Medium is a double-sided profiting platform only to bloggers who know the secret to unlocking this potential. So if up until now you’ve only been using Medium to publish your stories and articles, then I tell you, there is still more to gain.
And that what I will be letting you on in this post: the secret.
I will show you exactly how I utilized Medium to gain significant traffic to my blog and how I turned Medium into a passive income using that same articles I published on my blog—you read that correctly, I killed two birds with one stone.
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So here is how it got started and how it have improved the SEO of my newly created Masteringbackend blog.
On August 11th, 2017, I dropped my first story on Medium, and it went viral.
Did I say it went Viral? 🙂 Up till today, that story has 50 views and 50 reads. It never receives any traction since then.
But here is the thing:
That story opens a lot of new opportunities for me. It was the beginning of my Writing journey.
After having that amount of views and reads in a story, I discovered I could get more people to read my story if I only wrote more.
I held on to that insight and never looked back.
Now I have published, trending stories on Medium, alongside owning a blog.
At first my blog got no traction or views and I was in dire need for traffic. I was deep in my thinking pit, brainstorming how to drive traffic to my blog. It simply didn’t make sense I could drive traffic to my blog—you know, this could really drive you nuts and crazy!
But soon enough, I hatched on the idea—the secret I’m about to share with you. At this point, I want you to sit back because this is where the story begins to get even more interesting…
My Blogging Secrets with Medium
Canonical Links
The Canonical link update is one of the most important features of Medium for bloggers.
Canonical Link tells search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.
With canonical links, when you write an article for your blog, you don’t have to write another version for your Medium account. You can simply use Medium Imports to copy your story into Medium, then share it in any Medium publication of your choice.
This is exactly what I started out with: importing content from blog into Medium.
So here is the importance of doing this for your blog:
When a Search Engine sees your article from Medium, the Search Engine will look at the canonical link of that article—where it is pointing to—then loop over the Medium version to index the source, i.e. the master page.
For instance:
If I import this article from my blog to Medium.
https://masteringbackend.com/posts/backend-development-the-ultimate-guide
When Search Engine sees the Medium version below that has a Canonical Link pointing to the one above:
https://medium.com/backenders-club/backend-development-the-ultimate-guide-2021-6acaf98a432d
It will rank and index my blog’s version of the article to avoid indexing duplicate content—the master page get indexed, not the medium version!
This will make Search Engine crawl and index your blog content quickly and start showing it in Search Engine result pages.
In short, you are leveraging off Medium’s traffic to rank your blog
Got some old content on Medium you want to move to your blog?
Instead of posting that article on your blog and Importing again—you will lose all your statistics—do this instead:
- Repost the article (or updated version) in your blog and copy the link.
- Edit the Story on Medium
- Click in the Edit Menu and Click on More Settings.
- Scroll down to Advanced Settings and Click on the dropdown
- Now, Check the box and paste in your the article’s URL from your blog
- Save and continue with others.
After doing this for my blog, I noticed a significant growth in traffic to my blog from the trending and popular articles I had published on Medium.
This is just one of my articles if you can notice where the spike starts in the graph above.
High Domain Authorities
This also help you gain backlinks that boost your Domain Authority.
Medium has a high domain authority (95%), so having high-quality inbound backlinks to your blog from Medium is a solid signal to search engines to rank and score your blog.
Earning high-quality inbound links from websites and pages with high authority scores is crucial for boosting your domain authority.
HubSpot
This approach has worked for my blog and also has help rank and increase my Domain Authority by 20%.
In my Google Console Dashboard, Medium is the Top Linking Site to my blog.
Free Direct Traffic
Medium rewards every of your publication by showcasing them to its visitors giving you a chance to gain views, reads, and claps, etc.
Of course, you also get traffic to your blog when you embed links from your blog into your Medium publications.
I have had a significant amount of free traffic to my blog just having the above link in the footer of every of the articles I imported from from popular publications where I had previously published them.
There is still more money to make!
Here comes the second side of the coin: publish your story in popular Medium publications within your domain, your story could go viral from there.
A win-win for you!
Final Thoughts
That’s it. That’s the secret!
The steps I used to generate free traffic, gain high-quality backlinks, increase my blog’s domain authority and earn money via Medium partnership program.
So it all in your hands now, the secret. So go ahead and start using it to gain more traction and earn more money.
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