On Returning To Medium

I don’t consider myself a blogger but when I do write, it’s usually for SEO purposes.

I’ve discussed this topic extensively on my Ko-fi and in Patreon blog posts but with this article, I think things are finally official:

I’m returning to Medium

Why Blog At All?

There is one specific reason why I write blog posts and articles:

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. It’s basically a way to increase the search rankings of content.

Having multiple sources link back to original content makes search engines (Google, basically) rank it higher in related search results.

This applies to the YouTube algorithm as well; the more external links your video has, the more likely the algorithm will rank your videos higher when people search for related terms.

What If You Have A Website?

That’s the question I asked myself before switching away from Medium.

Just because you have a website blog, doesn’t automatically mean people are able to find it.

I have my own website, so why wouldn’t I just blog there instead of on Medium?

A website is basically a domain with some web service hosting up your content. In my case, the website is a Jekyll app which is actually built with blogging in mind. And the theme I use is designed for blogging.

Creating a blog is easy. Directing traffic to it is hard. Just because you have a website blog, doesn’t automatically mean people are able to find it.

That was my problem. The SEO for my website is poor and I don’t know enough about it to fix it. Nor do I want to pour myself into SEO theory to figure out how to fix it.

Another problem is the format. Even if your content is good, if the format is bad, people aren’t going to stay.

When people did find my blog, the bounce rate was quite bad.

What Does Medium Offer?

People tend to spend more time reading Medium articles than other services.

Medium is effectively an out of the box solution for blogging. It provides:

• CMS
• Analytics
• Hosting (media, etc)
• SEO & Authority

That last piece, Authority, is incredibly important for optimizing SEO in general. Medium is a well-known name, brand, and service that people trust.

Search engines (I.E. Google) are much more likely to recommend content if it is from services that people trust.

That being said, the built-in CMS and analytics that Medium provides is nothing to sneeze at.

Compared to others, the Medium “article” format is spartan but it works. People tend to spend more time reading Medium articles than other services.

Medium is also a network in & of itself. When people are done reading my articles, Medium recommends similar articles to them. And likewise, if someone reads an article about Linux, they might be recommended one of my articles.

What About The Paywall?

One of the reasons I switched away from Medium was because of their “metered paywall” thing.

I still don’t like it.

Personally, I have no need for it. I’m using Medium for SEO purposes and have no plans to put my articles behind the paywall.

It looks like Medium may be trying out different ways to monetize traffic but hopefully, that won’t affect my readers & viewership.

Summary

I switched away from blogging on my Jekyll website to Medium because I see significantly more traffic when I write on Medium. It’s as simple as that.

With enough time & effort, I might be able to get a blog on my website to perform as well as my articles on Medium do.

But the bottom line is, I’d rather put that effort into producing cool videos and writing interesting articles. And that’s what I plan to do. 😉