Publish a blog on Medium or on your website? Which attracts more traffic to your website eventually?
I was advised to start publishing on Medium especially when our website traffic is fairly low.
The argument was no one will see your posts unless you heavily distribute it. Whereas on Medium, you have a chance to be placed in front of masses.
The end goal is to move people to your website and take an action, yeah?
Has anyone had the chance to experience and compare both options? Any suggestions?
P.S. If you got any data, you can shamelessly plug it!
Your future self will never regret publishing on your own website — you have the chance to be placed in front of the masses through Google, it just requires patience. 😉
I don't think it's an either / or situation, do both if you can.
Thanks for your reply Rosie! That sounds like the general opinion here :)
Absolutely. It takes to learn how to rank your website, SEO, and other things. At the end, it will awesome process.
Just a data point: as a reader, I don't click or share Medium links. The reason is Medium has possibly the most annoying nags to create an account or subscribe.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Paolo! Good to hear how you perceive Medium links.
We published our articles on Medium with different content but a similar topic - "10 design tips to "category like lawn care, truck, racing" logos". The one on our website has higher traffic although our web has low traffic (150/day), we usually got 20 to the blog on the first week, whereas the one on Medium got only a few.
But we just did 2 experiments. Maybe others can share better.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience! Let's see if others had different results.
The good thing about Medium is the ability to publish from another URL so I publish on my blog and advertise to my network.
After that, I would publish via the link (make sure it's a link you paste the URL)
This way, Google won't punish you and you won't lose anything.
Good luck
I'm also curious about this. I personally write development articles and Medium just doesn't have great features for this. I've built a nice blog on my personal site akashhamirwasia.com where I post full length articles and just post a shorter preview of that article on Medium for visibility. Obviously linking back to my personal blog.
That is an interesting approach. I've also read it somewhere online in which you write the original on your website and link it to Medium. How would you rate your traffic from Medium to your blog?
Don't have enough insights right now. I just published a single blog article in this form as of now, still seeing how it goes.
I see! Good luck with it Akash and thanks again!
What if you do both? Building SEO for your domain is important. Medium can help you with the distribution.
Thank you for your input! Rosie and Akash mentioned the same thing above! I think it is best to give it a try this approach.
If you care about SEO, publish on your domain and import to Medium.
This is one of the top mistakes I see people make. Medium is trendy, so they publish there but publishing on Medium does absolutely nothing for your rank and will not give you the SEO benefits that come with publishing content.
If SEO is not your goal, then you can do whatever is easiest (though publishing on your domain is probably still better for the other reasons mentioned here).
Shameless plug, I wrote about this among other common SEO mistakes I see here: https://www.centori.io/post/stop-blogging-on-medium-and-other-seo-blunders-killing-your-chance-at-ranking
I read 4 of your articles! Your blog content is awesome! Keep up the great work mate.
Thank you!
Not a 100% on the topic. But favourite place to blog for me is linkedin and medium. I store all blogposts in Notion as a Backup just in case.
Not sure in terms of SEO/Medium terms and conditions, but I have seen people republish the content from their blog on medium with a link to their blog saying something like:
My advice would be to primarily publish on your own blog, and then publish the same content with canonical URLs elsewhere (e.g. Medium - make sure to get into a publication if you can).
I publish primarily on my own website ( https://p42.ai/blog ). Then I publish the same content on dev.to, hashnode, medium, dzone (my product is in the dev space), with canonical URLs being set up correctly. Plus sharing in social media and a few other places. Plus eventually taking the best content and making it part of my newsletter.
Do you put canonical urls on your own website? Or all?
On the other websites, pointing to your website.
That is interesting. I wasn't aware that you can do that. Thank you for sharing.
Appreciate your answer Lars and thanks for explaining your process! It feels as if this is the right approach! Are Medium publications open to publishing pre-written content? I read in a few places that they prefer to be the first to publish a piece. Perhaps it depends on where it is published?
I think it depends on the publication - different publications have different rules, # of readers, and editing support. I usually chose the publication based on the level of quality of the post because publications with more reach tend to reject lower-quality content (at least that was my observation).
That makes a lot of sense. That means if you can get yourself accepted, you have a higher chance of reaching a wide audience who take the time to consume that content. Sounds like the best of both worlds.
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Seems to be the right way!
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Thank you for sharing this article, its content looks great :)
I've just read it now! Suggestions laid out in the article are in line with what others mentioned here. But it was very well written so thanks a lot for sharing!
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Thank you for your answer!!