Why I Link to Medium Posts in Substack Posts

It makes sense, I promise!

Many of my Substack posts have a link to a post that was originally published on Medium. It might seem like a risky strategy to send my loyal Substack subscribers to Medium to read my work, but there’s a good reason for it.

Substack is for relationships

A newsletter is an online ‘space’ where readers can get to know you and your work - to have a relationship with you.

I’m building this newsletter to get to know you and your problems and for you to get to ‘know’ me. My goal is to create an excellent book that solves your problems. And create an audience who will buy that book when it’s finished. If you like my newsletter and learn something each week, you will love my book and (hopefully) buy it.

Your newsletter should also have an element of relationship-building, because the relationship you have with your readers and subscribers is what encourages them to open your emails, stay subscribed and - perhaps - pay to support your work.

Medium is for new eyeballs

I use Medium to get my work in front of new people.

You need new people to discover your work every week if you want your newsletter subscriber numbers to grow. I use Medium posts to get 'discovered'.

My strategy is:

Publish on Medium > Medium and search engines show my work to strangers > Strangers become readers > Encourage Medium readers to subscribe to this newsletter > New subscribers.

My Medium posts are (mostly) aimed at getting new Substack subscribers. But at the same time, I don't want my current subscribers to miss out on helpful advice so I make sure to tell them about each relevant Medium post.

Duplicating content is a bad idea

Update 2025: When I wrote this post in 2023, duplicate content was risky because search engines were still likely to penalize duplicate content if the canonical links were not set up correctly.

Fast forward to 2025 and the risk posed by duplicate content is gone. Search engines can now recognize your writing in multiple places and won’t treat it as plagiarism, as long as you publish it under the same name in both places.

Better still, the SEO performance of Substack-hosted content has improved hugely (hooray).

In 2025, I no longer worry about the intricacies of canonical linking between Substack and Medium, and I no longer send Substack readers to Medium posts.

The internet gods won’t help my subscriber numbers grow if I post the exact same content in Substack and Medium. This is related to canonical linking.

Search engines recognize duplicate content and try to decide which website they will serve up in search results. On many sites, the writer can tell the search engines which site is ‘best’, using canonical links. Medium allows writers to set a canonical link.

Substack does not allow writers to set a canonical link. If I posted the exact same content in both places, I risk reducing the overall reach of the Medium post and this would damage the discovery strategy I shared above.

It might seem crazy at first, but as you can see, there’s a good reason that I so often use Medium links in my Substack posts.

More about canonical links and Substack (2025 update)

If you’re still spending time worrying about canonical links and which should be set as the primary link for duplicate content, don’t.

Search engines are getting smarter by the moment and they are now making their own choices about which version of a duplicate article they want to show their users. These days, Google Search Console writes to me pretty often to tell me it’s chosen a different canonical link than the one I set.

This means I don’t need to fiddle about with canonical links, hooray.

The big takeaway: Write super-high-quality content that answers people’s questions, publish it in places where you can meet new readers, and encourage them to join you on Substack. In 2025 search engines know that you are you, and they will decide which of your articles they want to serve up to their users.