Medium, LinkedIn, or your blog: where should you publish your thought leadership?
As I discussed previously in this blog, thought leaders need to invest as much time in the promotion of their content as they do in authoring it — if not more.
One of the first decisions prospective thought leaders have to make is where they would like to see their thought leadership published.
Commonly, those planning thought leadership campaigns have several target publications in mind already. In other instances, authors want to start out more modestly and have set their sites on Medium and LinkedIn — or on their company blog.
As these two publishing platforms are commonly enquired about, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each.
Publishing Thought Leadership On Medium
Over the years, Medium has grown to become a veritable writing ecosystem containing a large network of profiles and publications.
From an SEO perspective, Medium is an offsite publishing location — because users publish to a subdomain of Medium.com (youruser.medium.com). [A subdomain is a separate part of a website denoted by a prefix to the Top Level Domain (TLD), which is, for example, Medium.com]
There is some debate among SEO experts as to whether the Google algorithm assigns subdomains the same domain authority (DA) as the parent domain. It’s reasonably probable that in most cases it does — particularly on a site like Medium in which each user is programatically assigned a subdomain as a core part of the user functionality.
Whatever the answer to that question, when users post their writing to Medium, they are not building up the SEO value of their own website, if they have one, directly (although backlinks will provide a slight boost). This applies equally to publishing to LinkedIn. Rather, their writing on Medium.com will be indexed in search engines.
Syndicating Writing To/From Medium
Medium has an ‘import’ function which allows users to syndicate content they have published to Medium-creating secondary copies of it. (This blog post is syndicated!)
This functionality adds the correct SEO tags (canonical tags) which mark the Medium post as a copy and the first publication destination (e.g. a company blog) as the original.
On the flip side, users can post to Medium and then copy to their own websites. If they are doing so, however, they should be careful to add canonical tags so that the search engines does not flag the post(s) as duplicate content. Moz has a guide as to how to do that here. If you’re using WordPress, SEO plugins typically contain this as a core feature.
Posting to Medium also opens up the article to the Medium community where users can comment on it. This has benefits (the potential to engage with new readers) as well as risks (authors can receive comments with negative sentiment).
From a PR perspective, both Medium and LinkedIn Pulse have characteristics more like onsite resources such as company blogs: because anybody can publish to them whenever they feel like it. This is of course convenient and makes publishing on Medium a popular option among those who have not developed their own website yet.
The exception is writing for Medium publications. Typically, these have dedicated editors that enforce an editorial review cycle. To apply to write for a Medium publication, authors also typically need to apply to be added as a publication author and then follow- to a ‘t’-the submission guidelines.
Writing for Medium publications is not typically directly compensated — save for revenue that metered pieces collect through the Medium Partner Program.
Many Medium publications will also not accept syndicated content-so this is one instance in which the Medium version may need to be the original rather than the duplicate.
Authors have to therefore decide whether investing the time in joining and pitching these publications is worth it. Comparing the return on investment (ROI) between Medium publishing and publishing on print and online publications involves comparing the time involved — and of course the likelihood of the pitch being accepted — with the expected distribution, bearing in mind that his might be significantly wider than what could be achieved through owned channels like early-stage blogs.
(In most cases, pitches are reviewed on an individual basis. For many publications, prior publication is no guarantee that future submissions will be accepted).
Why Publish To Medium
Leaving arguments about monetization aside (Medium operates a Partner Program), the main advantage for publishing content to Medium for many users is to tap into the audience the site contains through its architecture as a blog-based social network.
Every Medium user has a profile. Profiles can be tagged in writing and follow other profiles (or publications). As users publish content and accrue followers, their reach gradually widens. Mediums’ editors can also recommend content, thereby greatly widening its distribution.
By publishing for Medium publications rather than to their own profiles, users can expand this reach exponentially — -because high-profile publications typically have much larger follower bases than individual users (some have more than 100,000 followers).
Syndicating content to Medium, via the import functionality, is a good way to tap into the benefit of this secondary audience without forsaking the ability to publish the primary copy.
The import functionality assigns the appropriate canonical tags to the writing — so the copy on your website is the one that will index and the Medium post will be identified as the duplicate.
Publishing Thought Leadership On LinkedIn Pulse
Many prospective thought leaders are also interested in publishing articles on LinkedIn Pulse (Pulse is LinkedIn’s publishing platform and can be accessed by anybody with a profile).
Like with Medium, publishing to LinkedIn involves creating content which will inherit the Domain Authority (DA) of LinkedIn.com. Like publishing content to Medium, the domain authority of these massive websites is virtually certain to exceed that of your own blog — thereby making it likely that unless proper syndication practices are followed the version on your own site will be pushed down the search engine results pages (SERPs).
To get an estimate of the authority of a domain, you can use Ahrefs’ testing tool:
Unlike Medium, LinkedIn (at the time of writing) doesn’t have a functionality for importing content and automatically assigning canonical tags to mark the article as a second copy. Therefore, for syndicating blog content to widen reach and distribution, Medium is a better choice.
On the flip side, LinkedIn articles are not paywalled-therefore anybody with a LinkedIn account should be able to access your writing. Additionally, the publishing feature of LinkedIn isn’t monetized: users don’t receive compensation for views or engagements.
Medium vs. LinkedIn: Which Makes More Sense For Publishing Thought Leadership?
Ultimately, whether you wish to publish thought leadership articles on Medium or LinkedIn comes down to a few questions.
Firstly, consider the tone of the piece: if it’s a business-centric article, then LinkedIn might be a better fit. Content that has a focus on wellness, on the other hand, might be better suited to Medium.
There are subtle but important differences between the two from an SEO perspective. These differences are worth noting if publishing via LinkedIn or Medium is a long-term part of your thought leadership distribution strategy.
Authors can republish/syndicate content to Medium while continuing to build their onsite SEO. This is a huge advantage. Users can build their onsite SEO, syndicate content to a second audience and even, if they’re successful, monetize it.
LinkedIn, in contrast, won’t add canonical tags — although most SEO authorities think that syndicating content to the social network will be okay.
From a usability standpoint, the Medium article composer is also a delight to use — and it’s easy to automatically embed widgets from other websites. Many users prefer it over LinkedIn Pulse’s authoring tool.
For most thought leaders, building up a personal brand through strong on-site content (on personal websites or corporate blogs) is the preferred way to go with periodic placements in offsite editorial publications such as trade media outlets.
This approach is particularly popular with authors that have a strong library of on-site content and wish to refurbish insights for publication elsewhere. Although — as with Medium publications — this means submitting to an editorial process, the reach is often exponentially wider. If the trade media publication has a website, this also means accruing a backlink from another TLD (most Medium publications are hosted on Medium.com).
Users can share their content with their professional networks on LinkedIn by sharing posts rather than articles. Unlike copying the articles, this will not be considered duplicate content. They may wish to also share their writing in groups, through their email newsletter, or directly message it to professional contacts.
Publishing to LinkedIn or Medium, in the first instance, might make sense for thought leaders who aren’t concerned with building up their personal web properties’ SEO value or who don’t have one in the first place. It also appeals to those who just want to log into a site with a nice composer and get the writing published immediately with minimal fuss.
For many users, however (at the time of writing), authoring on-site content is the better approach which will pay dividends over the long run even if the setup process might be more involved.
If readers can be attracted to a managed resource, such as a website, it’s easier to expose them to more information without risking them getting distracted by other users’ content.
Readers that are engaged by something published on Medium or LinkedIn would obviously have to click a link, or run a search engine query, to find out more about the author and get in touch.
LinkedIn, Medium and other social networks can be used to widen distribution and tap into secondary audiences-and they are powerful means for doing this. First instance offsite publishing can be reserved instead for editorial publications with wider distribution.
Originally published at https://dsrghostwriting.com
