I started my blogging career on Medium. The first few months were really, really tough. I barely got any traffic at all. Medium wasn’t pushing my articles. In part because the first few weren’t so good, but also because SEO content is a bit different from work designed for social media. I wrote about almost 50 articles and still was getting under 200 views per month. Then, I suddenly got my first taste of success. My article about Andrew Tate began to rank on Google. I watched it rise up the ranks in incognito mode, and before I knew it, the article was ranked #1 for “How Did Andrew Tate Get Rich?”. This brought me a good amount of traffic, and for a second, it seemed as though I was really on my way to blogging success. I decided to buy a domain name. I did a bit of looking around, and before long I was able to use an AI name generator to create risingcurrent.com, which is still what this blog is called. I paid for my new domain name, and felt satisfied that it was a good one. This was about a month ago when I was writing this article.
My traffic instantly tanked.
I went from getting more than 10 views per day to struggling to get more than five. I knew there was a chance of this happening, but it was still quite devastating as if all of my work had been destroyed. What had really happened is that I had lost all of my domain authority. Thankfully my article about men went viral-ish on Medium and started getting more traffic. Before long I surpassed my original best, and am now averaging over 50 views per day, and am aiming to push that number to 100.
I still should have bought my domain name earlier. The logic behind buying the domain name four months into the creation of my blog was simple. I wanted to save money. Medium offered a way to write and upload articles for free and I took advantage of it. But my logic wasn’t sound. I should have been thinking about backlinks.
Backlinks are hyperlinks to a specific webpage. This article on buying your domain name first is a backlink to the Moz article on Domain authority. The amount of backlinks to a webpage dramatically influences that page’s ranking on Google. Backlinks can be acquired organically or by connecting with other site owners and asking. There are also link building services out there, which I recommend you use if you’re trying to start a business.
The earlier you buy a domain name, the more backlinks you have. It’s really that simple, and it’s one of those things that can sail over people’s heads. When you change your blog URL, it means the backlinks you’ve built up don’t lead to your blog. This means less traffic. I’m in month 8 of blogging, but it’s like I’m in month one in some ways. Oh well, I have a bunch of articles in queue and a small Medium following at the ready.
But buy your domain name super early. You’re likely to regret it if you don’t.
