How 5 Minutes Drove 13,000 Extra Visitors To A Blog Post

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:

• How to Write Magnetic Headlines
• Formatting Secrets of Content that Gets Shared

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.