Publishing on a blogging platform gets you readers faster and leaves you with nothing. Every article builds the platform's visibility rather than yours, which is a fine trade for a writer and a poor one for a business.
Short answer
A blogging platform supplies an audience and handles publishing, and everything you write accrues to their domain rather than yours. For a business, publish on your own site and use platforms for distribution. Where you do publish elsewhere, link back and keep the original at home.
Readers who are already there. A new site has none, and that difference is real enough to explain why so many businesses start on a platform and never leave.
It also removes the publishing work entirely. No setup, no layout decisions, no hosting, and a reading experience that is usually better than most small business blogs.
For somebody testing whether they enjoy writing, that is the correct place to start. The problem only appears once the writing is working.
The social element is real as well. Responses, follows and recommendations happen there in a way they rarely do on a business site, and for some writers that feedback is what sustains the writing at all.
On their domain, and in the standing their domain has with a search engine or an answer engine. Every link somebody builds to your article, every search result it earns and every reader who arrives builds the platform's standing rather than your own.
You cannot take that with you. Moving an article later means republishing it somewhere with no history, and the original either competes with it or disappears.
Our page on duplicate content covers what happens when the same article exists in two places, which is the usual result of trying to move.
The route from reading to hiring. A platform article ends in the platform, with a link to your site if you are lucky, rather than in your services and your contact route.
The connection between articles. Our page on internal linking covers why a set of pages that reference each other outperforms the same pages in isolation.
And the context. A reader on your site sees the business around the article; a reader on a platform sees other people's writing in the sidebar.
And the design context. A platform decides how your article looks, which is usually fine and occasionally places a competitor's promoted article directly beneath your own.
The list below is the arrangement that works. Publish at home, distribute everywhere, and never let the copy outrank the original.
Where a platform supports a canonical reference, use it. That tells search engines which version is the original and prevents the copy competing with the page you own.
Where it does not, publish a shortened version with a link to the full one. Half an article plus a link outperforms a full duplicate on somebody else's domain.
Our page on canonical tags covers the mechanism. It is one of the few technical details worth understanding before syndicating anything.
Platform audiences are real and they are mostly not your customers. A trade article read by a thousand people in other cities produces fewer enquiries than one read by twenty locals.
Judge by enquiries rather than by readers. That distinction is uncomfortable and it is the one that separates writing that markets a business from writing that markets a writer.
Where a platform genuinely reaches your buyers, it earns its place. Trade publications and professional communities frequently do; general platforms frequently do not.
Check what the platform actually sends you. Most analytics will show referral visits by source, and a platform producing readers but no visits is producing an audience for itself rather than for you.
Writing for somebody else's publication is different and often worthwhile. The article builds their site and the link and the credibility come back to you.
Choose publications your customers actually read rather than ones that accept anything. A link from a trade body or a local publication is worth a great many from content farms.
And keep your best material at home. Our page on topic clusters covers why the pages that answer your core questions belong on your own site.
Its own site. Everything published on a platform builds their domain rather than yours, and it cannot be moved later without the copy competing with the original.
Yes, after the original is indexed, using a canonical reference back to your version where the platform supports it. Where it does not, publish a shortened version with a link to the full one.
Only if they are your customers. A trade article read by a thousand people elsewhere produces fewer enquiries than one read by twenty locals. Judge by enquiries rather than readers.
Often, because the credibility and the link come back to you. Choose publications your customers actually read, and keep the pages answering your core questions on your own site.
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