Member-only story
You Don’t Need to Host Your Own Blog
Spoiler alert: Medium does it better.
I’m lucky to be a part of a number of great Medium support groups on Facebook, full of writers providing support, asking and answering questions. One of the frequent questions that crops up relates to hosting an outside blog in addition to their Medium account.
And, honestly, I’m surprised at how many people actually do it!
If you go to my website now, you’ll notice that there’s no blog on it. Instead, many of the pages link to various Medium posts of mine. For a while, I did have a tab labeled “Blog” that was a direct external link to Medium.
That’s not to mean that I never tried running my own blog. Of course I have.When I first set up my website as well as on various free-to-use platforms before that.
Unsurprisingly, they all had the same problem: nobody was looking at them. I’d post links on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I’d do all kinds of bloghops and other nonsense, leaving comments in the vain hope that somebody would click the little hyperlink with my name, and become interested in my website.
Judging from the years of stats, it’s fairly clear that nobody gave a shit. Nobody wanted to click. Nobody was interested in going out of their way to see what I had to say about anything.
