Is it better to create a blog post or a LinkedIn article?
A lot of my copywriting clients aren’t sure whether their content ought to be published on their blog or on LinkedIn.
Let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons. Plus, I’ll show you my recommended publishing process.
- Pros and cons: blog posts versus LinkedIn articles
- The publishing process
- Can I republish my blog posts elsewhere?
- Let’s wrap up
Pros and cons: blog posts versus LinkedIn articles.
Blog.
- Build authority on your own domain
- SEO benefits
- Full control over look and feel
- Potentially smaller audience
- Require readers to visit your site
LinkedIn article.
- Build authority on social media
- Potentially larger audience
- Serve people where they already are
- No SEO benefit
- No control over look and feel
So, there are pros and cons for each option. If you have something important to say, where’s best to publish those thoughts?
Good news: you can have the best of both worlds.
Yup, I recommend publishing in both places.
I’ve mentioned this before in my business blogging guide, in the section about the blog republishing strategy.
You might have missed that if you’re focusing on LinkedIn rather than on blogging.
Here’s the process I suggest you follow to give your content the maximum visibility:
The publishing process.
Step 1: Publish your content on your blog first.
Doing this means that Google and other search engines see the source of the content and give that credit to your website rather to LinkedIn.
Step 2: Index your content in Google Search Console.
This means that your content appears in the Google search index in a matter of hours rather than days.
I covered this in How to speed up Google indexing.
Step 3: Publish the content on LinkedIn.
You can copy the exact same post from your blog to your LinkedIn article, but I’d recommend tweaking the headline and the opening paragraph. This helps with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), meaning your content could be found on a couple of different keyword searches, e.g.
- Who is the best technical copywriter in the UK?
- The UK’s best technical copywriter 2019
(Same content but two different ways of being found.)
Even though search engines should be smart enough to detect which is the original source of the content (your website/blog, because that’s where you published first), it doesn’t hurt to end your LinkedIn article with some text that points back to the original content on your site.
Can I republish my blog posts elsewhere?
Yes, you can go beyond LinkedIn. The same process above applies for republishing on other platforms.
For example, you might want to publish your content on Medium (as a “Story”) or on Facebook (as a “Note”).
Remember: publish to your website first, get your content indexed by Google and then republish elsewhere.
Don’t be afraid of duplicate content penalties, as these will apply only if you’re duplicating content on a large scale (i.e. you’re a spammer) or if you’re ripping off someone else’s work (i.e. you’re a content thief).
If either of those are true, you can get lost right now. I probably ought to have said that before the end of the article.
Let’s wrap up.
You can and should publish your content in more than one place.
Start with your website or blog and then republish to LinkedIn and other destinations. The more, the merrier – so long as you’re not a spammer or a thief!
