I've been blogging for a number of years; most of the time on my own domain (dsebastien.net), but without being overly serious about it.
After a long pause, I started writing again. I decided to give Medium a try, as it had gained a lot of popularity. It was refreshing compared to my old custom Wordpress theme. I was also curious about the possibility of monetizing my content
In 2019 I put more effort into blogging on Medium and my posts started gaining some traction on the platform. For about a year, I didn't get much ROI ($0-3 per month), but then, probably as I approached it better, it started to compound. Since 2020 I get $50-100 per month from Medium and sometimes much more ($300-700 with outliers).
Still, I concur with the points made in the post. Medium has many downsides, the first of which being the paywall, which is getting more and more aggressive. Also, I realized that I was just hurting my personal brand by not bringing visitors directly on my own domain.
That's why I've changed my approach this year. I've rebooted my own Website and publish there first. Still, I continue to post my articles on Medium as well, behind their paywall, but with the canonical URL pointing to my blog so as not to hurt SEO as much. I think that this is a safer long-term approach and it gives me the best of both worlds; I can still monetize (even if less than before) while keeping full ownershop and better SEO towards my domain.
After a long pause, I started writing again. I decided to give Medium a try, as it had gained a lot of popularity. It was refreshing compared to my old custom Wordpress theme. I was also curious about the possibility of monetizing my content
In 2019 I put more effort into blogging on Medium and my posts started gaining some traction on the platform. For about a year, I didn't get much ROI ($0-3 per month), but then, probably as I approached it better, it started to compound. Since 2020 I get $50-100 per month from Medium and sometimes much more ($300-700 with outliers).
Still, I concur with the points made in the post. Medium has many downsides, the first of which being the paywall, which is getting more and more aggressive. Also, I realized that I was just hurting my personal brand by not bringing visitors directly on my own domain.
That's why I've changed my approach this year. I've rebooted my own Website and publish there first. Still, I continue to post my articles on Medium as well, behind their paywall, but with the canonical URL pointing to my blog so as not to hurt SEO as much. I think that this is a safer long-term approach and it gives me the best of both worlds; I can still monetize (even if less than before) while keeping full ownershop and better SEO towards my domain.