[tkrunning]

Medium has become the go-to publishing platform for more and more entrepreneurs and businesses. However, I'd argue that most people would be much better off publishing content on their own domain. This is especially true for "evergreen" content, since Medium does not allow you to update the date of your posts—meaning they will perform worse in search rankings after a while.

I started my own business, Nomad Gate, on Medium about 3.5 years ago, but have realized that I'm much better off hosting everything myself. After making the switch, both my traffic and revenue more than doubled.

I wrote an article/PSA describing my experience with Medium (and moving off it), how they are making it harder and harder to actually leave their platform (no more custom domains, no more updating canonical links, etc), and how to safely do content syndication to Medium after moving your content hub elsewhere.

I hope it will help some of you make better decisions about your content strategy, and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have for me!

[tekkk]

For anyone wanting to build their own blog and start publishing content, what do you think is the best way to gain traffic? Just share it everywhere and hope it grows or perhaps use a dual Medium+self-hosted thing? (for a time being)

I'm in the process of doing that, and oh man the amount of minute details that I have had to solve just to get things running. Granted, I did it the hard way building everything from scratch with Gatsby but I guess it was sort of an experiment too, so the time wasn't necessarily wasted. Recently I started fiddling with the OG tags, JSON-LD etc, and that was a quite tedious task. Hope it's all good now.

[tkrunning]

It obviously depend on your niche, but as long as it's not super competitive I've had pretty good success appearing in the top 10 with articles posted on my own (fairly new) domain.

Perhaps the best advice I can give is to don't focus too much on SE algorithms (just make sure you don't mess up any tagging etc), but rather focus on creating very good, well researched content. If you do that, people will share, and Google will notice. Personally, I have had success with writing long form articles. Many of the articles on Nomad Gate is 4-5000 words or more. At that point you will get a lot of long tail traffic as well.

[tnolet]

This times 100. Had exactly the same experiences with some long form posts on a new domain.

- write good, original detailed stuff.

- share on Twitter, Reddit,HN

- reach out to people.

[wolco]

Post meaningful articles and you will get some traffic. Social media accounts should include links to your blog so start sharing.

Go to topic related forums and share.

Wait.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This morning I listened (again) to a really good IndieHackers podcast with Laura Roeder where she answers this question (thanks Courtland!). Her suggestion was to buy traffic from Facebook, IG, etc. at the beginning. Once you're seeded with some regular visitors, continue to work on getting more organic traffic coming in.

But like everything, 90% of success is showing up, so first you actually have to tell people the blog exists and post stuff!

[michaelmior]

I wouldn't take advice from me since I post very infrequently and no one really reads the posts that I do write. However, I'll throw out one other option which is posting on both Medium and your own domain. Medium allows you to set the canonical URL so you shouldn't take an SEO hit.

[alexsb92]

Out of curiosity, why would you want to update the date on your posts beyond SEO? Wouldn't that be kinda misleading readers of said content?

[blotter_paper]

Not if you update the content. When reading up on interfaces that change rapidly, I'll often throw $CURRENT_YEAR into the search bar. If your post has been updated with current content, I'd like it to be included in my results.

[tkrunning]

It depends on the content and the type of updates you make.

As long as I do a significant update to an article, and make sure it's generally up to date and still entirely relevant, then I'll update the date to match.

When people look at the dates (in SERP) they generally want to know if the article is still relevant or if they are likely to find outdated information there. At least that's how I think.

Automatically updating dates without actually revising the content on the other hand... That's not something I'd want to endorse.