4 ms·

A few counterpoints on benefits of using Medium over of your own blog: - Submitting your articles to publications is a very easy way to get a lot of free expos

A few counterpoints on benefits of using Medium over of your own blog: - Submitting your articles to publications is a very easy way to get a lot of free exposure. For example, my most successful post [1] generated 36k views and 1.5k medium subscribers in the first couple of weeks just by being accepted to HackerNoon. - Collecting email addresses is extremely easy. Design a pretty CTA image that links to your email sign up form. Bonus points if you'll create a free guide or some other giveaway. This makes Medium about 95-99% as effective at building an audience on a custom blog. The post mentioned above generated about 200 email signups over time, which is pretty good for free exposure I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. - If you're interested in growing your own publication, you can easily request good stories written by other authors(one click on a menu under each post). That gives you free content and audience, if you want. - For me personally, Medium's editor significantly lowers the barrier of entry. Something about the well designed WYSIWYG format takes away the pressure and makes writing more engaging. Besides it's easier to publish short-form content. Many of my posts start out as tweets that ended up being too long, or as HN/Reddit comments I'd like to share in a better format. 100-200 word Seth-Godin-style posts are easy to write regularly and medium's format encourages you to do that. - You can always export your posts from medium into your personal blog. That's what I do for mine[2]. Write on medium to gain free audience and exposure, repost to your website, then promote posts from your site on twitter/reddit, thus still keeping all the benefits. You can even cherry pick your best articles - use medium to generate a ton of posts without any pressure to be good, and publish the ones you're most proud of on your site. [1] https://hackernoon.com/full-stack-web-development-the-complete-roadmap-9fe43ec0ba32 https://hackernoon.com/full-stack-web-development-the-comple... [2] https://startuplab.io/blog https://startuplab.io/blog

amigoingtodie 9y ago
Are you being penalized for having duplicate content on medium and your blog? What is the disadvantage of writing more of a shorter 'teaser' story on medium to funnel traffic to your blog? Is that what you do with twitter and and reddit (funnel to medium)?
- rayalez 9y ago
  Theoretically google does penalize duplicate content, but I've heard that you can ask medium support to set a canonical link pointing from the medium article to your site, I think that might even benefit your SEO. Although I've never bothered to do it yet, SEO is not my main strategy. Either way, for me, the benefits of anything that makes content creation easier way outweigh the possible SEO penalty, so I don't really care. I don't see the point of writing teaser stories on medium, I doubt they'll get accepted into big publications, or bring you a lot of traffic. For me, Medium articles are meant to close email subscribers, and the future emails I send can direct people to my site. I've got started on twitter only recently, I post there for fun, writing practice, and sometimes I just share links to whatever project or post I want to promote. Posts submitted to subreddits link to my main site. I don't usually bother to manually promote medium posts anywhere other than submitting them to publications (because I might as well promote the main site).
forgotpassagan 9y ago
Medium in it's purest form is a blatant SEO siphon from your website. Well written articles will generally place highly on Google's search results no matter the domain(unless you've got shady shit going on). God knows what metrics they're using these days (mostly ML?) But Google readily recognizes articles well written from expert sources in my opinion. I've only written around ten blog posts but they're all first page, some first result, for my goal keywords. And this is on a no-name website not optimized for SEO at all. The SEO arms race has been going on so long that we've reached a point where, if you're a good writer, it's easier to follow Google's guidelines than try to cheat the system. Medium and other blog sites are basically a guest blog, except you're not getting paid for placement. Google ranking is everything and posting on medium does nothing but hurt you gravely
- fphilipe 9y ago
  > Well written articles will generally place highly on Google's search results no matter the domain(unless you've got shady shit going on). Absolutely. I've written two blog posts on PostgreSQL on topics that, in my opinion, weren't well covered and often misunderstood by its users. Both posts show up on the first page on a google search for "psql cli" and "postgres timezone". I honestly never understood this whole fuss about SEO. In my opinion SEO is about good content. Good content over time will spread, which will result in a higher ranking.
  - forgotpassagan 9y ago
    Google heavy promotes articles that use their Google Analytics and have high time-on-page scores. Everything Google does with search ranking is gameable but built to focus on high quality content. The best thing about having a couple high ranking pages is that it becomes much easier to make others. Your trust score is already high so there's a good chance other articles about postgres will also reach first page, even if they're not about specialized topics. This is what the SEOtards fail to understand
- stevekintor 9y ago
  Wait presumably you have lots of high quality inbounds links, or lots of shares on social, or almost no one elsr is writing about the same topics you are. I see no other way you could be front page ranking just by publishing.
thisisit 9y ago
> Submitting your articles to publications is a very easy way to get a lot of free exposure. For example, my most successful post [1] generated 36k views and 1.5k medium subscribers in the first couple of weeks just by being accepted to HackerNoon. Same here. Though I did not really end up getting 36k views just 10% of that. Before Hackernoon, my read count hovered around 300-400, though I would like to believe it will grow. > Collecting email addresses is extremely easy. Design a pretty CTA image that links to your email sign up form. Bonus points if you'll create a free guide or some other giveaway. This makes Medium about 95-99% as effective at building an audience on a custom blog. The post mentioned above generated about 200 email signups over time, which is pretty good for free exposure I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. If possible, please expand on this. I have zero email marketing experience so really want to start something on that end. Any links/tutorials on building a CTA image and adding on a blog post will help.
- rayalez 9y ago
  It's really simple. My newsletter CTA looks like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*pDNISBRJFawWMkNX75g2zA.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*pDNISBRJFawWMkNX7... Just photoshop together a pretty image inviting people to subscribe. My free guide cta looks like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*MrvefAFP7GtyAtPZY73Vhw.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*MrvefAFP7GtyAtPZY... Put together a short pdf in your area of expertise, and offer it to email subscribers. Sometimes I simply send people to a landing page that looks like this: https://startuplab.io/free-guide https://startuplab.io/free-guide Keep it simple, minimal information, promise value, address potential objections, show a signup form and a big subscribe button. Here's some good advice on putting together a simple landing page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVRf3MeFKm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVRf3MeFKm0 If you're interested in email marketing in general, I highly recommend Alex Becker's courses. I don't know if HN audience will like him, but I've learned A LOT from this guy and I love his tutorials. You can find his introductory course here: http://alexbecker.org/membership-area/ http://alexbecker.org/membership-area/ Feel free to email me if you need more advice(raymestalez@gmail.com).

amigoingtodie 9y ago

Are you being penalized for having duplicate content on medium and your blog? What is the disadvantage of writing more of a shorter 'teaser' story on medium to funnel traffic to your blog? Is that what you do with twitter and and reddit (funnel to medium)?

rayalez 9y ago
Theoretically google does penalize duplicate content, but I've heard that you can ask medium support to set a canonical link pointing from the medium article to your site, I think that might even benefit your SEO. Although I've never bothered to do it yet, SEO is not my main strategy. Either way, for me, the benefits of anything that makes content creation easier way outweigh the possible SEO penalty, so I don't really care. I don't see the point of writing teaser stories on medium, I doubt they'll get accepted into big publications, or bring you a lot of traffic. For me, Medium articles are meant to close email subscribers, and the future emails I send can direct people to my site. I've got started on twitter only recently, I post there for fun, writing practice, and sometimes I just share links to whatever project or post I want to promote. Posts submitted to subreddits link to my main site. I don't usually bother to manually promote medium posts anywhere other than submitting them to publications (because I might as well promote the main site).

forgotpassagan 9y ago

Medium in it's purest form is a blatant SEO siphon from your website. Well written articles will generally place highly on Google's search results no matter the domain(unless you've got shady shit going on). God knows what metrics they're using these days (mostly ML?) But Google readily recognizes articles well written from expert sources in my opinion. I've only written around ten blog posts but they're all first page, some first result, for my goal keywords. And this is on a no-name website not optimized for SEO at all. The SEO arms race has been going on so long that we've reached a point where, if you're a good writer, it's easier to follow Google's guidelines than try to cheat the system. Medium and other blog sites are basically a guest blog, except you're not getting paid for placement. Google ranking is everything and posting on medium does nothing but hurt you gravely

fphilipe 9y ago
> Well written articles will generally place highly on Google's search results no matter the domain(unless you've got shady shit going on). Absolutely. I've written two blog posts on PostgreSQL on topics that, in my opinion, weren't well covered and often misunderstood by its users. Both posts show up on the first page on a google search for "psql cli" and "postgres timezone". I honestly never understood this whole fuss about SEO. In my opinion SEO is about good content. Good content over time will spread, which will result in a higher ranking.
- forgotpassagan 9y ago
  Google heavy promotes articles that use their Google Analytics and have high time-on-page scores. Everything Google does with search ranking is gameable but built to focus on high quality content. The best thing about having a couple high ranking pages is that it becomes much easier to make others. Your trust score is already high so there's a good chance other articles about postgres will also reach first page, even if they're not about specialized topics. This is what the SEOtards fail to understand
stevekintor 9y ago
Wait presumably you have lots of high quality inbounds links, or lots of shares on social, or almost no one elsr is writing about the same topics you are. I see no other way you could be front page ranking just by publishing.

thisisit 9y ago

> Submitting your articles to publications is a very easy way to get a lot of free exposure. For example, my most successful post [1] generated 36k views and 1.5k medium subscribers in the first couple of weeks just by being accepted to HackerNoon. Same here. Though I did not really end up getting 36k views just 10% of that. Before Hackernoon, my read count hovered around 300-400, though I would like to believe it will grow. > Collecting email addresses is extremely easy. Design a pretty CTA image that links to your email sign up form. Bonus points if you'll create a free guide or some other giveaway. This makes Medium about 95-99% as effective at building an audience on a custom blog. The post mentioned above generated about 200 email signups over time, which is pretty good for free exposure I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. If possible, please expand on this. I have zero email marketing experience so really want to start something on that end. Any links/tutorials on building a CTA image and adding on a blog post will help.

rayalez 9y ago
It's really simple. My newsletter CTA looks like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*pDNISBRJFawWMkNX75g2zA.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*pDNISBRJFawWMkNX7... Just photoshop together a pretty image inviting people to subscribe. My free guide cta looks like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*MrvefAFP7GtyAtPZY73Vhw.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1520/1*MrvefAFP7GtyAtPZY... Put together a short pdf in your area of expertise, and offer it to email subscribers. Sometimes I simply send people to a landing page that looks like this: https://startuplab.io/free-guide https://startuplab.io/free-guide Keep it simple, minimal information, promise value, address potential objections, show a signup form and a big subscribe button. Here's some good advice on putting together a simple landing page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVRf3MeFKm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVRf3MeFKm0 If you're interested in email marketing in general, I highly recommend Alex Becker's courses. I don't know if HN audience will like him, but I've learned A LOT from this guy and I love his tutorials. You can find his introductory course here: http://alexbecker.org/membership-area/ http://alexbecker.org/membership-area/ Feel free to email me if you need more advice(raymestalez@gmail.com).