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22 Comments

Medium or custom blog?

I'm thinking about to start creating content for company blog and looking what is a best way to do - use medium or create own blog.
With medium I can start almost immediately and it's already SEO friendly. Or make an effort to develop own.

Has anyone come across this issue? Can you advise something?

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    1. Create your own blog on yourdomainname.com/blog and publish all the content there.
    2. Cross post all the content you publish on your blog on Medium and its popular publications using the "Import" feature. Imported stories automatically apply a canonical URL which references the source URL and this pretty much gives SEO "credit" to your domain name.

    This way you not only get the benefit of Medium and the popularity of its publications, but you also build your domain authority and start ranking your website in search results. This will be so much more valuable and give you free organic traffic for your brand. Going Medium alone won't help your main site much.

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      Well done on the advice here, spot on 👍 I would have advised exactly as above as I had to learn the hard way ☹️

    2. 2

      Such good ideas! Thanks for sharing it.

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      It looks like Medium import feature is broken. It used to be able to import from my blog, but failed recently.

      Now I had to copy-paste all content from personal blog to Medium, and add the original post url at the end, something like: Original post: http://myblog.com

      Do you think a backlink like that would help SEO?

  2. 4

    I think part of what you need to decide is how critical your blog content is going to be to your business. I maintain a static blog hosted on s3 and really like the control I have over the content. It's mine and Medium can't put it behind a popup nag screen or decide to try to monetize it in some way. No matter what, I control the content and can benefit from what I create.

    I also think the process of setting up a static blog site is pretty straightforward so I don't see how Medium gives you that much in the long run. If you have a favorite web development stack then you'll probably find a static generator that works. If not, there are other platforms that are free or cheap that you can setup.

    However, I do realize that when you're setting up a new company, you need to decide where to spend your time. Lots of people have good experience with Medium so it must be doing something right. If you have limited ability to drive content to your site, then Medium might provide a jump start.

    Finally, I would not get hung up on "SEO friendly." If you choose simple clean templates that are mobile friendly, then it's more about the content than anything else.

    Anyway, those are my two cents. I hope they help.

    1. 1

      Thanks, Chris
      And do you know what problems can I face if will start Medium at the start and then will switch to a personal blog and transfer all the content there?

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        I think the big issue is making sure that any search traffic you build up will point to your new location. Apparently there is a rel=canonical link you can put in your post that will direct to your original site. However, if you only have it on Medium, I don't think you can do much about it. You can do a custom subdomain which might help.

        This article seems to be a really good relevant summary: https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog

  3. 1

    For the long term, I would encourage you to have your own website. Since you can re-publish your articles on Medium it's a nice booster to get some rankings.
    If you want to get some traction fast, write on Medium first.

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    What do you mean by develop your own? If you go the WordPress way, you don't need to develop anything, and you get full control over your data and your users' data, which in these times is a gigantic plus.

    If it is a company blog, I really appreciate when the blog and the website match organically. If you host on Medium, it will end up looking just like any other Medium blog. And if you do it for free, you will put your content behind a paywall.

    Sure, Medium ensures to distribute the content of the people who pay, which will give you visits to your website, but it will depend on what company you are working for if that is so important.

  5. 1

    I created a blog on Medium with my own domain (they support that for a fee). Did a fair amount post posting and built up some good traffic and external links etc. One advantage was that I had plenty of people sent my way by medium, who then gave me organic links from their blogs etc.
    When I was ready, I then setup my own Wordpress blog on some cheap hosting, and created copies of all of the posts on medium that I had created, and set the new url permalinks to replicate the urls on Medium. I then transferred the domain name to my new blog, so all of the inbound links now come to my own blog automatically. Medium quickly removed my old blog from their platform so there was no content duplication SEO issues.
    I think I did well out of it.

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    Custom blog without a doubt - I'm running a publication on medium, and unless your'e publishing under their paywall, and your content isn't trying to sell anything, distribution on the platform is limited. Much better off to run your own blog

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    A custom blog all day, you own your audience.

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    Unless I am expecting huge visitors from medium itself I won't go with medium, medium is too restrictive. Now a days it's very easy to host a static blog on Netlify.

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    I tried starting off this with Hacker Noon. There are a bunch of technology articles. However, it's surprisingly not useful to write technically.

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    Medium is quick to start and already SEO friendly, while a company blog would take some level of effort. And as @volkandkaya mentioned self hosted blog can potentially be more SEO friendly than Medium.

    That being said I'd recommend posting on Medium so you can get started immediately. In the future you can implement a self hosted blog and cross post your Medium blog posts on there.

    1. 2

      Sounds like a plan. Probably will do this

  11. 1

    For a company blog I would host a ghost server, very SEO friendly and you can always cross post to medium but they don't share it as much as they use to.

    For Versoly, we converted the ghost site into a static site so we can have it as a subfolder not on a subdomain to give us a little extra SEO.

    Funny how blogging is still an issue in 2019.

    1. 2

      I’m looking into Netlify CMS with gatsby.js

      I’m just never before face this question, so it’s better to double check)

      1. 2

        I've done blogging with Gatsby + Netlify before. You'll be in good hands if you go down that route.

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