How to Utilise Medium to Make Money and Drive Traffic as a Blogger
Medium is a two side coin platform for bloggers but the good news is that both sides of the coin are good and profitable to bloggers if you learn the secret of it.
I am going to show you exactly how I utilize Medium to gain significant traffic to my blog and how I also turn Medium into a passive income using that same article.
I will narrate a simple story of how I started writing in Medium and how that has helped rank my newly created blog.
So on August 11th, 2017, I dropped my first story on Medium and it went viral, I know you’re curious to see what the story was about, I will show you.
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 can only write more.
I held on to that thought and never looked back.
I have written many great and trending stories for Medium ever since then without having the thought that I will own my own blog someday.
Now my blog is here, what do I do to drive traffic to my blog with my old articles and still make money from my articles in Medium.
My Blogging Secrets with Medium
Canonical Links
The Canonical link update is one of the most important features of Medium for bloggers.
Canonical Link is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.
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 imports your story to Medium and share it in any publication of your choice.
Now here is the importance of doing this for your blog:
When Search Engine sees your article from Medium, Search Engine will look at the canonical link of that article, where it is pointing to, and indexed that one it points to.
For instance:
If I import this article from my blog to Medium.
When Search Engine sees this 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 indexed my blog’s version of the article to avoid indexing duplicate contents.
This will make Search Engine to crawl and index your blog content quickly and start showing it in Search Engine Result Pages.
You might want to ask, but what about my old articles when I didn’t have a blog.
Well, I asked a similar question and this is my answer.
Instead of posting that article on your blog and Importing again, which you will lose all your statistics.
Here is what to do:
- 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 blog from the trending and popular articles I have written before in Medium.
This is just one of my articles if you can notice where the spike starts in the graph above.
High Domain Authorities
Another interesting part of doing this that you gain Backlinks which will help boost your Domain Authority.
Since Medium has a high Domain Authority (about 95% out of 100 ) already, having high-quality inbound of Backlinks to your blog from Medium is definitely a strong 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
Assuming your article was a popular and trending article or you published it in a big and popular Medium Publication, you still stand a chance to gain Views, Reads, and Claps, etc.
This can also send free traffic to your blog assuming you added links to certain pages or products in your blog.
I have had a significant amount of free traffic to my blog just having that link in the footer of every of Imported Articles from many big and popular publications.
The same goes if you have any link to your blog in between your content.
Still Making Money
Here is the other side of the coin, Still Making Money from the same story.
If you publish your story in popular publications and your story happens to go viral, you gained a significant amount of Reads and Views.
You still make the same amount of money you would, if you have just published the story only on Medium.
Final Thoughts
That’s it, that’s the secret!
This is the exact pattern I used to generate free traffic, gain more high-quality backlinks, and increased my Blog’s Domain Authority, and at the same time still making money on that same story with the Medium Partnership Program.
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