Six Technical Advice & Lessons for Writing on Medium
Read this before you publish your next story.
I guess I figured out how things work on Medium. And in this story, I want to share six technical lessons & advice hoping you find them useful.
When I joined Medium, I didn’t think of making money from writing for two reasons. (i) I cannot sit there for long hours to come up with brand new ideas, and (ii) those ideas must be accepted by my zero audience. Mathematically, it was like dividing zero by zero. So I was like, no thanks.
At first, I used this platform to share my experience with quitting smoking. Then I super liked the fact that I can publish an article with just one click, no editors, no bullshit. It is very hard for us in academia to publish an article, so this website was fun.
Well, my words come from the statistician guy inside of me who believes numbers explain things most of the time (%95 of the time at their best). Because this article is not for the readers, this one is for my fellow writers who might be looking for extra income, just like me ;)
The First Attempt: Always start with things you do not know:
I wrote my first article about a completely new topic: Climate Change, I wanted to learn more about it. Believe me, I had near-zero knowledge about the environment compared to what I know now, but I was always interested to know more about the linkage between humans, the animal kingdom, and the ecosystem. And guess what?
My first article about climate change got curated in ‘Environment’, and six months later, I am a top writer in ‘Climate Change’.
If you focus on other things than your writing quality, you will lose your balance. Always remember to balance every aspect of your writing process.
Why you should write anyway?
I wrote another article and another. Now I have ten published articles, and a couple more ongoing. I can tell you if you write only for money, there is a %95 chance you are truly and utterly losing your time. The only good thing is that you are absolutely getting good knowledge out of it.
After I joined the partner program, I became like the ones who write for money. I did not like that so I decided to pull myself together and return to the first reason for writing. I write to express & educate.
And here are the six insights you should consider:
1- Your profit is similar to the way big supermarkets make money: a few cents profits per item and hundreds of buyers.
Have you wondered how big-chined supermarkets make profits? They rely on a large number of costumers who buy a large number of items. Multiply those large numbers you get a lot of profits. Same for medium, you should write a lot of stories and receive a lot of readers to make a lot of profits.
2- Writing a lot of stories is not always a good idea unless you write in cooperation with other writers.
Over-writing for Medium might generate low-quality content, and this is the only thing that you wish not to happen. I experienced that while I was trying to publish as much as +3 stories per week. Well, it might work if you have a team of editors, I assume you do not.
3- How to optimize numbers 1&2?
Thanks for asking :D There are different ways to consider this issue. You should write and save them in your drafts. Then you pick the ones you like the most and edit the ones that you find good for publishing. Maybe you have a better way, please share it with us in the comments.
4- Writing for publications is a great way to get more readers and thus potentially more money, but you should consider building your own audience, too.
5- Following random people will not result in more views, you have to connect with like-minded people who will actually read what you write.
It feels satisfying to see a three-digit number of followers, but that will not affect your earnings. It is like the dude on FB who has more than a thousand friends but their posts get like 5 likes. I am like, dude wtf?
While reviewing this article I wanted to add the sixth advice. A great one for smart writers only.
6- Did you know that Medium was initiated to extend Twitter’s 140 characters?
Think of Medium as you think of Twitter. Your tweet should be worth it so people get interested in knowing more about the thing you are talking about. If your tweet goes down the list with few reads, then leave it and focus on things that matter, sometimes magic brings it back with lots of reads.
Finally, about the %5 chance of heading the right way:
Have you heard about ‘Normal Distribution’ in probability theory? It says that the chance of being very successful is as low as %5. The explanation is here and here. In words, some writers are so popular and others get near-zero reads. So if you believe in this theory like me, you should know that making a full income out of Medium is very unlikely to happen, but it does happen. You should wait for my next article, I’ll talk more about it.
I doubt that most writers will not make any money and they will eventually leave this platform. Not because they’re bad writers, but Medium is not for anyone who just knows how to write. You also have to have another skill: How to make people enjoying reading your content?
But will you make money? What you can do is to try hard and invest in your writing and marketing skills.
Good luck!
