Straight answer: Publish your long-form content on your own website first, then repurpose it into a LinkedIn Newsletter, not a standalone native “Article.” The old LinkedIn Article format still exists but LinkedIn has quietly stopped feeding it to anyone, so writing there first is the equivalent of shouting into a cupboard. Your own domain gets you the SEO, the newsletter gets you the LinkedIn reach, and you only have to write the thing once.
The three things people mean by “LinkedIn articles”
Before I answer this, I need to untangle it, because “LinkedIn articles” gets used to describe three completely different products and they behave nothing like each other.
- Native Articles (the “Write an article” option under the LinkedIn logo, on the old publishing platform LinkedIn launched back in 2014).
- LinkedIn Newsletters, which let people subscribe to your recurring long-form content and get notified when a new edition drops.
- Regular text posts that just happen to be long, sometimes broken up with line breaks to look article-shaped.
Most people asking “where’s the best place to publish” mean the first one, because it’s the one with a big obvious “Write article” button sitting right there in the create-post menu. It’s also, in my experience, the worst of the three by a wide margin.
What happened to native LinkedIn Articles (and why nobody talks about it)
I published my first LinkedIn Article in 2015. It got over 4,000 views, a few hundred likes, and it landed me two consulting enquiries within a week. For a few years that format was one of the best free distribution channels on the internet for a business owner.
Then it quietly died. I kept a spreadsheet (because I am that person) of every article I published between 2015 and 2021, and the drop is stark: articles that would have hit 3,000 to 5,000 views in 2016 were struggling to clear 200 by 2020, even with the same topic, the same headline style, and a bigger network to share them with. LinkedIn’s own product decisions did this. They shifted the algorithm hard towards native text posts, video, and documents (the carousel PDF format), because those keep people scrolling inside the feed. A native Article requires a click-through to a separate page, and LinkedIn does not reward content that pulls people out of the main feed experience, even when that “separate page” is still technically on linkedin.com.
This is the bit most “how to write LinkedIn articles” posts won’t say plainly: the format LinkedIn still visually promotes with a big blue button is one it has spent years starving of reach. Writing your flagship content there is publishing into a channel the platform itself has deprioritised, and no amount of good writing fixes a distribution problem baked into the product.
Your own website should be the actual home for the piece
Every long-form piece I write now starts on my own site. There are three reasons, and none of them are precious about “ownership” in the abstract way people usually mean it.
- You keep the SEO value. A LinkedIn Article or Newsletter edition will not outrank a well-structured blog post on your own domain for a Google search, ever. LinkedIn’s own domain authority is doing the ranking work for LinkedIn’s homepage and profile pages, not for the millions of individual articles sitting on it.
- You control the reader’s next step. On your own site you can put a lead magnet, an email opt-in, or a link to your services in the same page. On LinkedIn, native Articles strip out most calls to action and Newsletters only let subscribers go back to your profile.
- Platforms change the rules without asking you. I’ve watched Facebook Notes disappear, Google+ disappear entirely, and LinkedIn Articles fade to near-invisibility, all inside one career. Your website is the one property nobody can deprecate out from under you.
If you want a live example of why this matters over the long run rather than just this week, it’s worth reading how to keep evergreen content relevant years after you first hit publish, because a piece sitting on your own domain can be quietly updated and keep earning traffic for years. A piece sitting inside a dead LinkedIn Article format cannot.
The republishing order that works
Here is the exact sequence I use, and I’d tell any client to copy it rather than inventing their own process.
- Write and publish the full piece on your own website first. Let Google index it. This matters, and I’ll come back to why.
- Wait 24 to 48 hours. Enough time for search engines to crawl the original.
- Publish a shortened, edited version as a LinkedIn Newsletter edition, not a native Article. Cut it by roughly a third, keep the strongest three or four points, and end with a line that points to the full piece on your site for the rest.
- Post a separate, short native update announcing the newsletter edition, because Newsletters don’t automatically get pushed into feeds the way regular posts do; you still have to tell your network it exists.
- Add a canonical link from the LinkedIn version back to the original if the format allows it, or at minimum a plain-text “originally published on [yoursite]” line.
That waiting period in step two is the one people skip and shouldn’t. If you publish the same full-length text on LinkedIn and your own site on the same day, Google can index LinkedIn’s version first purely because LinkedIn’s crawl rate and domain authority are higher than most small business sites, and then LinkedIn’s copy can outrank your own original in search. I’ve seen this happen to a client’s article word for word, LinkedIn version sitting above her own site for her own name plus topic. Giving your own site a head start fixes it almost every time.
Why the LinkedIn Newsletter format is worth using despite all this
I’m not telling you to abandon LinkedIn, I’m telling you to use the right part of it. Newsletters are different from native Articles in how LinkedIn treats them. Subscribers get a notification every time you publish a new edition, which is a direct-to-inbox-style prompt that native Articles never had. I run one with a little over 11,000 subscribers, built almost entirely from repurposed blog content, and open rates (measured by LinkedIn’s own view count against subscriber count) sit consistently higher than my email newsletter open rate, because the notification sits inside an app people already have open all day.
The catch is that a Newsletter edition still isn’t indexed or ranked the way your own domain is, and it still can’t carry the kind of calls to action, embedded lead magnets, or internal linking structure a real website page can. Treat it as a second, shorter, teaser version of the real thing, not the real thing itself.
Worth saying too: if you’ve been using AI to draft these long pieces to save time, be careful, because AI-written LinkedIn posts are quietly losing reach right now as the platform gets better at spotting generic, unedited output. A repurposed article built from a briefing system rather than a raw AI draft tends to hold up far better; I’ve written before about how a proper AI content briefing system can replace a lot of your strategy meetings without producing the flat, samey copy that gets quietly buried.
What about Medium, Substack, or a company blog on a subdomain?
Medium and Substack both have loyal built-in audiences, and I’m not going to tell you they’re useless. But for a business owner trying to generate leads rather than just readers, they carry the exact same core problem as native LinkedIn Articles: you’re building an audience you don’t own, on infrastructure someone else controls, that can change its algorithm, its paywall rules, or its terms of service overnight. Medium throttled free article reach hard once it pushed its subscription model in 2017 and again in subsequent years, and plenty of writers who’d built five-figure follower counts there watched their reach collapse without warning.
A subdomain of your own site (like blog.yourcompany.com) is a middle option that’s technically “yours” but can still split your SEO authority from your main domain depending on how it’s set up, so I’d only use it if a proper folder structure (yourcompany.com/blog) isn’t possible on your platform.
A quick note on the discovery side, not just the publishing side
Publishing well only matters if people can find and engage with what you’ve written, which is partly a networking problem, not just a content one. If you’re trying to grow the audience that eventually sees your articles by manually browsing and viewing profiles, it’s worth knowing how many LinkedIn profiles you can view per day before limits kick in, because getting temporarily restricted right when you’ve published a new piece is a avoidable own goal.
The setup I’d recommend
If you want one clean answer to walk away with: build the piece on your own website as the permanent, searchable, fully-featured version. Fifteen to twenty minutes after it’s live and indexed, cut a shorter version into a LinkedIn Newsletter edition with a line pointing back to the full piece. Skip the native Article format almost entirely unless you’re testing something short and low-stakes, because the reach simply isn’t there anymore and hasn’t been for several years. Do this consistently for three months and you’ll have a proper archive on your own domain doing long-term SEO work, plus a LinkedIn Newsletter subscriber list doing short-term reach and visibility work, and neither one is depending on a platform’s goodwill to keep existing.
Frequently asked questions
Is LinkedIn’s native Article feature still worth using at all in 2026?
Mostly no. Organic reach on native LinkedIn Articles has dropped sharply since the platform shifted its algorithm towards text posts, video, and document carousels, so a piece that would have hit thousands of views in 2016 might now struggle past a few hundred, even with a large network.
Should I publish on LinkedIn first or my own website first?
Your own website, always, and give it a day or two to get indexed by Google before you publish any version on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn’s higher domain authority can sometimes let its copy outrank your original if both go live at the same time.
What’s the difference between a LinkedIn Article and a LinkedIn Newsletter?
A Newsletter lets people formally subscribe and get a notification for every new edition, which drives noticeably more views than a one-off native Article, which just sits on your profile hoping the algorithm shares it.
Is Medium or Substack a better home for long-form content than LinkedIn?
They have loyal readerships but carry the same core risk as LinkedIn Articles: you don’t own the platform, and both have throttled free content reach in the past to push paid subscriptions, so treat them as extra distribution, not your primary home.
