I recently experienced what many might consider a fairly major setback. My budding blog was banned on Medium and put under investigation. I immediately lost 100% of my traffic. My website had an ominous message on it, stating that I was under investigation. It felt like my writing career on Medium was over. I sent the support team an email, knowing full well that it could all just be a misunderstanding. I waited a few hours, and decided to check and see how long it was likely to take to get an answer from the team.
To my eternal dismay, I found out that it could take more than a week for the Medium team to respond to my email. That meant up to a week of no traffic, and users being sent to an “Error 404” or “This account is under investigation” page. I wasn’t going to stand for this. I knew that migrating my blog onto WordPress was the solution. I had already been toying with the idea so that I would have a shot at collecting Ad revenue. I figured migrating would be easy. Just export my site and reupload it, right?
I was so wrong.
It turns out that Medium doesn’t allow you to export your site in a way that’s easy to reupload to WordPress. This means that I would need to copy paste everything over. I tried to bulk upload my posts, but since they were html pages, WordPress tried to post them as pages rather than posts. I’ve been copy pasting text for 3 days straight now, and my new blog has nearly got 100 posts on it, including 6 that I’ve just written.
I didn’t do this blindly. A big concern of mine is SEO. I spent 6 months writing on Medium, and when I bought my custom domain name, my rankings instantly dropped. It was incredibly frustrating after all of that hard work. Now this happens 3 months later. If I can avoid starting over from scratch once again I will. I decided to figure out how to recreate the same links for my new blog as what was showing up on the Google search console. This way I wouldn’t lost the valuable traffic that I was already getting. I didn’t waste a second. It was time to get after it. I figured out that all Medium links have a suffix. They’re made the same way as WordPress links are, but you add a unique code full of letters and numbers. These codes can be found in the export file.
I’ve copied over half my site properly and tested a lot of the links. I’m not quite back to normal yet, but my site isn’t empty. The jury’s out as to whether or not I’ll lose traffic, but things could definitely be worse. I know I’ve gotten 5 pageviews in the last three days. This is better than nothing, considering today’s traffic hasn’t been sent in yet. Hopefully my site can make a full recovery by the time I’ve uploaded everything. My most recent articles were the ones that were getting the most traffic.
Pushing through this setback has caused me to save a lot of time. I would have lost a lot of time trying to get my ranking back and then move my site to WordPress. Now, I’m looking at monetizing my blog already, and have already set up accounts with two display ad publishers. I’ve also found a portal through which I can sell my digital products. I also now know how cheap it is to get 4 years of hosting. Starting your own website should cost about $300 tops if you’re going barebones. I learned that there are no excuses. Going harder while experiencing this setback has put me father ahead with regards to my career than if I hadn’t experienced any problems in the first place. If you get knocked down, go harder. Especially if you actually have talent and are honest. You might be surprised to see what happens.
