How To Get More Traffic To Your Blog With Medium

My traffic from Medium has now reached “significant.”

When I first joined Medium almost a year ago, I was excited … not because of the earning power (I had NO idea) but because I saw an opportunity of sending traffic to my blog sites.  It was THAT potential that got me started.

I have to admit to being very disappointed in the first eight months — because though I DID get some traffic it was erratic and unpredictable.

I review my blog traffic stats ONCE a month to see how much traffic, where it is coming from and if there are opportunities I am missing.

In the past TWO months I have been blown away because the numbers from Medium have changed significantly.

I will talk about one of my blogs — the sugar-free-zone.com  because that is where the changes are most obvious. The traffic is coming from two sources:

1. Incoming Traffic Specific to Medium

This traffic comes directly from readers on Medium clicking to my site.

The “duh” moment for me is that in the past two months … I have significantly increased the number of articles on Medium that link to the SFZ (sugar-free-zone).

I almost always post articles on my blogs first, and then post the same article (stripped of affiliate links) on Medium.  I have  a link at the bottom of the article, similar to this:

This article was originally posted on the Sugar-Free-Zone.com    I create a hyperlink to the same post on my blog.   This is called a canonical link.

According to Yoast, a canonical link

“… helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues. It does this by specifying the “canonical URL”, the “preferred” version of a web page – the original source, even. Using it well improves a site’s SEO.”

Medium encourages the use of canonical links.

In the past two months my traffic from Medium has increased by 10 times … to over 100 unique visitors a month.

While 100 may not seem like much … SFZ is a small (but growing) website.

What is MORE significant about my 100 visitors is the fact that each visitor returns 2.6 times, in the same month.  So 100 unique visitors turns into 260 visits.  And even better?  Each visit session has an average 3.75 page views which totals 975 views …

almost 1000 page views from 100 Medium visitors!

AND I am going to assume that some of these people will come back to SFZ in the months to come, without linking from Medium first.

2.  The second source of traffic comes from Medium indirectly.

In the world of SEO (in which I participated for over 12 years as a consultant),  one way to increase ranking is by having links coming in from other sites.  The more “authority” the source site has, the better the SEO juice your site acquires.

Medium is a VERY HIGH AUTHORITY SITE.

Having links FROM Medium TO your blog is a GOOD THING.  A very good thing!

Up till two months ago my SFZ traffic came from Google with Pinterest almost matching Google traffic, then Twitter and finally Facebook … with Medium far behind.

So imagine my surprise when I found a significant increase in the amount of traffic from Google.  I did a few searches and it turns out that the SFZ was showing up on Google more often and in high rank positions.  Some of my keywords were ranking in the top 3.   Some in the top 10.  Just ONE of my high ranking keywords is bringing in over 100 visitors a DAY.

While I spend time making sure my SFZ articles are SEO optimized, the fact is I have HUGE competition and the chances of ranking high is … low.  So the fact that I am seeing my keywords at the top of searches is amazing.

I am attributing the jumps in my ranking to … Medium.

I have found several of my keywords on Google with listings for both a SFZ post and the same Medium post.  SEO Nirvana.

The bottom line is …

Medium is not only sending my sites traffic directly, but is influencing my Google rankings.  The traffic to my SFZ website is increasing, the page views are increasing and the time spent on my website is increasing.  ALL good things.

Here’s How YOU Can Increase YOUR Blog Traffic.

1.  Always post your article on your Blog first.  This works only if your article is relevant to your Blog.  For example, this article was first posted on melanierockett.com  NOT on  sugar-free-zone.com because it has nothing to do with health or food.   IF I posted this article on SFZ it might actually have a detrimental effect on my traffic.
2. Set up your Blog post to get the most SEO benefit you can.  Using plugins such as Yoast SEO,Squirrly SEO or SEO Ultimate can make this easier.  You should look at the name of your article as well as your headers and image names.
3. Post your article on Medium, creating a canonical link back to your original blog post.
4. Create a page on your website with a feed that links to Medium.   If the feed page code doesn’t work for you,  just create a page with your top 10 articles on Medium and update them once a month.   See example here.
5. Promote your articles on your Blog and on Medium to your Social Media channels including: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn.

The reality is that it took over eight months to get significant traffic from Medium to my websites. BUT … like many things, just plodding along like a boring old turtle produces results.  Start as soon as you can and just keep it going with every new article.

Be sure to read this article about how I got started on Medium.  Is Medium Just Another Shiny New Object?