What’s Medium like as traffic source?
Literally as the title says.
So I’m looking to create some alternative sources of traffic to my website and I hear Medium posts actually rank pretty well. Has anybody else used it as a source of traffic?
For context, I write a newsletter and since the beginning I’ve only used Carrd, I love it but the only down side is that SEO isn’t really on my side because there is no blog functionality (as is with most one page site builders). But I really don’t want to try and fix what isn’t broken, because I still get quite a bit of traffic to my site.
To reinforce the question….is Medium a viable option for me?
Trending on Indie Hackers
In my opinion, the medium is great but you should also post the same content on other platforms where the audience already hang out like hashnode, dev. to like website and give the main link to your main blog.
Also due to a paywall on medium, It prevents some users from reading your content.
Hope this helps you.
Omkar from indie latte
Posting on Medium will give you good traffic numbers on those posts, but the caveats (at least, the ones I know of) are:
Much of that traffic stays on Medium by default. If you want it to come to your website (which is usually the goal), you have aa few options to do so: a single link in the navigation, links in the content, links in the footer.
That content is mostly associated with Medium, not necessarily with your company or brand. Which also decreases the value of the content.
It is however great for reposting content, since you can use their import tool to pull in blog posts you've written on WordPress or other places, and it will automatically treat the original url as canonical.
One article by a company who made the switch (BareMetrics) a while back:
https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog
A few things to add on what others have said:
Make sure you include links back to your website (backlinks) from the medium post -- this will help w/ SEO for website
Keep your posts relevant to your product or industry. The purpose of this is to directly or indirectly drive sales.
Example of what NOT to post: a random post on the company blog about how you tried to smoke a brisket this weekend (unless you are in the brisket or bbq industry).
Medium can work as blog/traction channel.
I'd echo Dean, if SEO is your concern then do not publish on Medium first - publish on your domain and import into Medium (which will tell Google that the post on your domain is the original).
Google weights sites by authority. The more high quality content you have on your domain, and the more consistently you publish the more authority you will build up over time (backlinks accelerate this process). Having authority behind your domain is what helps new content rank higher out of the gate, and helps you rank for broad industry/product keywords.
Publishing off your domain provides no such benefit to your site. It's all the hard work of blogging and none of the positive side effects (SEO wise at least).
Rather than use a CMS that is not supporting you for SEO, I'd recommend going with one that will. Wordpress, SquareSpace, and Webflow all offer different advantages design-wise while allowing more SEO support. People tend to focus on Wordpress however I've had success ranking on all three platforms.
4 years ago it was great - content ranked well for SEO, and the organic reach of content on medium itself was 🔥🔥
However in recent years they've forced any content that wants organic reach on medium itself to be behind their paywall, which has made it a lot harder to get value out of, as at the end of the day there are less eyeballs reading content that is paywalled.
If you did want to start a blog, I'd recommend running it on your own domain (mysite.com/blog) so that any SEO benefits can be shared with your primary site.
Note that you can cross publish to medium (published content from your blog there as well), just make sure you attribute it to the original so that Google knows what the original is.
This comment was deleted a year ago.