I love seeing when something I wrote helps someone.
Someone sent me an email years ago thanking me for writing about some obscure bug or problem I solved and blogged about, and I remember it to this day!
Medium is a popular blogging platform that a lot of software engineers use, and I’ve started cross-posting there.
Why Cross-Post?
A picture is worth a thousand words:
That’s right - 60 people found my post and found it to be useful and clapped! That story has 179 views as of right now - that’s a great “clap-to-read” ratio.
Would 179 people even know about my personal blog, hosted at my personal domain, with absolutely zero SEO?
You can also choose to monetize your posts on Medium, but I personally don’t.
How to Cross-Post
What Not to Do
Do not simply copy and paste your blog posts from elsewhere into Medium and post.
There’s an easier way that also has SEO benefits.
Importing Stories
Rather than copy-pasting stories, use Medium’s “Import” functionality: Importing a post to Medium
Not only is it faster - it also creates a canonical link between the Medium post and your external blog’s post.
I don’t really know the first thing about SEO, so I’ll let Wikipedia explain it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element
That’s all there is to it. Stories on Medium will have a “originally published at” link to your blog at the bottom of the posts. You get the benefits of “owning” your blog as well as the discoverability aspect of Medium.