Should I cross post between Medium, LinkedIn and my website?

Most people have, at some point, thought of using a blog vs using a publishing platform such as Medium or LinkedIn. The platforms, have a higher reach since they are dedicated places where in people come for the sole purpose of reading. Hence a there are chances of increasing your readership if posts are directly published to Medium, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora or any other similar website. But the next question that comes in the minds of people who have a dedicated blog is that a post on these platforms cannot be monetized. You cannot prompt people to join your mailing list using pop ups, nor can you show your own advertisements and earn revenue. And the other thought that pops into the mind of a blogger immediately after this is that duplicate content will lead to negative SEO effects if one cross posts between these platforms and their own blogs.

But we are in the 21st century, and the philosophy behind web publishing has changed a lot. In addition to publishing posts on your website/blog, you should upload your posts to the LinkedIn platform, to Medium and other similar websites as well. Not only will this boost your personal branding, but also it will encourage you to write more since these platforms rack up a lot of shares and views. Publishing on platforms wherein you do not have complete control, can look like something that does not make sense. But anyone who has been writing for some time will know how difficult it is to attract people to your blog and have them visit your website over and over again. And unless you are a website that gets constantly updated multiple times a day, only a tiny fraction of your social media followers will click the links that you will share.

Platforms like Medium and LinkedIn provide a chance for your content to not get lost in the noise as they have an existing audience which increases the chances of your content getting discovered. So you get the opportunity for some real engagement.

And as far as the negative SEO aspect of it goes, the thinking is incorrect. As far as you are not spamming the posts with multiple links, duplicate content on these platforms should not have any effect on your SEO rankings. A blogger Ryan Battles conducted an experiment in which he cross posted all his posts on Medium and LinkedIn. The results show that all his posts got indexed and none was removed due to duplicate content.

So, if you are looking to expand your audience, cross posting does not seem to have many cons. Though you need to keep in mind that

• Re posting content on different publishing platforms will not lead to penalties for duplicate content
• Your website traffic might reduce due to cross posts on medium and LinkedIn (search will have more options which might defuse traffic among platforms and your website)
• You get access to thousands of readers who might not have found your content otherwise
• A better approach would be to post the content on your website/blog first, and then, after say 5 days,  cross post it onto different platforms, if that makes you more satisfied
• Chances of your post going viral are more on LinkedIn or Medium
• Your website may not rank the highest for the keywords you want to since publishing sites might be more authoritative
• You can experiment with different keywords/headlines for the same content by publishing them on different platforms
• Medium links are better for forums that are sensitive to blog posts or view them as spam posts

In fact, medium even gives a built in feature to import stories from URL’s, encouraging you to cross post. I am going to start reposting my old posts from Wisdom Geek on LinkedIn and Medium starting today. What about you?