Making money with Medium as a mere mortal (Part 1/4): Getting a taste for it
Are you the author of a Medium story where the number of readers stagnates, but you actually would like to grow your audience? I had the same problem with my first story: The monthly views grew in the beginning, but soon fluctuated around 950 per month.
At this point I became interested in how to grow this number. Like probably every other author, I wanted to spread my contributions as far as possible to reach a large audience. In this first part of the series, I will describe the number of readers and monetization of my first Medium story after six months.
I would like to add a disclaimer: I am aware of that the total numbers here are kind of peanuts compared to others (especially compared to all the people who become rich with the Internet), but still I enjoyed it to experiment and learn more on this topic. Summing up I think you could say that this is a use case for the “normal” Medium writers out there to show what you can get out of your stories if you have not written them for making money in the first place.
Before I explain the steps I will take with the goal to increase my readers in the second part of the series, I want now to give you some context on the Medium story I am talking about.
My first story on Medium
Being an enthusiastic reader of Medium, I always had in mind writing a story on my own when I was doing my side projects. When I was playing around with my Raspberry Pi and a USB RFID reader, I found it quite hard to get this simple setup running.
Being a bit frustrated after having tried multiple approaches that I have found on message boards, I succeeded quite quickly with Node-RED. I was sure that sharing my approach would be helpful to others as well, since there were already many discussions at stackoverflow and other platforms. One could say I have found a little niche.
Since I had the implementation already running, writing the article was easy and soon after I published my first Medium story!
Earning money with Medium and affiliate marketing
With writing the article, my intention was not to get some money out of it, but I had that Amazon account anyway. So I decided to experiment with affiliate marketing for the first time.
In the the tutorial, I describe a setup consists of a Raspberry Pi and a USB RFID reader. They would be a good start to include links that make sense and wouldn’t feel unnatural.
Of course there may be better products for affiliate links, and this is why: The bigger part of the readers will most likely already own a Raspberry Pi, where the USB RFID reader is quite cheep. But anyway, for a first experiment I was completely fine with that, because I just wanted to experiment a bit.
Adding affilliate links to your stories is again quite simple. You first have to join the Amazon PartnerNet and then basically search for the right products at the platform. If you have found some, you can directly create an affiliate link by just using a toolbar which gets displayed once you have joined the PartnerNet.
If you have not heard about affiliate marketing yet or would like to read some qualitative in-depth books on it, I can recommend the following two:
- Performance Partnerships: The Checkered Past, Changing Present and Exciting Future of Affiliate Marketing (affiliate link) from Robert Glazer is an entertaining read where you get a lot of background information on the topic, where the book …
- Amazon Affiliate: Make Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program (affiliate link) by Armann Kholie is providing you with practical knowledge on affiliate marketing.
Looking at the stats after 6 months
Soon after publishing the story I stopped to check the stats and basically forgot about it since it was just a little experiment.
But then at some day I received an email from the Amazon PartnerNet telling me that there were some sales. That drew my attention back to the story because I was neither expecting many readers nor any sales on it.
Readers on Medium and ranking on Google
But when I had a look on the stats again, I was pleasantly surprised: In the first six months, my story got 4400 clicks with a reading ratio of around 43% or roughly 2000 people reading my story until the end.
That was already a good result for me knowing that I most likely helped a lot of people with their side projects.
By looking more into the details of the stats I was quite surprised to find out about the following: Only 3% of my readers found me on Medium, where the majority came actually from Google.
Therefore I typed in the keywords “raspberry pi rfid reader usb” and found out that my story would rank no. 1 on Google for them.
Wow, that was great!
I guess this is a good proof that Medium is well suited for making money with affiliates since I only had to create relevant content and did not care about search engine optimization.
I did not even posted the article in places where the audince would usually be. After that experience I was curious to see how it went with the affiliate links.
Affiliate clicks and sales
After the good results on Medium and Google, the income from Amazon was quite small (9,63 € in 6 months).
Nevertheless, there was something promising about my metrics. Since the release of the story, I had 424 clicks on the affiliate links with 19 products ordered, which equals a conversion rate of 4,48% on the clicks.
Since I did not have a lot of experience with affiliate marketing, I did a quick research online and found out that this conversion rate is actually quite okay. On the other hand, I guess that the high number of ordered products in September 2018 was an outlier and I have to expect lower sales in regular months.
Also, we have to keep in mind that my conversion rate overall is more like 0,005% if we take the total clicks on my story into account.
How would you calculate the conversion rate for a story? I would be interested on your opinion so feel free to comment.
The next steps
After going through all these figures I got a taste for it and I wanted to find out if I could boost those numbers through some improvements around my story.
The next step for my was to analyze the story that I had published to find opportunities in growing the audience and monetization.
I will cover that in the second part of this series. There, I will describe the 7 steps that I finally defined to get more readers and to increase the conversion rate.
