Udemezue John
Let’s be real for a second. If you’ve been creating content online for more than a month, you’ve felt the pull. The siren song of a platform like Medium is incredibly seductive.
“Just write,” it whispers. “Forget about website hosting, plugin updates, or SEO technicalities. We’ll handle the distribution. We’ll put your words in front of our audience. Just publish here and watch the reads roll in.”
I get it. As someone who’s spent over six years in the trenches of SEO, digital marketing, and building online businesses, the promise of simplicity is a powerful thing. Managing your own blog can feel like running a small city—you’re the mayor, the utilities department, and the sanitation crew all at once.
But after helping hundreds of entrepreneurs and creators build sustainable income streams, I’ve landed on a non-negotiable principle: You should never build your home on rented land. And that’s exactly what moving your blog to Medium.com is doing.
Here’s the hard truth, framed by years of watching platforms rise, change their rules, and evaporate opportunities overnight: surrendering your blog to a third-party platform is one of the riskiest business decisions a content creator can make.
You are Trading Temporary Convenience for Permanent Value
The core of my argument isn’t about features or fonts. It’s about asset ownership.
When you publish on your own website, you are building an asset. Every article is a brick in a house that you own. Its value accumulates over time. It generates traffic that you control, leads that you nurture, and revenue that you dictate.
When you publish on Medium, you are contributing to their asset. You are adding a brick to their house. You might get to stay in a nice room for a while, but the deed is never in your name. They control the traffic, the monetization rules (if any), the design, and most importantly, the future.
I’ve seen this movie before. Google algorithm updates, Facebook killing page reach, social platforms pivoting to video. If your entire audience and content library live on a platform, you are eternally one policy change away from irrelevance.
The Practical, Business-Crushing Reasons to Stay Independent
Let’s move past philosophy and into the practical realities that hit your bottom line.
1. SEO is Your Sleeping Giant (And Medium Mutes It).
My bread and butter for years has been search engine optimization. It is the most powerful, consistent, and free source of targeted traffic in existence. Your own blog is an SEO engine. You optimize a post for a specific keyword, it starts ranking, and it can bring in visitors for years without you lifting another finger. That’s compound interest for your business.
Medium’s SEO is… messy. While individual articles can rank, you are not building the domain authority for your brand. You’re building it for medium.com. If you ever leave, you leave all that search equity behind. You are essentially doing the hard SEO work for them, not for your own legacy.
2. Your Brand is Your Most Valuable Currency.
Think about the entrepreneurs and experts you trust. Where do you find them? On their own turf. Their website is their headquarters. It smells like them, looks like them, and functions exactly as they intend.
A Medium publication looks like every other Medium publication. It screams “tenant,” not “owner.” For a freelancer or business owner, establishing expert authority is critical.
A custom-designed website that you control is a non-negotiable tool for that. It’s your digital business card, your portfolio, and your sales floor, all in one.
3. Email List? What Email List?
If you take one piece of my experience to heart, let it be this: the money is in the list. Your email subscribers are your most valuable audience. They have literally raised their hands and said, “Talk to me.”
On your own blog, capturing emails is a central, seamless strategy. Pop-ups, content upgrades, newsletter signups—it’s the core of your funnel.
On Medium, the primary goal is to keep people on Medium. Directly building your list is clunky, often against the spirit of the platform, and secondary to their goal of retaining readers. You are farming on someone else’s land and they get first pick of the harvest.
4. Monetization on Your Terms, Not Theirs.
With your blog, you choose. Affiliate marketing for products you believe in? Done. Selling your own digital products or courses? Easy. Display ads? Your call. Offering client services? Your site is your best salesman.
With Medium, you’re generally locked into their Partner Program. You get paid based on member reading time. It’s a black box of algorithms and changing payout rates. It turns you from a business owner into a piece-rate content laborer, subject to the whims of their internal system. I help people build sustainable income, not lottery-ticket income.
“But What About the Built-In Audience?”
This is the most common pushback. Yes, Medium has a built-in audience. And it can be a fantastic outreach tool, but a terrible home base.
My strategy? Repurpose, don’t relocate.
Here’s what I do and advise my clients to do:
Write and publish on your own blog first. This is your cornerstone content. Optimize it for SEO, add your email capture, link to your products.
Then, adapt that article for Medium. Edit it slightly, and publish it there as a way to reach new people. Use Medium’s “Import a story” tool (which handles canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues) or simply publish a truncated version with a clear, compelling link back to the full article on your website.
Use Medium as a top-of-funnel channel. Let it be a discovery platform that drives serious readers back to your owned property. You get exposure without sacrificing control.
FAQs
I’m just starting. Isn’t Medium easier to get my first 1,000 readers?
It can be. And there’s no harm in using it for discovery as I outlined above. But start building your own site from day one. Even if it’s simple. Getting that first 100 email subscribers on your own list is worth more than 10,000 followers on any platform.
Can’t I just use a custom domain on Medium?
You can point a custom domain (like blog.yourname.com) to your Medium publication. This helps with branding, but it’s a facade. You still don’t own the platform, the data, or the relationship. You’ve just put your name on the mailbox of the house you rent.
What about the writing experience? Medium is so clean and focused.
This is a valid point. Tools like WordPress can feel overwhelming. The solution isn’t to abandon ownership. It’s to simplify your own setup. Use a clean, fast theme and a distraction-free editor plugin. You can replicate that serene writing experience on your own property.
The Final Word
This isn’t just about blogging. It’s about how you view your digital presence as an entrepreneur, freelancer, or business owner. Are you a sharecropper, or are you a landowner?
My experience—from affiliate sites to eCommerce stores to client work—has cemented one truth: long-term, resilient, scalable business is built on assets you control.
Your blog is the central hub of that universe. It’s where your authority is cemented, your trust is built, and your revenue streams converge.
Medium is a great street vendor. Your own blog is your flagship store.
So I’ll keep maintaining my city, troubleshooting plugins, and writing for my own corner of the web. Because when I look back in another six years, I want to see a library I own, an audience I know, and a business that can’t be switched off by a stranger.
The question you have to ask yourself is this: Five years from now, do you want to look at your body of work and see a portfolio you own, or a collection of links to a platform that may not even exist in the same way?
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings