Maximising Blog Post Impressions by Cross-posting the Correct Way.

This post was originally published on my blog: conermurphy.com if you like my content please consider following me on Twitter @MrConerMurphy for notifications as soon as I publish.

To increase your number of impressions you should be cross-posting to other platforms. But, there is a crucial thing you need to do to make sure you're not putting all those extra impressions to waste.

Personal Domain

Before we look at cross-posting, it's pivotal that you have your blog posts hosted on your own domain. This doesn't need to be a custom-built website. It could be a Medium or Hashnode blog but make sure you're using your own domain name.

If you're new to buying domains, I recommend using namecheap.com. They're one of the cheapest places to buy domains and offer a wide selection of Top Level Domains.

Why it matters?

Why is it so pivotal to have all your posts on your own domain? One word (or rather three letters), SEO!

By having all your posts on your own domain, search engines can crawl your posts and build a profile on your domain. Over time search engines will start listing your domain higher in search results. This will in turn generate more views, reinforcing your ranking.

Once you have this profile built up, you can start thinking about making money off your hard work. This could be ad revenue or using analytics to attract sponsors, the options are endless.

But, what enabled this?

The profile and domain authority you built from your posts being on your own domain.

Cross-posting

Now we've addressed why we need to post to our domain first, let's talk about cross-posting.

Cross-posting is a great way to get extra views, but there is one big gotcha, I'll cover this later on. First, let's cover the best places to cross-post.

Medium

Medium.com is one of the biggest names in blogging. It's a platform that allows you to create a blog and post for others to consume.

There is a couple of ways to get your post noticed on Medium:

1. Adding tags to your posts. You can add up to 5 tags per post by tagging your post it will show up in searches on the site. 2.Posting in a publication. Publications are like digital newspapers, they allow you to publish to their readers. This is a great strategy because they will already have a readership built up. And, by publishing in their publication it immediately gets put in front of these readers.

DEV

DEV is another blogging platform like Medium but geared more towards developers.

DEV has a smaller total readership than Medium. But, as its core readership is developers more people are likely to read your article. This makes DEV a great candidate for cross-posting.

Like Medium you can also add tags to your blog posts up to a limit of 4 per post to allow your posts to show up in search results. DEV also has communities that are like publications on Medium.

Hashnode

The final place to cross-post your blog post is Hashnode.

Hashnode is the newest platform in this list but that doesn't make it any less important. Hashnode has recently grown in popularity, becoming a staple for blogging for developers. This makes it a great candidate for cross-posting.

Hashnode like Medium and DEV allow you to add tags to your posts up to a limit of 5. Also, you can submit your posts to other blogs like the other platforms.

Avoiding SEO Disaster

You can cross-post to all these platforms or one of them. But, no matter where you choose to cross-post, you'll need to make sure you always set the Canonical URL.

I won't go into detail on Canonical URLs here, if you're interested Google has a great page on it. But, the upshot of Canonical URLs is they tell search engines where the ultimate source of the content is.

This means we can cross-post to other platforms and still get the SEO benefits on our original post. Allowing our domain to be the ultimate source. Search engines will then push our original post and by extension our domain up in ranking.

Here is how to set a Canonical URL on each of the platforms:

• Medium: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033930293-Set-a-canonical-link
• DEV: https://dev.to/p/editor_guide
• Hashnode: When writing an article goto settings and add the URL to the Original URL field.

Summary

It's good to cross-post on to other platforms to increase your impressions but you need to do it the right way. By using Canonical URLs to ensure you get all the SEO bonuses and not the platforms you cross-post to.

If you have any questions or need any help, you can reach out to me on Twitter.