Most startup founders and small business owners would love to have some secret sauce for growing their audience. For a lot of businesses, content marketing can be a great step. However when starting out it can be a very slow way to attract new customers because you still have to start building your audience.
In the beginning, it’s a slow step. It takes a lot of time to write high-quality posts and if you simply post it to your blog, you may be missing out on some tremendous opportunities for growth. We already wrote earlier about 33 ways for promoting your newly created pieces of content. But what if you want even more?
Medium and LinkedIn Pulse are becoming increasingly popular as publishing platforms. But is posting content to these platforms great for you? What are the pros and cons of (re)posting content on these, and in the future maybe even other, platforms? In this blog post, we will be looking at the advantages and disadvantages of posting content on these sites.
Reposting CAN hurt your SEO if done wrong
Let us first start of with the bad news. Google doesn’t like duplicate content. So when you just repost your content without any modifications on it and your original content is not indexed by Google yet, you risk that your content on a higher ranked websites will get all the traffic. With this in mind, always make sure to, not directly post the same content on multiple sites. Wait a bit for Google to index the original content, or use the “Fetch as Google” option within your Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that your content is added first from your original website.
The cons of posting content on other sites
Even if you’re not reposting your content on other sites and want to make use of other platforms instead of your website for publishing your content, there are still some other things you need to keep in mind when posting content on for example Medium or LinkedIn Pulse.
By publishing on other platforms you miss the change to:
- do retargeting on your content
- put your branding on the content
- do lead generation (you can’t capture emails, social logins, phone numbers, or whatever you qualify as a lead on someone else’s website)
- earn link equity that helps built your future SEO
- secure engagement with your content that helps future SEO (and many other marketing channels)
The pros of posting content on other sites
Of course, it is not all bad, if the goal of you writing content is to get it viewed by as many people as possible and build your (personal) brand like this posting on other sites has a couple of advantages:
- The community is already there. There is no need for additional promotion to get in front of your audience.
- Medium or LinkedIn Pulse as a product goes further than only being a publishing platform. If you think about it as social media platform (for content consumers and creators), you’ll see that you can build a follower base there like in any other place – Twitter, Quora, wherever your audience might be. It takes time, but the more active you are, the bigger it might get.
Especially the first item can be a real winner for a lot of people who are just starting out and don’t have an audience yet. After all, you get a ready-made network of individuals that your content can get exposed to.
How to get the best of both worlds
So how can you leverage the best of both worlds? We understand the distribution benefits, we also know the user experience appeal on these other sites.
But in the end, you sacrifice a lot when you use only use Medium or LinkedIn Pulse for your content. Things like long-term SEO benefits (they get the credit, not you), the inability to gain subscribers, leads or customers, and very little control of your brand.
This is where the reposting of your content comes into play. You can convert a blog post to slideshow and post that on SlideShare, or create a video and post it on YouTube (the audio of the video can then be posted on SoundCloud again). By doing things like this, you still own your original content, and you will get the extra exposure, and there is no issue with duplicate content.
If creating slideshows or video is too much work for you (or you don’t like to put yourself in front of a camera), you can always just repost your content to Medium and LinkedIn Pulse as well. You’ve got to keep a couple of things in mind when you do this, though:
- Don’t copy content word for word. Instead, rewrite posts and publish those.
- Do include one link back to the original article, informing your readers where and when the article was originally published.
- Do make use of the “rel=canonical” option on another platform and therefore telling Google that the original article is the one on your website. (LinkedIn Pulse doesn’t support this option, but this can be useful when reposting your content as a guest post somewhere else. Medium, however, does using their import function.)
- If you don’t have the time to rewrite all your posts, consider only reposting something like 20% of your original posts on other sites. And only if you are under the impression that it’s adding value by having your content seen by a larger audience.
We know that writing a high-quality, unique blog post takes some time to write. And with 2 million posts written every day, it can be hard as a startup to stand out and grow your audience. By taking the content that you are posting on your blog and reposting it on sites like LinkedIn Pulse and Medium, you can substantially grow the number of people reading your content.
However, it is not enough to just copy/paste content onto other sites, in the end, you’ve got a business to run and bills to pay. By coming up with creative ways to lead visitors back to your site you’re able to grow your email list and get more leads.
But if done correctly, reposting content can be a huge multiplier for the growth of your audience, with little extra work.
Have you had success reposting content on LinkedIn Pulse, Medium or any other sites? Share your thoughts in the comments!
