How to increase your organic traffic from Medium to your Website
Are you looking for a new way to increase your organic traffic?
Is your strategy included Medium?
In this article, I am going to map out how to increase your website traffic with Medium.com
Medium — a new platform to raise your voice
Medium is founded by Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams, and it is a social media platform to raise your voice. I have been using it since 2012. Many people criticised the whole platform when it launched, but I didn’t give up and I believed it was a good platform.
Today, many writers, politicians, and reporters use it for sharing their contents.
The biggest advantage of Medium is to connect your website to Medium. If you are using Wordpress, you can download their official plug-in.
I use this plug-in to publish my posts automatically to my Medium profile and publication. And it is a tool that I use to increase my website traffic.
So how to do that?
First, install the plug-in. In order to connect your WordPress site to Medium, you need a token from Medium. To get it, you have to go to your Medium profile > Settings > Integration tokens > Get Integration Tokens
After you generate the token, you have to go to your WordPress site > users > your user account > Medium > Paste the Token at Integration Token section
The token is a key to connect your website to Wordpress. I would not share the token to anyone.
After you save your profile, you will able to see a new box at your post section (Top Right Corner). That is your setting to publish your content to your Medium profile automatically.
General Benefits: Increase the Traffic
So here are few tips to increase your website from Medium:
- Popular Tags: Medium has been focusing on the tag function since 2015. You can put up to 5 tags at your Medium article. I put one or two popular Medium tags at your Wordpress articles. Once when I publish my article on my website, it will automatically publish to my Medium profile with these tags. People would immediately see your article on Medium. Popular tags can drive more people from Medium to read your article and increase the traffic.
- Specific Tags: I also put some specific tags, i.e. specific keywords on my article. It is for SEO reasons. Medium popular tags are quite general. If you put all popular tags, it might not be good for SEO. So, I would mix popular tags and specific tags in your article. For example, if my article is about Influence Marketing on Social Media, I would use “Social Media”, “Business” for popular tags, and “Influence Marketing”, “Marketing Trends”, etc for specific tags. People have specific interests and then they will search specific topics. Having specific tags help you bring more target audience. It also increases the traffic.
- Publications: Medium publications help writers gain more readers. If you can publish your article in one of the major publication, your article will receive lots of traffic. If you have edit your article and have clear anchor text linking back to your website, the chance to have more people to click the link and go to your website is higher. Popular publications is one of the powerful function in Medium. Having your article in popular publications can drive many traffic.
SEO Benefits: Drive more traffic for a long term
- Signature at Medium: many people just automatically publish their articles from their website and never go to their Medium profile to edit their article. I see people always have the same sentence at the end of their article “Originally published at their website.” They miss lots of SEO opportunities. You can create a no-follow backlink on Medium and link back to your website. I also go back to my medium to edit my article and put the anchor text and link back to my website. This link does have some SEO benefit, and it also can bring some people’s attention and click your website to view more contents of yours.
- Including One or two “Internal backlinks” in your article: When you write and publish the article, you would do it at your website first. Then once when you post, the medium plug-in would automatically publish on your Medium profile. If you have few internal backlinks linking back to your previous articles on your website, it will turn out two different kinds of links — (1) internal backlinks to your website, (2) no-follow backlinks from Medium linking back to your website. So you create two different backlinks by doing one job (WHY NOT!) Also, the no-follow backlink from Medium.com would drive traffic back to your website when someone read and click that link from Medium.com. However, do not over do it because search engine would consider too many internal backlinks as spam. Too many internal backlinks in one article is not a good SEO practice. I also suggest people only put one or two links in each of your article.
Future Projects on Medium: Also benefits?
Medium has been working on few projects to help more writers get most out of Medium. If you publish your high-quality contents regularly and consistently. Medium staffs would notice and send you an email (please put your valid email in your Medium profile and check your email regularly) and invite you join their latest project.
I joined one or two these projects in the past and it definitely helped me get more traffic and followers on Medium. Also, it brought me some traffic back to my website.
Medium is not only a social media platform, but you can also use it to generate more traffic to your website and have SEO benefits.
So, what do you think?
Originally published at Apartment Number 2, Tony Yeung, Toronto Social Media Specialist.
