Purpose of this post: To share my data and thoughts on publishing content on Linkedin vs. Medium vs. here on RichTucker.co.
You may have heard rumors that blogging is dead. As the first cruise industry blogger, I have not actively blogged in a few years and I have several friends who have let their longtime blogs go dormant.
The battle for attention online is at all-time highs. Hyped studies show that our attention spans are getting shorter leading which could indicate that there is a preference for consuming content in forms other than lengthy blog posts. Short videos and memes fill our social media newsfeeds taking full advantage of the shortening attention spans.
While all this may be true. I decided at the beginning of 2018 that I wanted to start blogging again. I wanted a home base to write about fitness, online marketing, crowdfunding and innovative tech. So, I launched this blog.
A lot has changed o the internet since I started my cruise blog in 2007. One of the biggest changes are the new options like Medium & Linkedin Articles for publishing content that offers the opportunity for potential distribution to their networks.
After a couple of blog posts here, I decided to test out these new platforms by publishing the same article in all three.
Blogging is not dead
Before we get the stats of the test, I’d like to dispell the rumors…. Blogging [or writing on the internet] is NOT DEAD!
When I started the CruiseSource Blog in 2007, my first post was read by 9 people. After the first month of writing a 2 – 3x per week, my blog had a total of 160 views. I was actually excited by these numbers in 2007. Excited enough to stick with it. After a couple of years, my CruiseSource blog was getting over 500 visitors per day thanks to free Google Search traffic.
Today, distribution of content is 100x better than it was when I start blogging in 2007. If you have an idea for a post, the publishing options are much better than they were years ago.
You now have Publishing Platforms like Linkedin, Medium, and Quora that allow you to publish blog posts or articles on their platform. These platforms give the best-performing content extended reach on the sites. Grant Stimmel, a member of the Facebook Advertising team, received over 19,000 views on his first post published on Linkedin titled 25 Things Every 25-year-old Needs To Hear. This would never have happened when I started blogging in 2007.
The opportunities for sharing high-quality valuable content are also better than ever. If you write valuable content that is not overtly selling then you can share it in relevant Facebook Groups, Linkedin Groups, and answer Quora questions with it.
Stats of my Linkedin vs. Medium vs My Blog Test
For my test I used the following article: I exercised every day and abstained from drinking alcohol for 380 straight days. I went from the worst shape of my life to the best at age 42. I wrote an article listing out my top 12 lessons learned over the 380 days. I published it on my new blog first, then Linkedin and a week later on Medium.
RichTucker.co Blog Stats
I posted it first on this blog because I wanted Google to give my site credit for it being here first. I shared the article on my blog with my personal Facebook profile. The original article written here on the blog has received 191 views.
Linkedin Article Stats
This was originally just going to be a test of my new blog vs a Linked Article. So, the second place I published the article was on Linkedin. It was extremely easy to copy and paste my content from this blog to Linkedin.
After publishing, I tweeted the article once and wrote a Linkedin post sharing it.
The article on Linkedin has received 1,253 views with 11 comments and 81 likes. Linkedin provides stats on the article that only Linkedin could provide like the top employers and job titles of the readers. 68 of my 1,253 viewers have CEOs or Executive Director titles.
Stats from Linkedin Article published a month and half ago:
Medium Article Stats
Like I mentioned above, my original plan was to only test Linkedin vs. my blog, but a friend suggested I test Medium too. Medium is publishing platform owned by Twitter and it is loosely connected to the Twitter ecosystem. I’ve been familiar with Medium over the years and a lot of my favorite writers post there. So, I decided to publish the 12 Lessons Learned Article there too.
It was so easy to copy the content from Linkedin over to Medium. It took about 5 minutes total to make sure everything looked good.
My tweet sharing my Medium article definitely received more retweets and likes than when I tweeted the Linkedin article. Twitter may have given it preferential treatment in the newsfeed since it was linking back to a Twitter-owned property.
In three weeks, my Medium post has received 736 views. Medium also gives stats on how many of the viewers read the whole article. This is an awesome stat for content creators to know.
As the weeks go by my read ratio keeps improving. I think this is because Medium’s AI learns who is most likely to enjoy the article the most and suggests the article to those users. My read ratio is 44% which I think is pretty good for an article that takes 12 minutes to read.
Medium sends emails out to users with suggested articles in it. I did not know this. I found out from a friend who reached out to let me know that they received my Medium article in their email and that they enjoyed reading it. Definitely, a nice benefit that you do not get when starting your own blog.
Medium Stats from the dashboard. I have not actively shared this article in the last 2 weeks, but you can see that the daily viewers have started going back up.
What are Fans on Medium?
In the stats provided by Medium, the number of Fans is given. On Medium Articles, readers are able to clap at the end of the article if they really like it. They can clap as many times as they’d like. So far for the 12 Lessons Learned article I have 30 people (fans) who have clapped 162 times. As I write more on Medium, I’ll use these numbers to help improve my writing.
Linkedin vs Medium Google Search Results
When I started my cruise blog back in 2007, the long-term success of it was because of free organic Google search traffic. When thinking about a blogging strategy for yourself, Google Search is an important consideration.
Here are a couple of the Google Search results:
Medium wins on the 380 Straight Days of Exercise Google Search:
Linkedin Wins on the 380 Days of exercise Google Search:
This blog, RichTucker.co is not showing up for either search on Google. One of the major disadvantages of a new blog or website is that it takes time to build up trust from Google to show up high in search results.
Final Conclusions of Blogging Test
Total views so far on 12 Lessons Learned Article was 191 on RichTucker.co, 1253 on the Linkedin Article, and 736 on the Medium Article for a total of 2,180 views.
I love how easy it is to re-post an Article on Linkedin and Medium. Both platforms have great layouts and design for the content leading to easy readability. The additional stats each platform gives will help make me a better writer. I also liked writing the same content on all three but testing slightly different titles or opening paragraphs.
When deciding on your publishing strategy it is important to consider your goals and WHY you are writing.
MY REASON FOR WRITING: The last couple of years, I’ve been pushing myself to make personal improvements to quickly hit fitness and business goals. My ultimate goal with my writing is to share what I’m learning in order to help as many others as possible who are interested in doing the same.
With that goal in mind, I’m going to continue publishing my articles on a combination of RichTucker.co, Medium & Linkedin. If I only published the 12 Lessons Learned blog post on RichTucker.co, I would have only had 191 readers. That’s why starting a new blog is tough. After this test, it appears to me that the benefits of publishing on Linkedin and Medium outweigh the long-term potential of those posts outranking my blog site on Google Search.
My plan is to only re-post business and online marketing articles on Linkedin since that feel more relevant to Linkedin. I will re-post the blogs that I think are the most valuable for fitness, business, and personal growth on Medium. Every post will be posted here first with the hope that over time, this site will start to outrank my posts on Medium and Linkedin on Google Search.
Since I’m just getting back into the swing of blogging, I’d love to hear your publishing strategy: Are you publishing on multiple platforms? Do you post the same content on each or mix it up?