrote a tutorial, and I want to get as many eyeballs as possible on the article. I have 900 followers on Medium, and I think the article will have decent SEO once published, and I think Medium does a good job of driving traffic by itself to good content.

That being said, I want to own the content as much as possible. In addition to Grit List, I revamped my personal blog recently, and think it might be good if the SEO juice went there. That being said, I definitely won't get as much organic traffic to a relatively new blog.

Lastly, I'd like to post it to Indie Hackers as well.

I'd love feedback on people's approaches to cross-posting and syndicating content.

As of right now, I'm thinking about publishing to my personal blog so that has the oldest domain record of the content, and the syndicate it out to Medium and Indie Hackers a few days later, but not sure if this is the best strategy.

Thanks for your input!

posted to Icon for group Bloggers
Bloggers
on June 18, 2020
  1. 4

    Sounds great. I do something similar.

    • Do add the canonical tag on medium when you add your article there.
    • On IH (maybe even relevant subreddits?), post it with a link to the original article, but after a few days.

    A place like IH is a bit tricky because it doesn't give a canonical tag. But I guess we all want to drive traffic to a blog, so you have to take a bit of a chance.

    1. 1

      Sweet, thanks for the tip! For anyone looking on how to set the tag, I just googled and found this guide on Medium

  2. 1

    The strategy you are thinking of right now is the best. Building your personal blog needs to always be the first priority. Luckily, articles that appear on your blog first before appearing on medium are more likely to rank higher via your blog. Make sure to use the "import" story feature on Medium so that it goes with "article first appeared on ..." at the end of the post once you publish. We have used this strategy before and it worked fine.

    1. 1

      Cheers, appreciate it!

  3. 1

    Good question, it's something I struggle with myself sometimes. I usually post my main articles on my blog and smaller ones with a link to my blog on medium/LinkedIn/elsewhere.

    Just a question: what do you mean with syndicate on other platforms? Rewriting the content so that it stays unique?

    1. 1

      Nah, syndicate just meaning cross post.

      Content Syndication means republishing the same piece of content -- an article, a video, an infographic, etc. -- on one or more different websites.
      Source

      1. 1

        Cool, thanks for the clarification!

  4. 1

    Yes, that strategy seems right. Post on your own site first and then distribute / syndicate to other popular places in whatever format fits best for them. This way you're building SEO value to your own site which is important if you want to start getting traffic from search engines.

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