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Want to host your company blog on Medium? Know the pros and cons

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, Medium did away with supporting custom domains. While there is value in using Medium to support your content marketing efforts, it is no longer a viable option to host your company blog. Ask yourself the below questions when determining whether you should host your blog on another service. 

 

It’s easy to look at Medium, with its minimal and gorgeous layout, and decide to move your corporate blog to its platform. After all, it’s easier than hosting your own blog with Wordpress or another CMS. 

But is it right for your company?

Note: in speaking about Medium, this post is referring to fully hosting your blog on Medium and using a custom domain such as blog.yourcompany.com to do it. (This is free, but there is a $75 charge to set your domain.) 

Blog hosting on Medium: The cons

The first con is a big one, so weigh it carefully. 

You give up a lot of control if you don’t host a blog on your own site. This is the only place you control everything about your content and truly own it. If you rely on another service – like Medium – you do have to worry about how they maintain their platform and what would happen should the service shut down. You still, however, own all of your content and can export it. 

While Medium is well-structured for SEO, any content hosted on a subdomain will lose some SEO value. Ideally, you’d want to use www.yourcompany.com/blog, and Medium does not support URL routes like that – only subdomains or new domains. 

Blog hosting on Medium: The pros

Medium makes it incredibly easy to write and publish beautiful, modern, easy-to-share posts. You need to add a link on your website directing to your blog, but otherwise, everything will be maintained in Medium. It’s pretty turnkey to get the blog up and running, and there’s no need to rely on your developer team to launch the blog or maintain it.  

Medium also makes collaboration and editing extremely easy between bloggers and editors. If you’re the sole editor and manager of your blog, Medium makes it easy to keep track of submissions from your contributing bloggers. If you’ve got a team of editors and writers, it’s also easy to track the status of all drafts and published posts between the team. 

Medium also gives you access to a wider community to boost your distribution. Even if you don’t host your blog on Medium, you should still syndicate your blog or even publish fresh content here to extend the reach of your content.

What’s right for your blog?

In a perfect world, you’d host your blog directly on your site. But – as Medium knows – sometimes you have to give a little. If your team is strapped by time and resources, the pros may outweigh the cons for your blog. Yes, you’ll give up some control, but if it’s a choice between launching a strong blog and launching a half-hearted blog, Medium wins. 

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