I have published several articles with Better Marketing because it fits my topics and they always get distributed. Recently, I republished a few articles from my early days but Better Marketing rejected one. I tried to get it into another publication with no luck because I use GIFs which is against that publication's policy.

Since this particular article was ranking on Google before I deleted it, I decided to self-publish it. It got distributed and did better in a week than it had over the previous several months.

Moral of the story? If you're new, I highly recommend publishing in a publication as it helps Medium discover you, especially if it is a good publication that Medium recognizes.