18/05/2023 Edit: Obviously, I’ve moved back… 😂
I’m getting a trickle of traffic from Google, about 150 people per week, but I’ve decided to move my posts from my personal site to my Medium blog.
While it seems kind of unusual, instead of simply dual posting by importing the articles to medium, here are the reasons:
(One important caveat to add here is that this experiment is for a personal brand, not a corporate leads driven business).
🧪 Why
- SEO is a distraction. It may be different for you, but I find the need to try and build links and promote content since there’s no audience without Google, takes me away from actually trying to write things that people like. I will be reallocating all that time away from SEO to writing .
- Faster feedback. Some posts can get dozens of views in the first day on Medium. Blog articles can take weeks to ramp up, if ever.
- Existing audience. I know it’s common knowledge, but I like the idea that medium is exposing my work to more than just people who might search the topic. It can’t hurt to have some traffic diversity.
- Topic breadth. Writing on a blog and relying on Google traffic somewhat limits the things that I can really talk about, because who is really going to search them? My hope is that with Medium’s social element I can write more broadly about things that interest me and still have a chance to get people to read it.
- Data on readers reactions. Medium has stats that show me how many people actually read my articles and eventually clap for them. From the 20 or so articles I’ve moved across so far, I’ve noticed some topics are actually more liked than others. This is big advantage to the metrics that I’ve managed to get from Google Analytics such as simply sessions, and time on site.. Now I know what topics to write more about.
- Repost ability. I found that with writing for a blog and relying on SEO com I kind of went a bit loopy about needing links and having the right URL for my work. with medium, each article is actually a work in progress I can later unpost it, improve it based on the feedback gathered so far, and repost it again in the future.
- Comments. I know not everybody cares about comments but I find them particularly motivating. For my website, people have to sign up to yet another thing so I think I got less comments. On Medium most people reading probably have an account, so it can attract more comments.
I will admit, overall this is just an experiment. I plan to take the feedback from there from there and potentially post my greatest hits, if they ever are such pieces, to my Substack blog permanently.
👎 Disadvantages
At the same time, I have lost some things in doing this:
- Subdomain. I understand that a Medium blog on a Medium subdomain probably doesn’t rank as hard as your own domain. But if you wanted to, you could just link your own custom domain to Medium.
- Old links. I had some decent links built to my old work through natural references. They will be lost when I move that content over.
- Affiliate income. It seems medium doesn’t allow you to post affiliate links so any articles that I had monetised this way will be demonetised. I made about 10 US dollars a month from this so it isn’t a big deal.
- Medium algorithm. Technically, I am at the whim of mediums content algorithm as to how much they want to show me within their ecosystem. But this seems not to affect the SEO ranking of articles.
Ultimately I still own my content even though it is posted on this platform. And some of them continue to rank in SEO.
The difference is that now I can focus all my time on writing about things that aren’t necessarily driven search-driven, as well as refine my content topics based on feedback from users.
Has anyone else thought of doing this instead?