Podcast Interview Covering Substack, Medium, and Amazon KDP

Blogging Guide featured on recent podcast

Hey everyone!

Recently I was fortunate enough to chat with Thom Hart of the Traction Growth & Income Podcast.

I’ve been an avid listener of his podcast for some time, so it was really cool to actually be featured on there myself.

If you want to learn a little more about my experience with Substack, Medium, or Amazon KDP, I highly suggest you check it out:

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Major Takeaways

The conversation with Thom was great, and I think many of you will get a lot out of it. But in case you didn’t listen to the whole episode, here are some of the key points I’d like to highlight for Blogging Guide readers:

• Medium is an effective platform for writers who want to monetize their content. That said, the main limitation of writing on Medium is the inability of writers to grow their mailing list and connect directly with their readers.

• Substack addresses many of these problems. Substack is an all-in-one CMS, email marketing system, and blog, which also allows you to directly charge subscribers for access to premium content.

• Success on Substack is not guaranteed if you are a successful Medium writer. Medium encourages writing that appeals to large groups of people, whereas Substack encourages you to write content that will be applicable to a (generally) smaller group of hardcore followers who are willing to pay for access.

• The two platforms are not mutually exclusive—in fact I would encourage writers to utilize both (assuming you produce enough unique content). They each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

• Substack’s main draw back is that it lacks the large built in audience that Medium has. Successful Substack writers must also be willing to market their content. There are a number of unique strategies that Substack writers use to increase their paying subscribers.

• Regardless of which platform you write on, you need to be passionate about whatever it is you are writing about, or you will not make it through the many rocky patches you will encounter. If you are purely looking to make money, there are many better ways than writing.

• Medium’s publication function is vastly underutilized considering that it is one of the only ways to link to external content or drive traffic away from Medium without violating their rules.

• Create products and communities that are reasonably priced. Expensive products and communities will sell to a small group of people, but it is better to try to leverage the scalability of digital publishing, and ensure that you are over-delivering content to readers, since the marginal cost of adding another subscriber to your newlsetter is typically next to nothing.

• If you want to self publish an eBook, Amazon KDP is an excellent platform to use.

• Diversification is important not only in investments, but in your strewasm of income as well. If you are relying upon once stream of income, you are putting yourself at financial risk. To learn more about diversifcation of income, check out Escaping The 9-5 or the other great Traction Growth & Income’s interviews!

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Casey