My goal with Blogging Guide is to help as many writers succeed in achieving financial success through writing online. What are some questions you have? What are the biggest obstacles standing between you and success? What writing platforms are you currently experimenting with?
Hi Casey. Do you have any recommendations on supplementing Medium Partner Program with Substack paid subscription revenue? Any practices on growing both audiences, cross-posting, subscription pricing, etc. would be very helpful. Thank you.
This is a really good question, and something I am figuring out myself.
I don't have any conclusive answers since I'm still implementing/testing using both (and I do not know of many writers who successfully written on both platforms concurrently and documented the process).
But a few of the strategies/thoughts I've had:
✏ I think that it will be tough to maintain both successfully, if you plan on posting unique content on both (for many writers this would mean 8-14 unique posts per week).
Ultimately, most authors who are already on Medium and making any money will stay.
For new writers, the choice may be less clear.
Substack is an amazing platform, and (imo) offers writers a better value proposition, if you are not trying to appeal to large groups of people.
That said, for most writers, it will take a while to create enough free content and market their Substack newsletter, let alone charge for it.
Plus writers are typically terrible at marketing their work (or hate doing it).
So some of the writers with a bit more financial flexibility or free time might try this, and I think a fair amount of them will be successful.
✏ I generally think that if you are going to be cross promoting between Medium and Substack readers, you need to be conscious of your subscription price.
Even though this is a false equivalency, many Medium readers have already been sold on the idea that they are getting a comprehensive range of unique ideas for $5 per month/$50 per year.
The minimum (excluding promotions) that you can charge on Substack is $5 per month.
So for many readers, they are going to balk at paying more for a new subscription to a single newsletter than their entire Medium subscription.
My approach has been to keep the subscription price at the minimum (at least initially) and to offer immediate value to readers (in the form of access to free downloads of various digital products that I have created for writers).
However, there are a few Medium writers charging way more than that on Substack. And they do have paying subscribers (how many? I'm not sure).
Regardless, this seems borderline usurious to make $1,000s on Medium, charge $25 per month for access to their newsletter covering more or less the same content, and trying further upsell them on pricey courses. This is how many high earner make a lot of money online, but I want people to walk away from my content feeling good. I'd rather use the scalability of a newsletter to keep the price down for readers.
I have a Substack post coming up that will discuss this more in detail, but I think that providing clear value to discerning readers, is the only way to make the use of both platforms work (unless you are writing about two entirely separate topics, which isn't a bad idea itself).
✏ I think for most writers, one of the platforms will ultimately become their lead generation content/syndication tool and the other will become the platform that they monetize their work through. Since Substack allows writers to control their pricing, and Medium already functions for many as a content syndication tool, I think there is a decent chance Substack will win over many of these writers.
Many Medium writers are unhappy seeing their earnings fluctuate or go down in recent months. If Substack's marketing team is smart, they would capitalize on this. Medium used to allow publications to charge for access to content but then they reneged on their deal and pissed a lot of writers off. They could try to pivot back but they have definitely burned some bridges.
Thanks Casey! Really appreciate your detailed answer. So far my experience on Medium has been rather disappointing in terms of earnings. I started less two weeks ago. Yes, I know it's a very short time, but I've already spent almost a year on Medium building a publication under a different account, so I know the system. I've been posting almost daily and getting decent read rates (60-70%), 2.5K claps, hundreds of reads, dozens of responses, etc. Had my stories published in a couple of pubs including a big one. And all of that resulted so far in whopping $14, which makes me question the whole value prop of Medium for writers at this point. According to Medium stats, paying subscribers have spent hours reading my content. I have spent hours creating it. It's a high-quality content (I'm saying this after spending years in the publishing space). And yet I could have earned more by flipping burgers for half a day McDonald's. I'll keep trying but overall, but I'm getting more skeptical by the day.
So what I'm trying to figure out with Substack is how to leverage the same content for building a paying audience that would supplement Medium (or maybe the other way around). I agree it's unlikely that my Medium readers will be subscribing to my Substack precisely for the reason you mentioned -- $5 price tag for all Medium content. I'm trying to use Substack as a notification mechanism for my Medium readers and (in some way which I'm yet ot figure out) to use this content to start growing Substack audience from non-Medium readers. If you have any ideas on that last part please let me know. Thanks again for all the time and effort you put into helping others.
The publication itself has been doing great, content-wise. Great writers, engaged audience. The monetization part, however, has been very challenging since Medium provides zero monetization options for publishers (a missed opportunity from my perspective, but it's their business to run). As of now, we use Mailchimp, but now looking at Substack as an alternative. It's tempting, but its feature set is quite limited at the moment.
I too use Substack and mailchimp and agree it seems like a missed opportunity on Medium’s part. The publications do allow you to send letters which is useful but not nearly where it should be.
Thank you. This is very helpful. To be honest, I have wanted to use a Substack newsletter primarily as a way to share my Medium content for free via a centralized repository of the friend link. Almost all of my content related to education (my best performing content) comes from external traffic that I drive there (well over 90% every time) anyways. But as my stories get shared, people share the regular link and I worry about people hitting the paywall. Of course, I'm happy if people join Medium because they see value in it. But I also want people to be able to read my stuff for free while also earning money for the Medium members who do read my stories. Starting a Substack newsletter is also a way to make it possible for readers who want to support my work financially to do so. I don't ever want my content to be inaccessible, but I DO want people to be able to donate according to their means and desires. I also want people who read and are interested to be able to follow me directly and know that they will get notified when I've written something new - as opposed to the more random process of Medium + sharing on social media.
But now that I've actually started, I'm struggling with how best to accomplish this. Thus far, I've written a short intro/synopsis of my Medium pieces and then directed them to finish reading on Medium via a custom button containing the friend link. But this feels clunky and multi-step. I am also considering using the newsletter as a true newsletter function - round-ups, synthesis and analysis of information + community building features. I am ambivalent about whether to post links to stories on Medium as part of these roundups (where they might get lost) or as separate posts.
Hi Casey! Thanks for your love for your community.
First of all, I'm a pretty positive dude. So I see most obstacles as opportunities to do cool work. Anyway...
For InspireFirst.com, my biggest obstacle is something I'm chipping away at slowly but surely and that's increasing our publishing frequency from 1x per week to 3x per week. What's helping here is recruiting more writers. If we can put out more quality content, then we will increase our monthly sessions and ad revenue.
On the agency side at Nao Media, not being able to do in-person networking for sales prospecting has been a big challenge since the pandemic reached the States.
I'm experimenting with Medium right now as a syndication spot for my other blogs. I'm also about a month into sending a weekly email to our email list on ConvertKit.
This brings me to my question: do you think that growing a Quora Space is a good way to drive traffic to a blog or Medium publication?
But those points were framed from the perspective of a reader making a choice between exclusively using either platform.
You have the better strategy, by creating your own blog/website, syndicating content on Medium, and (potentially) using Quora as a source of new traffic.
Does it need to be a Quora Space, as opposed to strategically posting and promoting your content in response to Quora questions? No, definitely not.
But I have seen a lot of content marketers and writers have success with a Quora Space. So whether its a Quora Space or a standard post, I think it is a great idea.
BTW, love your website! Definitely one of the better designed ones I have seen, recently. And I agree on recruiting more writers. If you are pursuing the route of your own self hosted site, managing and finding new writers is essential/a good strategy.
If you are looking for writers/collaborators, feel free to reach out: (my firstnamelastname) @ gmail dot com
Thanks, Casey! I'll check out the Quora piece and settle on a consistent Quora strategy. Your compliment means a lot to me. I'd love to collaborate with you for our self-hosted site, our new Medium publication, or anything else. I will email you now.
Morning Casey. You are wonderful, thank you. I've been writing on Medium close on three years. I follow their guidelines, I ensure my stories are as perfect as Grammarly and Hemingway will allow without altering my voice. I write short as I tend to read short, thus assuming there are others out there like me. My swim lane is faith, life, a little humor. Yet I make a dismal amount of $$. What can I do/change? I'm still learning Substack. Thanks again.
Hey Ida! Your articles are great! Are they being curated by Medium? You have done a really good job at submitting them (and getting published) to a wide range of publications.
1. You write in several categories which (I believe) are generally not as lucrative and others. That doesn't mean you shouldn't write, but it is harder to make money writing in humor, poetry, faith.
2. Have you considered starting your own publication? There may be other writers in the same boat. If readers cannot find your work, it will be hard to make any money. A publication encourages all the members/editors to share and promote it.
3. There is nothing wrong with writing shorter 3-4 minutes stories, but based on the payment structure, you will likely have to write more of these to keep pace with writers of longer articles. You may also need to publish more frequently.
Medium can definitely be frustrating, however, I would keep in mind that most non coronavirus content is suffering. There are also many writers new to the platform who are probably going to leave once they return to work.
Thanks! My own pub isn't a proposition. My website is being revamped right now. Work ahead. Writing more is easier. I just spend too much time getting it"publish" ready aka editing! I can't write about things I have no "feel" for and refuse to hang too much personal self of a certain variety out there. I know that is what "sells." Is there anywhere one can check which categories are the most lucrative? Is Life one of them? That's what my website is about. You are still the best. Thank you! Never had so much help before.
Hi Casey, thanks for this. What's the best way to promote a Medium article please so it gets lots of traffic? Also what's the best way to grow my following on Medium?
As for growing your following, there are two main schools of thought.
1. Create lots of content that you are passionate about (without writing for s specific audience). The upside of this is that you can experiment with writing about different topics and based on the traffic you receive, you can let the readers essentially pick which topics they enjoy the most.
2. The other strategy is to pick a niche, become recognized in that topic, and solicit feedback from readers so that you better understand who they are and why they read your content.
A few more tips on increasing your Medium followers:
I'm only starting and want to make writing a solid side-hustle. Currently, I only write on Medium. I guess my biggest obstacles have been to find the grit of writing good articles as often as possible AND posting on all of my Facebook groups about it because otherwise nothing really happens. How long will that last? I'm at 200+ followers and I still have to post everywhere otherwise people don't really see my stuff organically. Second, and this is more a question, do I really need a newsletter? Everyone seems to have one these days and I'm not a huge fan of emails (like, for example in my case I want to receive as few emails as possible and kinda just the important ones). Is it really necessary to drive enough traffic to your Medium profile through a Newsletter? Or it is easier but you can still get enough views and reads without a Newsletter? Hope you see what I mean. I think those are al my main questions and obstacles.
Thank you for taking the time to hear us out and help us! Appreciate it!
They are an effective way to drive traffic, but many authors become dependent upon this. Even though posting on Facebook groups seems efficient (and relatively speaking it is), if it is cutting into the time you need to be spending creating new and better content, it may be worth taking a break or reducing the time spent on this.
Yes, there may be a short term drop in earnings, because these groups are essentially low hanging fruit (everyone is a paying member, making their activity more lucrative than the average reader elsewhere online).
But taking a long term approach (increasing quality content, attracting followers outside of these groups) is probably the smart move. After all, FB groups are great but they do not offer a scalable solution to increasing earnings or followers.
This leads to your second question...
You don't NEED a newsletter. But it is very useful.
Medium is constantly changing their algorithm, and to ensure that all your followers/readers are getting your content, email marketing systems (like Mailchimp) make this process much easier.
The main benefits of an email marketing system are:
1. Automation-you can set up an email sequence that promotes your best articles to new subscribers (just one example)
2. Scalable-as your followers grow, regardless how many you have the strategy more or less remains the same. You may need to pay more, but at that point it's a pretty straight forward cost-benefit analysis.
3. Insurance-You don't want to spend all your time and energy building an audience on Medium (or any single platform) because there is always the risk that Medium will fail, your account will erroneously be suspended, or there will be some change in the algorithm that decimates your earnings.
Moreover, if you don't have the contact information of your readers, it is much harder to form a personal connection.
This is part of why I suggest writers consider Substack.
Substack automatically functions as an email marketing system. You write a blog post, you check a box, and when you click publish, it will be live online AND sent to your email list. All of this is free too (Mailchiimp and other similar platforms are not cheap).
That said, Substack is not the perfect lead generation system. It works best if you are utilizing the platform as intended.
Also, 200 followers on Medium is good, but not enough to expect to see huge earnings or self-susaining follower growth.
In my experience, it seems to be between 1,000-2,000 followers that most writers gain more traction.
But it does depend on the quality of the follower you are attracting.
Creating better content (and more it) is almost always the way to go about attracting high quality followers.
The other way (which is more time intensive) is to focus your marketing efforts outside the FB Groups.
An example would be to reach out the niche websites and do a guest post or interview.
Most people end up coming back to posting frequently on the FB groups because they fail to gain traction through super high quality content or learning how to market their articles (in more complex/creative ways than FB groups).
You can still keep the FB groups in your rotation, but don't forget to look for other ways to get exposure/backlinks to your content.
Keep up the good work! It takes time, but it generally works out if you pursue these strategies long enough.
An irresistible offer, Casey. Here's my question. I will be publishing my existing Medium articles on a new website I am launching. How do I prevent Google from getting confused about the source URL? Or is that an issue at all? I want people directed to my site rather than Medium.
I've had this issue myself. You need to set the correct canonical link for your Medium articles, so that Google recognizes your blog as a single source of that content is the ultimate authority.
This process is annoying if you have a lot of articles, but it is fairly straightforward. You basically just need to copy the URL of the blog post and paste it in Medium's canonical link settings function.
If you were importing to Medium from your blog, Medium would automatically assign the correct canonical link. But since you are taking articles from Medium and pasting them in your blog, you need to manually set the canonical link in each Medium article.
You will definitely want to do this for all articles you want indexed properly.
If not, the version on Medium will be recognized as the source article, and it will always appear in lieu of the version on your blog.
I am a new writer who has a few things published on a couple of websites. So Farr its been no charge but I would like to know when it's appropriate to request money for your work. I also am wondering if you don't get paid for your work, it is appropriate to retain rights to your own work and have the right to publish the same work on multiple sites?
For your first question, are you referring to Medium or asking about being paid from other websites in general?
For the second question, it is between you and the publisher. But, generally speaking, if you are not being paid, I would not sign over rights to your work.
It's also worth noting that even on large platforms like Medium, you still retain full control/rights to any work you publish.
I have nearly 100 posts on Medium. Some older ones have few views. Does it make sense to delete them and republish? What are scenarios when it wouldn't make sense?
"We do not allow posting duplicate content, whether from a single account or across multiple accounts, either publicly or as an unlisted story. This includes the following:
Deleting a post and republishing it without substantive changes and improvements"
Several top Medium authors have been warned about this so I would be careful about deleting and republishing content.
I would instead focus on creating backlinks between your network of articles to drive new organic traffic (linking older articles to newer, better performing ones), or figuring out a way to efficiently promote the older articles.
I utilize Signal to retweet articles, and I have had several old articles see a boost in views months/years later due to this renewed exposure:
Answer: This is very hard to do given Medium's stance on reposting similar or duplicative content. Obviously you can change the title of any article, but without a proper tool to rapidly A/B test the titles I don't know how you would determine what works. This is especially tough to measure given Medium's heavy algorithmic decay. Unfortunately, I do not know of a tool, for Medium that does this.
Question:
Any case studies and learnings from taking Medium articles and creating a boom?
Answer:
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but I have taken an article that initially saw very little traffic, posted a link to it on LinkedIn, and saw it jump to tens of thousands of views:
And any useful online tools that allow for suggested edits outside of GDocs.
Answer:
I do not use any special tools for suggested or batch edits, but if someone else does, please feel free to respond to this comment. I typically write in the Medium editor, on a large split screen, and sometimes utilize multiple monitors. If I am collaborating, I usually use Google Docs and keep that open on a separate screen.
Super helpful and comprehensive. The "boom" should have read "book" (my bad). I'm speaking with Notion to try and convince them to build suggested edits, if they did it would be ideal!
Thanks for the response and keep up the awesome work.
Hi Casey! I cannot get over the amount of incredible content you've put out to help Medium writers, thank you! I'm new to Medium, and submitted an article to several of the Medium publications for their consideration. One just responded and added me as a writer, but said they don't post publish stories that are behind medium pay wall at this time.
Why would that be? And what do I do? I'd like to publish the story where it can be considered for curation with the metered paywall, but I suppose if I publish it with this particular Medium publication I'm out of luck? Is there any way to still be considered for metered curation if I publish it there? I'm stumped -- can't decide if I take advantage of being curated in this publication for free, or hold out and hope for curation elsewhere?
That is very odd. What publication is it? I only ask because there is really no reason for them to follow such a policy.
Only the writer can decide if their story should be made eligible under the MPP.
So if you are already an approved writer, you could technically submit your story enabled for monetization but the editor (it sounds like) will likely just choose not to publish it.
Also worth noting, being "curated" is not the same thing as being "published" in a publication.
Being curated means that your article was selected by Medium's curators. This can occur even if you do not submit your article to a publication. Being published just means that a publication editor approves your story. It does not confer curation.
Honestly, I would either just publish it in another publication, or if you can't find one, just publish it under your own account. Your article will still be eligible for curation.
And if a publication only accepts non MPP articles, the exposure they can potentially offer you is almost certainly not very high. You can check to see how many followers the publication has.
No you do not need to post every single day. But if you are trying to build an audience as a new writer, 2-3 times per week is a good threshold. 4-5 would be ideal.
Here is a post I did looking at the post frequency of trip writers:
It is hard to guarantee that any article will rank #1 for any keyword, whether it’s through Medium or another platform. I would check out this article on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as I think that is what you are really getting at:
It used to be true, but not anymore. Medium switched to reading time based compensation model last year. Claps somewhat help a story to be seen by more readers, but that's about it.
Hi Casey, I’ve been using an Upscribe embed for email capture. However, I just found this article from 2018 that says it’s not permitted by medium: https://link.medium.com/1UxIQIQX25
Have you experimented between link out and embed CTAs to see if Medium penalises the latter?
I created Active Publications which is a collection of publications that are active, have accepted multiple writers, and have a clear submission requirements page: https://medium.com/active-publications
Hi Casey. Do you have any recommendations on supplementing Medium Partner Program with Substack paid subscription revenue? Any practices on growing both audiences, cross-posting, subscription pricing, etc. would be very helpful. Thank you.
This is a really good question, and something I am figuring out myself.
I don't have any conclusive answers since I'm still implementing/testing using both (and I do not know of many writers who successfully written on both platforms concurrently and documented the process).
But a few of the strategies/thoughts I've had:
✏ I think that it will be tough to maintain both successfully, if you plan on posting unique content on both (for many writers this would mean 8-14 unique posts per week).
Ultimately, most authors who are already on Medium and making any money will stay.
For new writers, the choice may be less clear.
Substack is an amazing platform, and (imo) offers writers a better value proposition, if you are not trying to appeal to large groups of people.
That said, for most writers, it will take a while to create enough free content and market their Substack newsletter, let alone charge for it.
Plus writers are typically terrible at marketing their work (or hate doing it).
So some of the writers with a bit more financial flexibility or free time might try this, and I think a fair amount of them will be successful.
✏ I generally think that if you are going to be cross promoting between Medium and Substack readers, you need to be conscious of your subscription price.
Even though this is a false equivalency, many Medium readers have already been sold on the idea that they are getting a comprehensive range of unique ideas for $5 per month/$50 per year.
The minimum (excluding promotions) that you can charge on Substack is $5 per month.
So for many readers, they are going to balk at paying more for a new subscription to a single newsletter than their entire Medium subscription.
My approach has been to keep the subscription price at the minimum (at least initially) and to offer immediate value to readers (in the form of access to free downloads of various digital products that I have created for writers).
However, there are a few Medium writers charging way more than that on Substack. And they do have paying subscribers (how many? I'm not sure).
Regardless, this seems borderline usurious to make $1,000s on Medium, charge $25 per month for access to their newsletter covering more or less the same content, and trying further upsell them on pricey courses. This is how many high earner make a lot of money online, but I want people to walk away from my content feeling good. I'd rather use the scalability of a newsletter to keep the price down for readers.
I have a Substack post coming up that will discuss this more in detail, but I think that providing clear value to discerning readers, is the only way to make the use of both platforms work (unless you are writing about two entirely separate topics, which isn't a bad idea itself).
✏ I think for most writers, one of the platforms will ultimately become their lead generation content/syndication tool and the other will become the platform that they monetize their work through. Since Substack allows writers to control their pricing, and Medium already functions for many as a content syndication tool, I think there is a decent chance Substack will win over many of these writers.
Many Medium writers are unhappy seeing their earnings fluctuate or go down in recent months. If Substack's marketing team is smart, they would capitalize on this. Medium used to allow publications to charge for access to content but then they reneged on their deal and pissed a lot of writers off. They could try to pivot back but they have definitely burned some bridges.
Thanks Casey! Really appreciate your detailed answer. So far my experience on Medium has been rather disappointing in terms of earnings. I started less two weeks ago. Yes, I know it's a very short time, but I've already spent almost a year on Medium building a publication under a different account, so I know the system. I've been posting almost daily and getting decent read rates (60-70%), 2.5K claps, hundreds of reads, dozens of responses, etc. Had my stories published in a couple of pubs including a big one. And all of that resulted so far in whopping $14, which makes me question the whole value prop of Medium for writers at this point. According to Medium stats, paying subscribers have spent hours reading my content. I have spent hours creating it. It's a high-quality content (I'm saying this after spending years in the publishing space). And yet I could have earned more by flipping burgers for half a day McDonald's. I'll keep trying but overall, but I'm getting more skeptical by the day.
So what I'm trying to figure out with Substack is how to leverage the same content for building a paying audience that would supplement Medium (or maybe the other way around). I agree it's unlikely that my Medium readers will be subscribing to my Substack precisely for the reason you mentioned -- $5 price tag for all Medium content. I'm trying to use Substack as a notification mechanism for my Medium readers and (in some way which I'm yet ot figure out) to use this content to start growing Substack audience from non-Medium readers. If you have any ideas on that last part please let me know. Thanks again for all the time and effort you put into helping others.
Do you currently have an email marketing system? If not, then you could use Substack for capturing leads and essentially promoting your posts.
How is your account doing that you built the publication under?
The publication itself has been doing great, content-wise. Great writers, engaged audience. The monetization part, however, has been very challenging since Medium provides zero monetization options for publishers (a missed opportunity from my perspective, but it's their business to run). As of now, we use Mailchimp, but now looking at Substack as an alternative. It's tempting, but its feature set is quite limited at the moment.
I too use Substack and mailchimp and agree it seems like a missed opportunity on Medium’s part. The publications do allow you to send letters which is useful but not nearly where it should be.
Thank you. This is very helpful. To be honest, I have wanted to use a Substack newsletter primarily as a way to share my Medium content for free via a centralized repository of the friend link. Almost all of my content related to education (my best performing content) comes from external traffic that I drive there (well over 90% every time) anyways. But as my stories get shared, people share the regular link and I worry about people hitting the paywall. Of course, I'm happy if people join Medium because they see value in it. But I also want people to be able to read my stuff for free while also earning money for the Medium members who do read my stories. Starting a Substack newsletter is also a way to make it possible for readers who want to support my work financially to do so. I don't ever want my content to be inaccessible, but I DO want people to be able to donate according to their means and desires. I also want people who read and are interested to be able to follow me directly and know that they will get notified when I've written something new - as opposed to the more random process of Medium + sharing on social media.
But now that I've actually started, I'm struggling with how best to accomplish this. Thus far, I've written a short intro/synopsis of my Medium pieces and then directed them to finish reading on Medium via a custom button containing the friend link. But this feels clunky and multi-step. I am also considering using the newsletter as a true newsletter function - round-ups, synthesis and analysis of information + community building features. I am ambivalent about whether to post links to stories on Medium as part of these roundups (where they might get lost) or as separate posts.
I would love your thoughts and experiences.
Hi Casey! Thanks for your love for your community.
First of all, I'm a pretty positive dude. So I see most obstacles as opportunities to do cool work. Anyway...
For InspireFirst.com, my biggest obstacle is something I'm chipping away at slowly but surely and that's increasing our publishing frequency from 1x per week to 3x per week. What's helping here is recruiting more writers. If we can put out more quality content, then we will increase our monthly sessions and ad revenue.
On the agency side at Nao Media, not being able to do in-person networking for sales prospecting has been a big challenge since the pandemic reached the States.
I'm experimenting with Medium right now as a syndication spot for my other blogs. I'm also about a month into sending a weekly email to our email list on ConvertKit.
This brings me to my question: do you think that growing a Quora Space is a good way to drive traffic to a blog or Medium publication?
Yes, I do!
If you've read my post on Medium vs. Quora, my answer may appear hypocritical:
https://bloggingguide.substack.com/p/medium-vs-quora
But those points were framed from the perspective of a reader making a choice between exclusively using either platform.
You have the better strategy, by creating your own blog/website, syndicating content on Medium, and (potentially) using Quora as a source of new traffic.
Does it need to be a Quora Space, as opposed to strategically posting and promoting your content in response to Quora questions? No, definitely not.
But I have seen a lot of content marketers and writers have success with a Quora Space. So whether its a Quora Space or a standard post, I think it is a great idea.
BTW, love your website! Definitely one of the better designed ones I have seen, recently. And I agree on recruiting more writers. If you are pursuing the route of your own self hosted site, managing and finding new writers is essential/a good strategy.
If you are looking for writers/collaborators, feel free to reach out: (my firstnamelastname) @ gmail dot com
Thanks, Casey! I'll check out the Quora piece and settle on a consistent Quora strategy. Your compliment means a lot to me. I'd love to collaborate with you for our self-hosted site, our new Medium publication, or anything else. I will email you now.
Morning Casey. You are wonderful, thank you. I've been writing on Medium close on three years. I follow their guidelines, I ensure my stories are as perfect as Grammarly and Hemingway will allow without altering my voice. I write short as I tend to read short, thus assuming there are others out there like me. My swim lane is faith, life, a little humor. Yet I make a dismal amount of $$. What can I do/change? I'm still learning Substack. Thanks again.
Hey Ida! Your articles are great! Are they being curated by Medium? You have done a really good job at submitting them (and getting published) to a wide range of publications.
Thanks. I needed that. I was compiling my equivalent of a Dear John letter this afternoon to withdraw from Medium. No, never been curated.
I'm sorry to hear that! A few thoughts:
1. You write in several categories which (I believe) are generally not as lucrative and others. That doesn't mean you shouldn't write, but it is harder to make money writing in humor, poetry, faith.
2. Have you considered starting your own publication? There may be other writers in the same boat. If readers cannot find your work, it will be hard to make any money. A publication encourages all the members/editors to share and promote it.
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-to-create-a-medium-publication-9c7af3dc0344
3. There is nothing wrong with writing shorter 3-4 minutes stories, but based on the payment structure, you will likely have to write more of these to keep pace with writers of longer articles. You may also need to publish more frequently.
Medium can definitely be frustrating, however, I would keep in mind that most non coronavirus content is suffering. There are also many writers new to the platform who are probably going to leave once they return to work.
Thanks! My own pub isn't a proposition. My website is being revamped right now. Work ahead. Writing more is easier. I just spend too much time getting it"publish" ready aka editing! I can't write about things I have no "feel" for and refuse to hang too much personal self of a certain variety out there. I know that is what "sells." Is there anywhere one can check which categories are the most lucrative? Is Life one of them? That's what my website is about. You are still the best. Thank you! Never had so much help before.
There is no list, just my personal observations. Writing about life could definitely work if framed correctly.
I agree this has helped me a lot!
Hi Casey, thanks for this. What's the best way to promote a Medium article please so it gets lots of traffic? Also what's the best way to grow my following on Medium?
Hi Feima! Good question. If traffic is your main goal, optimizing your article so that it indexes well and ranks highly in search engines is probably the best place to start. https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-article-search-engine-optimization-medium-seo-9249f18e8e76
As for growing your following, there are two main schools of thought.
1. Create lots of content that you are passionate about (without writing for s specific audience). The upside of this is that you can experiment with writing about different topics and based on the traffic you receive, you can let the readers essentially pick which topics they enjoy the most.
2. The other strategy is to pick a niche, become recognized in that topic, and solicit feedback from readers so that you better understand who they are and why they read your content.
A few more tips on increasing your Medium followers:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-to-increase-your-medium-followers-32924c6d896
Hello!
I'm only starting and want to make writing a solid side-hustle. Currently, I only write on Medium. I guess my biggest obstacles have been to find the grit of writing good articles as often as possible AND posting on all of my Facebook groups about it because otherwise nothing really happens. How long will that last? I'm at 200+ followers and I still have to post everywhere otherwise people don't really see my stuff organically. Second, and this is more a question, do I really need a newsletter? Everyone seems to have one these days and I'm not a huge fan of emails (like, for example in my case I want to receive as few emails as possible and kinda just the important ones). Is it really necessary to drive enough traffic to your Medium profile through a Newsletter? Or it is easier but you can still get enough views and reads without a Newsletter? Hope you see what I mean. I think those are al my main questions and obstacles.
Thank you for taking the time to hear us out and help us! Appreciate it!
Hey Cristina!
Medium Facebook groups can be useful (obviously I see some value, since I run one).
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mediumwriting
But they can be a double edge sword.
They are an effective way to drive traffic, but many authors become dependent upon this. Even though posting on Facebook groups seems efficient (and relatively speaking it is), if it is cutting into the time you need to be spending creating new and better content, it may be worth taking a break or reducing the time spent on this.
Yes, there may be a short term drop in earnings, because these groups are essentially low hanging fruit (everyone is a paying member, making their activity more lucrative than the average reader elsewhere online).
But taking a long term approach (increasing quality content, attracting followers outside of these groups) is probably the smart move. After all, FB groups are great but they do not offer a scalable solution to increasing earnings or followers.
This leads to your second question...
You don't NEED a newsletter. But it is very useful.
Medium is constantly changing their algorithm, and to ensure that all your followers/readers are getting your content, email marketing systems (like Mailchimp) make this process much easier.
The main benefits of an email marketing system are:
1. Automation-you can set up an email sequence that promotes your best articles to new subscribers (just one example)
2. Scalable-as your followers grow, regardless how many you have the strategy more or less remains the same. You may need to pay more, but at that point it's a pretty straight forward cost-benefit analysis.
3. Insurance-You don't want to spend all your time and energy building an audience on Medium (or any single platform) because there is always the risk that Medium will fail, your account will erroneously be suspended, or there will be some change in the algorithm that decimates your earnings.
Moreover, if you don't have the contact information of your readers, it is much harder to form a personal connection.
Creating a Medium publication is one solution:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-to-create-a-medium-publication-9c7af3dc0344
Publications allow you to send "Letters" to your publication followers, which is similar to an email marketing system.
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-letters-bea7e0a56fb5
This is part of why I suggest writers consider Substack.
Substack automatically functions as an email marketing system. You write a blog post, you check a box, and when you click publish, it will be live online AND sent to your email list. All of this is free too (Mailchiimp and other similar platforms are not cheap).
That said, Substack is not the perfect lead generation system. It works best if you are utilizing the platform as intended.
Also, 200 followers on Medium is good, but not enough to expect to see huge earnings or self-susaining follower growth.
In my experience, it seems to be between 1,000-2,000 followers that most writers gain more traction.
But it does depend on the quality of the follower you are attracting.
Creating better content (and more it) is almost always the way to go about attracting high quality followers.
The other way (which is more time intensive) is to focus your marketing efforts outside the FB Groups.
An example would be to reach out the niche websites and do a guest post or interview.
Most people end up coming back to posting frequently on the FB groups because they fail to gain traction through super high quality content or learning how to market their articles (in more complex/creative ways than FB groups).
You can still keep the FB groups in your rotation, but don't forget to look for other ways to get exposure/backlinks to your content.
Keep up the good work! It takes time, but it generally works out if you pursue these strategies long enough.
Can anyone create their own publication or does it require approval from Medium?
Anyone can create a publication. The process is fairly simple too: https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-to-create-a-medium-publication-9c7af3dc0344
Anyone
An irresistible offer, Casey. Here's my question. I will be publishing my existing Medium articles on a new website I am launching. How do I prevent Google from getting confused about the source URL? Or is that an issue at all? I want people directed to my site rather than Medium.
Great question!
I've had this issue myself. You need to set the correct canonical link for your Medium articles, so that Google recognizes your blog as a single source of that content is the ultimate authority.
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/understanding-canonical-links-and-medium-article-seo-for-your-blog-or-website-25a5afe2b71c
This process is annoying if you have a lot of articles, but it is fairly straightforward. You basically just need to copy the URL of the blog post and paste it in Medium's canonical link settings function.
If you were importing to Medium from your blog, Medium would automatically assign the correct canonical link. But since you are taking articles from Medium and pasting them in your blog, you need to manually set the canonical link in each Medium article.
You will definitely want to do this for all articles you want indexed properly.
If not, the version on Medium will be recognized as the source article, and it will always appear in lieu of the version on your blog.
Wow, Casey. You have been so helpful. Thank you!
No problem Laurie! Thanks for reading!
Hi Casey,
I am a new writer who has a few things published on a couple of websites. So Farr its been no charge but I would like to know when it's appropriate to request money for your work. I also am wondering if you don't get paid for your work, it is appropriate to retain rights to your own work and have the right to publish the same work on multiple sites?
For your first question, are you referring to Medium or asking about being paid from other websites in general?
For the second question, it is between you and the publisher. But, generally speaking, if you are not being paid, I would not sign over rights to your work.
It's also worth noting that even on large platforms like Medium, you still retain full control/rights to any work you publish.
Why sir would you post on sites for free and give up your rights? I don’t understand this strategy at all...
I have nearly 100 posts on Medium. Some older ones have few views. Does it make sense to delete them and republish? What are scenarios when it wouldn't make sense?
Hey Dave,
Full questions/answers:
Question:
For example, I have nearly 100 posts on Medium. Some older ones have few views. Does it make sense to delete them and republish?
Answer:
Technically, you are not allowed to delete a story on Medium and republish it without make "significant" edits:
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039513913-No-Duplicate-Content
From Medium:
"We do not allow posting duplicate content, whether from a single account or across multiple accounts, either publicly or as an unlisted story. This includes the following:
Deleting a post and republishing it without substantive changes and improvements"
Several top Medium authors have been warned about this so I would be careful about deleting and republishing content.
I would instead focus on creating backlinks between your network of articles to drive new organic traffic (linking older articles to newer, better performing ones), or figuring out a way to efficiently promote the older articles.
I utilize Signal to retweet articles, and I have had several old articles see a boost in views months/years later due to this renewed exposure:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/signal-review-tool-that-auto-tweets-your-medium-articles-on-a-schedule-236fcff6be63
Question: How can I do AB testing on headlines?
Answer: This is very hard to do given Medium's stance on reposting similar or duplicative content. Obviously you can change the title of any article, but without a proper tool to rapidly A/B test the titles I don't know how you would determine what works. This is especially tough to measure given Medium's heavy algorithmic decay. Unfortunately, I do not know of a tool, for Medium that does this.
Question:
Any case studies and learnings from taking Medium articles and creating a boom?
Answer:
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but I have taken an article that initially saw very little traffic, posted a link to it on LinkedIn, and saw it jump to tens of thousands of views:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-sharing-a-story-on-linkedin-can-generate-45-000-views-on-medium-b0393dac044e
Question:
And any useful online tools that allow for suggested edits outside of GDocs.
Answer:
I do not use any special tools for suggested or batch edits, but if someone else does, please feel free to respond to this comment. I typically write in the Medium editor, on a large split screen, and sometimes utilize multiple monitors. If I am collaborating, I usually use Google Docs and keep that open on a separate screen.
Super helpful and comprehensive. The "boom" should have read "book" (my bad). I'm speaking with Notion to try and convince them to build suggested edits, if they did it would be ideal!
Thanks for the response and keep up the awesome work.
Hi Casey! I cannot get over the amount of incredible content you've put out to help Medium writers, thank you! I'm new to Medium, and submitted an article to several of the Medium publications for their consideration. One just responded and added me as a writer, but said they don't post publish stories that are behind medium pay wall at this time.
Why would that be? And what do I do? I'd like to publish the story where it can be considered for curation with the metered paywall, but I suppose if I publish it with this particular Medium publication I'm out of luck? Is there any way to still be considered for metered curation if I publish it there? I'm stumped -- can't decide if I take advantage of being curated in this publication for free, or hold out and hope for curation elsewhere?
Hi Tiffany!
I'm so glad you found it useful!
That is very odd. What publication is it? I only ask because there is really no reason for them to follow such a policy.
Only the writer can decide if their story should be made eligible under the MPP.
So if you are already an approved writer, you could technically submit your story enabled for monetization but the editor (it sounds like) will likely just choose not to publish it.
Also worth noting, being "curated" is not the same thing as being "published" in a publication.
Being curated means that your article was selected by Medium's curators. This can occur even if you do not submit your article to a publication. Being published just means that a publication editor approves your story. It does not confer curation.
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-to-get-your-article-distributed-by-the-medium-curators-be938442f81e
Honestly, I would either just publish it in another publication, or if you can't find one, just publish it under your own account. Your article will still be eligible for curation.
And if a publication only accepts non MPP articles, the exposure they can potentially offer you is almost certainly not very high. You can check to see how many followers the publication has.
How do I make my medium articles look cool with the special quotes, the three faint dots, and special effects?
This article contains explanations of all these formatting tips and more:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-article-formatting-guide-with-visuals-62a55abc133c
I will try...that makes already one month that I am starting and starting..but hope I will end up to be a writer:)
Same here! Just starting but determined to put in the work and create a profitable side hustle!
How much should I be posting on Medium? Is it necessary to post everyday?
No you do not need to post every single day. But if you are trying to build an audience as a new writer, 2-3 times per week is a good threshold. 4-5 would be ideal.
Here is a post I did looking at the post frequency of trip writers:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-often-do-top-earning-medium-writers-publish-stories-ddfd6cbc456a
How can I make my article be #1 in google? I am trying to use medium as this tool
It is hard to guarantee that any article will rank #1 for any keyword, whether it’s through Medium or another platform. I would check out this article on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as I think that is what you are really getting at:
https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-article-search-engine-optimization-medium-seo-9249f18e8e76
Is it true that claps impact payments to writers? Because I have received claps on articles but wanted very little...
It used to be true, but not anymore. Medium switched to reading time based compensation model last year. Claps somewhat help a story to be seen by more readers, but that's about it.
Medium currently pays writers based on Member Reading Time: https://medium.com/blogging-guide/mediums-new-method-of-calculating-earnings-965d5dc2dcff
Hi! Is it possible to use Flipboard to increase my views on Medium and to promote my Substack newsletter?
Hi Casey, I’ve been using an Upscribe embed for email capture. However, I just found this article from 2018 that says it’s not permitted by medium: https://link.medium.com/1UxIQIQX25
Have you experimented between link out and embed CTAs to see if Medium penalises the latter?
I created Active Publications which is a collection of publications that are active, have accepted multiple writers, and have a clear submission requirements page: https://medium.com/active-publications
There is even a list for Medium owned publications: https://medium.com/active-publications/medium-owned-publications-631c665662ea
These are probably the best resource you will find.