For anyone thinking about publishing anything on Medium, here's a little story: Since day 1 I self hosted my blog, starting about 3.5 years ago. About a year

For anyone thinking about publishing anything on Medium, here's a little story: Since day 1 I self hosted my blog, starting about 3.5 years ago. About a year ago I read about how much of an SEO boost and new eyes I would get by re-publishing my articles on Medium (with canonical URLs pointing back to my site) and it sounded good on paper. Medium is essentially a marketplace for blogs and can act as a way to promote your articles... ...but the reality is, Medium won't really do anything at all to drive traffic to your Medium articles. The only articles you ever see trending on the front page or in the Medium newsletter is when a Medium article happens to gain a ton of external traction. That traction usually happens when YOU (as the content creator) are either famous and drive your own traffic to it, or you wrote something good and other people are linking your Medium article around the internet. In both cases, Medium does nothing here to help you. You could have posted the same article on your site instead. About a year ago I republished about 20 of my most popular blog posts on Medium and got around 200 hits over 6 months on all of the articles combined. I never sent any traffic to those pages and never linked to them from anywhere. I just let Medium do its thing. Meanwhile just 1 of those articles alone gets 5x that traffic in 1 day on my own site. I've long pulled all of my republished posts off Medium and will never (re)publish anything again on that platform. Do yourself a favor and just self host your own blog.