Medium vs Own site for blog
What are the pros/cons of using a platform like Medium, vs my own website (e.g. a section of the domain with my web app), for blogging?
More specifically, are there SEO implications that I should consider? I'm very new at this Internet marketing business.
If anyone has posts / sites / resources that would be helpful in understanding this better, it would be very much appreciated also :).
Cheers
JP
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It depends on what you want to do.
Putting content on Medium or any other site will help people discover you, but in the end, you play by their rules, and their rules always change at some point. So you're not in control of what you've built, especially your followers since you depend on Medium to contact them.
If you're in it for the long term, nothing beats your own email list that you own and control. You can use a free plan of a paid tool like mailchimp or mailerlite for that. It's harder to get email signups than to get someone to click 'follow' but it also means that your messages are always sent to them (not so when you post on Medium) and it means your followers are more committed to hear from you.
There's a great evergreen post on this here: http://swombat.com/2012/6/1/email-works
For me, when I'm committed to a project or audience, I start with my own domain and email list, and treat everything else like marketing to attract people to that list.
Gotcha. Sounds like medium might be a solid place to start from but then also I should try to build up a list / channel for myself.
Why not use both? Having your own site provides great value in the long run - if you've put enough energy and effort in it. On the other hand, Medium is a big platform where you can get more instant results and you're more likely to be noticed by Mediums editors.
Medium has an option where you can import an article - that way Google can know which article is canonical - an original piece of content.
Yeah I think that is solid advice! Just have to think of some useful blog topics; and actually produce some content. How hard could it be? 😉
As for medium it's probably not bad except you don't improve your website's rank in search engines.
With all other solutions like Wordpress or Ghost, the problem is you usually can't integrate them into your website and should put it on the separate subdomain like blog.mydomain.com what will be indexed separately from your domain, therefore it's not improving your site's rank either.
That's why I created a simple product website that already has its own blog and faq. Basically, when you roll out the app you will get a working website with a landing page (having a form to collect emails integrated with Mailchimp), pricing page, faq, and blog - all on the same domain, all server-side rendered what is 100% SEO-friendly, and the dashboard to manage authors, blog posts, and faq sections and questions.
The template page: https://www.saasforge.dev/templates/product-website-template
The working demo (except the dashboard, I just can't provide public access to it): https://productsite-demo.herokuapp.com/
And btw, the FAQ contains questions/answers about the template: https://productsite-demo.herokuapp.com/faq
Aaaaah I didn’t realise that subdomains would be a non-factor in the SEO stakes. Thanks!
I would say always, always use your own domain first and foremost. If you're going to spend so much time and energy on creating great content, and it's so good that people want to link to that content, then you want the links pointing to your own site. A large parts of SEO is inbound links.
Try starting at ahrefs.com blog, which has a lot of nice resources: https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building/
Thanks Mark! Appreciate all the help I can get as a solopreneur / total newbie at marketing :)
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
Oh that’s an awesome post! I’m going to have to think about how that might apply to what I’m trying to do; but that sounds great.