Read this before making your first post on Medium
You would probably think that writing a ton of articles on Medium to be a more profitable business. Many writers have made a living on posting an article on Medium every day, leading others to believe that doing the same would generate a quick buck on that platform as well.
This website is saturated with a lot of articles on how to make money from writing for Medium, which is a very common interest for those who wish to succeed in their writing. Remember, though, that while they seem to make a promise of success, it may not work after all. Therefore, you may end up wasting your time and money trying to break even with your own hard work.
After experiencing a lot of articles on Medium, showing all of their tips on how to write a successful article, I would like to present you with a few pointers before you ever decide to make your first post on Medium.
Don’t expect an overnight success
When you produce your articles through the Medium Partner Program, you may notice you won’t receive as much earnings as possible. That is because you are a new writer on the block, unless you already have a huge following based on your recent work published elsewhere. Whether you post articles about your life, your experiences in business, or anything else that comes to your mind, they would still need to be read by a ton of people in order for you to gain some reputation on Medium.
Before writing this article, I made a few stories on Medium; one taught about business marketing, a couple of them dealt with the National novel writing month, and one was related to a recent event. Each one of them didn’t receive over 50 views within the first few months. But when I posted another article about the do’s and don’ts of transgender characters in novel writing, it gathered over 1,000 views. It’s true the views for all of my articles can grow over time, especially since I haven’t been writing so many articles in the recent months, but the latter one I mentioned was offered for free and had grew pretty well within that same time period.
Much like YouTube, you may gain more views if you post every day, as you may be more likely to gain more followers in return. I can tell you that quality matters more than quantity, for the right choice of themes can do more than just gunning out a lot of posts on your blog.
That leads to another point –
Always know what you’re talking about
Medium doesn’t pay you for just anything you say to your readers. It is a publication service open to all writers, without having to be interviewed for the job. To get the best out of it, you must sell yourself. Why would readers, who have little time to read many articles, need to listen to you?
It is not like Twitter, where people follow you based on your collective opinions and achievements in your life. It’s more of them following you based on the content they expect to see from you.
Because of this, there is a hefty competition where a lot of writers on Medium compete for attention from everyone. Therefore, it is difficult to write on Medium and get noticed. With the new criteria set for the Partner Program, it’s even harder to get 100 followers in order to get paid for their views.
So whenever you want to write for Medium, you always need to know the subject at hand. That doesn’t mean you can research as extensively as possible, as many writers can get away with good quality posts within a short period of time. One way to accomplish this feat is by relying on your experiences and using the information that you already know before writing any post.
Getting paid means paywalls on your articles.
To get paid on Medium, you must first grab 100 followers if it’s already implemented. Then you can join the Partner Program and enter your taxpayer information, so you can choose which articles to set a meter on.
If you used places like Instagram and Facebook, then you would believe that your articles will be supported by ads. That is not the case, for the articles’ primary source of monetisation is by having the subscribers read them. Others can only access a few articles for free, before having to pay for the subscription or wait until next month. That means if you were to monetise your articles, then many people will only read a few of them for free. That limitation is not exclusive to your articles; it also affects every single article across Medium, therefore you may end up having issues on getting exposure for your articles via search engines and allowing people like student to reference them for research.
It hurts, but it’s ideal to host a few free articles in order to get readers to know you. For example, my article about my dos and don’ts of writing transgender characters had received a lot more views than the other articles. That was intended as a free resource to everyone who wishes to write such characters for their novel. It was discovered more often through Google searches and Facebook shares, which helped many people to discover my writing tips and other advice more easily.
This may be not the best advice, but allowing snippets of your work like this can help build you as an aspiring writer.
Marketing works, not social media
Don’t expect to share your articles through social media, hoping to gain exposure for your efforts. I’ve been there before and it didn’t really work out in the end. I once paid for advertising on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to promote one of my products, which extended its reach to more people online. It generated enough interest to try my product out, but they were not sold on its whole premise.
To really sell your articles out to other readers, you must rely on them without relying on other services including advertising. As according to one of my articles on Medium, you have to ensure your article hits the market gap between the innovators and the mass market. One way is to take the most popular subject on Medium and place on it a different theme for an unique combination. For example, writing tips is very popular, but if you mix them with LGBT themes, then those tips would help a smaller market of writers who wish to write more meaningful LGBT stories.
It also helps to focus on the fewest amount of themes as possible, so people who follow you will get the content that they signed up for. For me, I focus on marketing, writing tips and personal experiences as my core themes. By mixing them together, it offers different dynamics, leading to an incentive for new readers to follow you on medium.
Marketing is indeed a complex field and most people would not achieve success because of it. But it can be mastered to a great extent, without having to resort to social media and such platforms.
Medium is not really a blog platform.
Medium is not really meant to be your personal blog. It is more of an online newspaper, where its entire purpose is to host any kind of story. It’s possible to get away with articles about your personal experiences, but you may receive more views if you share useful advice towards readers around the world.
If you intend to use Medium to host your blog that talks about your chosen subject or your own experiences, then hosting your own blog on different website or domain (i.e. Blogspot, Wordpress) would be a better choice. Medium owns your content, meaning you can’t just post across many platforms. That is unless you post your work on your blog, so you can create a story and reference that as a link. That way you’ll be able to post articles across platforms without causing any issues with Medium and its monetisation program. Unfortunately, there is a lack of information on the proper way to post content on both Medium and such multimedia services like YouTube and Instagram. That is why you must always be careful when you post your same article across all platforms without upsetting Medium’s code of conduct.
If you have the money to host your own website, then you can host your works there and have much tighter controls on their monetisation and formatting. If there is any benefit to Medium, however, then it would be about building a habit of writing and having your articles easily recognised without having to rely purely on search engines and social media.
Don’t expect Medium to pay you handsomely
You may not get paid enough when you write articles on Medium, even if you have received over 100 followers. Articles on Medium will pay you based on their views received, but bear in mind that they need a lot of them in order to sustain a healthy monthly income. Regardless of having 100 followers or not, you will still need thousands of views in order to get a sizable amount of earnings each month. That’s the reason why you should not expect to be paid a lot within the first few weeks, unless you’re incredibly lucky.
It is also the reason that when you write for Medium, it should be out of passion, and not to make money. Remember, you have to write articles for not just months, but also for many years to come. So when you write on Medium, you’re doing it to hone your skills and learning the whole experience of creating publications online for all people to see.
This article is not intended to discourage you by knowing this hard truth. Medium is still a good starting point when it comes to head starting your writing career, for it certainly has its perks when it comes to monetisation and exposure. You just need to be realistic.
I’m always careful when it comes to writing a lot of articles on Medium. Though it pays to read a lot of articles on Medium, as not only you can learn others’ experiences on the service, but you can also learn which trends work on its current market.
For as long as you can do that, you will have a lot of experience under your belt and know how to make the best first steps to gain a matter of exposure on medium.