This is so drop dead easy and takes so little time everyone should be doing it. But most people don’t know the opportunity exists, and even if they do, they get lazy and don’t do it. Here’s how it started for me:
Jordan: You should republish all your blog posts on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium. It’s an easy way to get extra traffic.
Me: Ok. I’ll try it out.
I tried it out. I took many of my blog posts from Forbes, Entrepreneur, and this blog and copied and pasted them onto LinkedIn Pulse and Medium, with a note at the end stating where the content was published first and linking to it, and also linking directly to my Twitter profile. To copy and paste an article and format it on these additional networks took all of about 5 minutes per post. Here are the results. First, on LinkedIn Pulse.
And here are the results on Medium.
Some posts have performed better than others on the same network. And curiously, the same post sometimes performs much better on one network than another. The biggest surprise was my post How Getting Fit Saved My Life And My Business. This was first published on Forbes, where I have a huge audience. I put more work than usual into this post. I had previous success with a similar post on Entrepreneur, so much so that Time magazine syndicated it, and I thought this would go gangbusters on Forbes. But after two weeks it had gotten just over 2,000 views. 2,000 views is great, but I can publish just about anything on Forbes and get that many views. My better performing posts get over 100,000, and that’s what I was expecting for this one, so 2,000 was a disappointment.
On Medium the same post only attracted 28 views–definitely not stellar results. But then on LinkedIn it got over 13,000 views, over 1,000 likes, and over 200 comments! What made the difference? That’s a topic for another post. The point is that for a few minutes worth of work, my post received an additional 13,000 views. But even excluding that outlier, let’s look at the rest of the results. I’m only counting those posts that were syndications of posts from other places (sometimes I post unique content to Medium, plus Medium stats show views of comments and such).
LinkedIn Pulse Stats
- LinkedIn Pulse total posts: 9
- LinkedIn Pulse total time invested: 9 x 5 = 45 min
- LinkedIn Pulse total extra views: 1,942
- LinkedIn Pulse time per extra view: (45 x 60) / 1,942 = 1.39 seconds per extra view, or 23 minutes to get an extra 1,000 views
Medium Stats
- Medium total posts: 8
- Medium total time invested: 8 x 5 = 40 min
- Medium total extra views: 150
- Medium time per extra view: (40 x 60) / 150 = 16 seconds per extra view, or 4.5 hrs to get an extra 1,000 views
In other words, even excluding the big one on LinkedIn Pulse, I can get an extra 1,000 views to my blog posts with minimal effort. Some of this traffic generates leads for me in terms of speaking engagements, or for my business, MWI. Is that worth 23 minutes of my time? Definitely. While the results on Medium are not nearly as positive, I also haven’t invested any time to learn how to make posts get more traffic on Medium, and I suspect a small investment there would yield more traffic so I’m not giving up just yet.
Key takeaway–created content on owned channels (personal blog, company blog, company website, etc.) and then syndicated it by copying and pasting it to LinkedIn Pulse and Medium.
How to Post to LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn Pulse is an area on LinkedIn where anyone can post content. Here are the steps:
1. Go to https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/.
2. Click on “Publish a post” button in upper right corner.
3. Create your story. Make sure to add an image and tags to categorize your post and make it more likely to get noticed by people who follow those categories.
Here are some other tips that might help you create a post that’s going to get some serious traffic:
But don’t get too complicated. Better to keep it simple at first and get it done, then try too hard and never get anything published because you’re spending too much time writing the perfect headline or stressing on formatting.
The best part about posting to LinkedIn Pulse and Medium is is that anyone can do it. When people click on my posts on these two networks, most of them have no idea I write for Forbes. Any credibility I have anywhere else doesn’t show up. All they see is a headline and the article. That means if I got 13,000 views from a post on LinkedIn Pulse, there’s no reason you can’t get the same results, even if LinkedIn Pulse is the only place you can post.
Have you already had success on LinkedIn Pulse or Medium? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Update: Now you can post to Medium even faster. When I went to syndicate this post there, I noticed this:
Once you click on it, you can copy and paste the URL of an existing blog post, and rather than having to copy and paste the content in and reformat it, Medium imports everything. A little reformatting, and you’re ready to go. Total time to publish? Less than 30 seconds, instead of 5 minutes.
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About Medium: posts with non-white background are more difficult to read. A more classic format is an image on the top + white background for the rest of the post. It might have affected the number of reads/shares.
I used a mix of posts with and without an image, with no discernible results given the small sample size and low traffic levels. They were all on a white background.
Ok. I meant this post (white font + picture in the background): https://medium.com/@joshsteimle/how-getting-fit-saved-my-life-and-my-business-4883db44dd41#.faeplw9nr
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I did experiment with a photo background on that one. Yes, that may have affected things, although I would think the difference had more to do with something else…I suspect it may be that on Medium I have fewer than 2,000 followers, and on LinkedIn my posts get blasted out to around 6,000. And I suspect the LinkedIn feed is probably better at getting the content in front of people than Medium. Something I’ll have to look into a bit more.
Are there any duplicate content issues to worry about with this strategy of just pushing same content to these networks?
I’ve never seen any problems with it, nor heard of any. There are some good pointers on this here.
Thanks for the advice Josh, I recently posted my first article to LinkedIn Pulse. It’s exciting to see that people like it!
Hey Josh. Have you noticed any issues with any “duplicate” content, seeing as we would post our blog posts to our regular LikendIn business page, then post them to this “pulse” channel as well? Or SEO issues with duplicate posts in the same platform? Just curious..
That’s something I have to admit I haven’t experimented with. Try it out with 3-4 posts and let me know what you notice. I wouldn’t be too concerned about anything negative, but I am curious as to what exactly would happen.
Ok. I will test it out and return and report 🙂
Hi Patrick, checking in. Over the past 2 months, what has been your experience with this strategy?
Hi Patric, in most cases, Google will know where the content was published in the first place. It may penalize the LinkedIn duplicate. But why care?
I mean yeah, it wont be on page 1 of search results. But should it be there? The original article will rank OK and it will be getting organic traffic. The one in social media will be shared through the network by likes and tweets and whatever.
Thus penalties shouldn’t be an issue in terms of potential reach.
Great idea. Based on your suggestion, I uploaded 2 posts to LinkedIn. Like Patrick, I had some concerns about the SEO duplicate penalty. This will be an experiment to see what happens.
Thanks for the tip Josh. I’m trying it out and as far as I can tell – the five minutes are totaly worth it.