This is a quick follow-up report on my quick test about the effectiveness of cross-posting from WordPress to Medium posted a few days ago.
I have been observing the stats on both the Medium post and my blog post for a few days. I conclude that it is an okay time to give a quick report on what I learned from this testing.
Medium gives you exposure. 20% of people visited my blog.
Over the past 4-5 days, 59 people viewed the article on Medium. 80% of them actually read it through and 4 people favorited. Out of four, one is me. To me, 59 viewers were quite impressive number given that my Medium account has been dormant for years. 80% reading ratio is also probably high, but the article itself is quite short anyway. The number of daily viewers changes like [3, 37, 12, 4, 3]. I then compared it with Google Analytics. Over the same period, the [1, 6, 2, 1, 2]. Although the referral information was not captured in my current Google Analytics, I suspect that these two trends resemble each other. Based on this observation, I conclude for now that about 20% of people who read my article on Medium will visit my blog.
There are a few things to think about further. Will this conversion rate increase or decrease as my readership grows on Medium? My guess is it will decrease as only new readers will visit my blog out of curiosity and old readers will have no reason to do so. I guess for popular Medium writers the ratio will be even below 10%.
Time lag is another dimension to consider. As Sarah Cooper mentioned in her comment, if I post an article on Medium with a delay of a week, what will happen. I don’t think it will affect the click-through rate to my blog per se. But, it may influence search engine results in case Google thinks my blog primarily carries duplicate contents only. First of all, I think Google is smart enough. Second, there seem to be some work-around for this type of cross-posting across blogs. The Medium WP plugin in fact adds “canonical” link header in their page, so I am not worrying about timing too much right now.
Mention some people that you want to get along on Medium.
One thing I was very happy about this process is that Sarah Cooper was the first person who commented on my post! This is exactly what I like about joining a new platform in its early days. You can engage with people that you will not hear back from on Facebook or Twitter. If I were to start following President Obama from Twitter today, I would be one of his 76 million followers. At Medium, I would be one of 12k follower. Ignore both numbers are practically zero. The difference is of a few orders of magnitude. To mention in your writing some people that are active in Medium and that you are interested in getting along is a good way to keep you motivated and also boost the initial exposure.
Having some initial followers must have helped.
I also had about 80 mutual followers imported from other social media–Twitter I think–when I first created an account at Medium. Having those initial followers must have helped as well. My advice is to start following some people on Medium and reading what they write. The more I spend time with reading, the more I feel embedded in this growing community. Activities like following, reading, commenting, liking, etc. will help bootstrap the initial set of followers.
In summary, it was an interesting test for me and I hope it can shed a light on how traffic looks like when you first start blogging and using Medium. Although I am by no means a professional blogger, I look forward to meeting and interacting with people at Medium on occasion.
Also published on Medium.