A mixed bag of results.
I don’t have established networks on either LinkedIn or Medium. So I didn’t expect either to get much traffic and I was right. About 110 views on LinkedIn at last count and a mere 5 on Medium.
Five years ago a story like that may have had 10 to 20,000 views on what was then my Wordpress site. Today they rarely hit 1000 on my site and maybe two to three times that when syndicated on Scoop.co.nz.
There wasn’t any obvious traffic bump on my site, which is now on Ghost.
I typed the headline into Google:
The top entry was the version of the story I syndicated to Scoop.co.nz
The Medium story came second.
Three was a Facebook scrape of the Scoop story and four was the automatic repost to Muck Rack.
Almost everything else was a scrape although my Tweet announcing the story on my site showed up at the bottom of Google’s page one.
There was one indirect link to the LinkedIn version of my story, but only because it showed up on someone else’s LinkedIn page. That was on the second page of Google results.
The original Ghost post didn’t show up at all. Clearly Google decided the Scoop or Medium version is the canonical page and thinks the original is a scrape despite* the canonical links I used where I could.
So, in summary, cross posting delegitimised the original post and failed to generate much extra traffic.
Most of my stories get the majority of their traffic at Scoop.co.nz, which is fine with my sponsor, but may not help me find another one. The weekly newsletter also goes to mailing list with a few hundred readers and 85 to 90% engagement.
@billbennettnz on the other hand “85 to 90% engagement” on the newsletter is a pretty impressive stat - maybe that is the way to go?
