DEV Community

Davide Bellone
Davide Bellone

Posted on

Personal blog, Dev.to or Medium?

Now that on Dev.to we have a great community, and on Medium you can be rewarded for your articles, does it make sense to have a personal blog?

If yes, do you copy-paste your articles from the blog to the other platforms?

Top comments (8)

Collapse
 
matthew_collison profile image
Matthew Collison

It depends on your intention - whether it is:

  • To impact as many people as possible with your articles
  • To build SEO rank for your website
  • To build a mailing list

Depending on what your goal is would determine your actions.

If you're simply trying to reach and help as many people as possible, posting on DEV.to and on Medium (turning off the paywall) - because you immediately get the reach you need. You're not going to get this with your blog without a few months of continuous posting and good SEO.

If you're trying to build SEO or a Mailing List, posting on other platforms with a canonical link will work as it gives you the dual benefit of 1) building brand through attention towards your content and 2) building long-term SEO and traffic to go into your Mailing List

Hope that helps.

To take it a step further, through my organisation, I repurpose a lot of my blog posts to Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook etc. This gives even wider reach.

Collapse
 
bellonedavide profile image
Davide Bellone

Interesting!

But why do you specify turning off the paywall?

Collapse
 
matthew_collison profile image
Matthew Collison
  • If your aim is to reach as many people as possible to help the masses and build brand, turning off the paywall makes sense.
  • If your aim is to make money from your articles, turn the paywall on.

Either one is absolutely fine! Once again, it really depends on your intent :)

Collapse
 
stereobooster profile image
stereobooster • Edited

I see it like this: my blog is for canonical links - my content belongs to me.
But my blog doesn't have a community. By community I mean not just passive readers, but people who want to comment as well.
For the community, I use other platforms, for example, dev.to.
I repost the whole article here, not just a preview, because I respect the local community. (I'm annoyed by articles, which links to outside resources - this is blog platform, not an RSS reader.)
I provide a link to my reposts, from a central source, so if anybody would want to comment or read what others thought.
Platforms where I repost: dev.to (always), hackernews (sometimes). I never reposted to Medium, but want to start. As well I think about Reddit and Lobsters.
Idea is that I have a central place for my articles, but decentralized communities.

Collapse
Collapse
 
vier31 profile image
Jan Schröder

I would always favor a blog/site under my control over a platform that might go away at any time.

But that's just me and the answer starts probably with 'It depends...'

Collapse
 
voiedev profile image
Charles Allen

Why not both? => canonical link

Collapse
 
xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

I currently have a personal blog that triggers to dev.to but I don't get much time to write on it.