There are plenty of web sites where you can publish content. But, what’s the best place? Well, I’m not a fan of “best” anything. Your “best” is up to you, what works for you, based on your requirements and will be different for everyone. In this blog post I will share my recommendations where to publish content and you can use them to decide (or not) where to publish.
I wanted to publish this article for some time and also because of recent controversy with Medium. You can read about it here and here.
There are many web sites where you can publish content. This is just a short list of web sites:
- Medium (plus various Medium publications)
- Devada (formerly Dzone)
- Dev.to
- LinkedIn (Publishing platform)
- InfoQ
- Personal blog
- Work blog
- and many others…
My recommendation is almost always to publish first on your own personal blog. There are a number of reasons for that:
- It allows you to build your portfolio and keep all your work in one place
- It allows to build your personal brand
- It can act as your “second” resume as it shows that you actually published. It’s easy to put anything on a resume. A blog shows the actual work
- When you get a new job, the content you published will be available on your personal blog and not on the company’s blog
To reach even more people there are great communities out there where you might want to re-publish content or syndicate. For example, Dev.to is a great community for developers. Dev.to allows you to syndicate or re-publish content from your blog. It even automatically imports content from your blog and keeps the content in draft mode. You still need to click publish (you can also edit the content before publishing if you wish). You can also write a new blot post.
When a blog post is imported, Dev.to adds a canonical URL to the imported article. When a cononical URL is present, it tells search engines where the original content is published avoiding duplicate content.
When an article re-published on a 3rd party web site without a cononical URL, that result in search engines seeing it as duplicate content and negatively impact its SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
You can check if a canonical tag is present on a page by viewing the page source. If you look at the source code for this page: https://dev.to/ibmdeveloper/build-a-mobile-app-with-language-translator-service-without-coding-3e29, you will find the following tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="[https://maxkatz.org/2019/04/26/build-a-mobile-app-with-language-translator-service-without-coding/](https://dev.to/ibmdeveloper/build-a-mobile-app-with-language-translator-service-without-coding-3e29)" />
href attribute will point to the original URL.
Medium also supports importing an existing blog post and it also adds a cononical URL.
LinkedIn Publishing is a great platform for publishing content but doesn’t allow importing existing content or allowing you to set the cononical URL manually. If you want to re-use existing content but don’t want to simply copy and duplicate it, one option is to write a new introduction paragraph on LinkedIn and then link back to the original article.
Here is an example of re-using content on LinkedIn. This article has a new introduction paragraph with a link to the original blog post:
Read the article on LinkedIn.
I’d recommend a similar strategy with a work blog. If your company will allow this, first publish content on your personal blog and then syndicate content on the company’s blog.
As I mentioned at the beginning, these are just general guidelines. If you think that publishing a new article on company’s blog is the way to go (and then re-publish on your personal blog), then go ahead and do it. Only you can determine what’s “best” for you.
Content, in general, is a superb way to scale your advocacy program. You can reach people anywhere in the world with content. Learn How content creates content to help you scale.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this!
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