If you own a blog and don’t republish on Medium, you’re missing half the fun and you’re leaving money on the table.
Here’s why and how every blogger should use Medium to grow their audience, increase their income, and skyrocket their traffic.
One click is all it takes
For starters, it’s super easy to re-publish blog posts to Medium. No need to manually copy and paste everything from your blog platform (like WordPress or Ghost) to Medium.
You only need one click. Here’s how:
Instead of hitting the “Write a story” button you find in multiple places on the Medium website, go to your stories tab. There, you’ll find the option “Import a story”.
This is the one to click.
Simply add the URL of your blog post, and hit “import”. The story will be added as a draft to your Medium account.
It works well. In some cases, you might have to reformat a couple of things throughout the text body like bullet points, but overall, it’s a solid importer.
You might notice, that a paragraph gets automatically added at the bottom of your imported story, saying something like “Originally published at https://byburk.net on March 26, 2023.”
That’s no big deal. You can remove it if you like or leave it as is.
Exciting is what happens behind the curtain.
Changes you don’t see (immediately)
When importing a blog post into Medium, something else happens automatically in the background. A canonical link will be added that points to the original source of your story, i.e. your blog post on WordPress, Ghost, etc.
This is good, because it will
- tell search engines that this isn’t duplicate content, but a repost on another platform
- let search engines know the original source
- drive web & search engine traffic to this original source, aka your blog
This is what we want. We want to drive organic traffic to our blog on our own custom domain. For multiple reasons:
- to increase the domain authority score (DA)
- to rise in search results
- to get better rankings for past and future content
- gain valuable backlinks from a high-quality domain (Medium)
and more.
Sidenote: You can find (and edit) the canonical link in the story settings or “More Settings” in the three-dot menu within the Medium editor in the top right corner. Scroll down to “Advanced Settings”, open the toggle, and look for “Customize Canonical Link”.
Spill it, what’s the catch
What’s the downside, I hear you say?
No downsides!
Re-publishing on Medium (when done correctly via the import and canonical links) won’t harm your blog. It won’t lead to duplicate content issues.
The only possible downside is that your Medium posts would get more search engine traffic without an original source, because Medium has a high DA score and ranks well on Google. You lose this potential high ranking because you point to your own domain which has a (considerably) lower DA score.
In short: You’d get more external readers to Medium if you only publish there. But since Medium doesn’t pay for external views, it doesn’t really matter.
What matter is that Medium can help you grow your own DA score by importing stories with correct canonical links. And thereby, help your blog rank better, get more viewers, and become more successful.
Huge win-win.
The bottom line
If you own a blog and don’t re-publish on Medium, you’re missing half the fun and you’re leaving money on the table, because
- It doesn’t take time or savvy tech skills to import a story from most blog platforms
- It doesn’t hurt Medium or your blog
- You potentially earn money on Medium from member reading time while still getting search engine traffic to your blog
In my opinion, re-publishing to Medium is a no-brainer for every blogger out there. You get the best of both worlds and you have nothing to lose.
Whether you should run a blog in the first place, that’s an entirely different story and you can read more about that here:
Instead Of Creating Your Own Website, Do This
For freeburkrosemann.medium.com
