If you’re thinking about starting a blog, don’t get suckered into the Wordpress *vs* Medium debate.

It’s remarkably simple—and hugely effective—to take a Wordpress *and* Medium approach.

Here’s how I do it... [Thread]

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High level:

- Use Wordpress as the canonical location for your content and where you redirect all your traffic, since it’s easier to convert WP traffic to your email list.

- Republish everything to Medium to gain early exposure/traffic and make money (Partner Program).

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Setting up a Wordpress blog is simple. Most website hosts (e.g. DreamHost) let you do it with a single click.

Then install a good-looking and free theme—I love @andersnoren’s themes!

Don’t worry about customizing it till later.

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Now set up an email newsletter.

Mailchimp is good and free up to a few thousand subscribers.

Although I like ConvertKit for power and usability (easer to use for non-technical people imo).

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On your Wordpress site, have a signup form for your newsletter on your site’s homepage, your newsletter page, and your about page.

Here’s an example of my newsletter page where I try to send all my external traffic. Https://nickwignall.com/newsletter 

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Sign up for Medium and Join the Partner Program.

Each time you write a blog post, republish it on Medium and include a simple link at the end of your articles sending people back to the newsletter page of your Wordpress site.

Here’s what mine looks like:

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When you republish to Medium, don’t forget to go into the Advanced Settings and change the “canonical link” to the original url from your Wordpress version.

This ensures Google will index the Wordpress version, not the Medium one.

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I’ve been using this strategy for 2+ years & it’s been super effective:

- My WP site houses all my content and gets all the SEO juice

- Medium brings me new traffic, gets me exposure, & makes me money

- Medium is also a great place to connect with other bloggers and peers

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Finally, using a WP + Medium approach isn’t that much more complicated than either alone:

- Setting up a basic Wordpress site can be done in under 30 min easy

- It takes me all of 10 minutes to import an article from Wordpress to Medium and make a few formatting changes.

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Happy to answer questions about this if you have any!

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