Making money with Medium as a mere mortal (Part 2/4): My 7 steps for more readers
You can find part one here where I show you the statistics on my very first story and the thoughts that led to this Medium story.
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 very 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 second part of the series, I will describe how I defined the steps to increase the number of my readers.
How I defined my 7 steps for more readers
While I was brainstorming the possible steps to improve the performance, I had the main overall goal to improve the value for the reader as the first lever to attract more readers.
Additionally, I had the goal to try boosting the monetization of the story. Since I was already number one on Google for the relevant keywords I established one key assumption:
The traffic I get from Google will not grow forever on this topic. I assume that the visitors from Google basically are a good representation for the audience having the following characteristics: Being interested in using a USB RFID reader with a Raspberry Pi and having troubles getting the two running along.
Apart from that, it is an audience that is okay with reading tutorials. If this audience is not growing due to some other external reason (which I guess is not very likely), the traffic will also not increase.
From that assumption, I derived three conclusions:
- To reach all members of my core group of readers, I should offer the content in different types of media and on different platforms.
- To extend my group of readers, I have to adapt my content or create complementary content to reach people with slighty different but connected interests.
- Since my content covers only the interest of a small niche I should try to increase the conversion.
With my assumption (core target audience will not grow) and the three conclusions described above I had built my framework to reach my two goals (improve the value for the reader, increase monetization). The following steps where what I finally identified as promising.
My 7 steps to attract more readers and increase monetization
First you get a quick overview on the steps before I explain them in more detail below:
1. Improve copy
2. Record a video tutorial
3. Share the code on GitHub
4. Write a story making use of Raspberry Pi + RFID reader
5. Add an attracting visual
6. Recreate affiliate links
7. Place more affiliate links in the story
1. Improve copy
To reach my first goal to improve the value for the readers, I will work on the story itself in these two fields:
- Firstly, I want to check if there are any unclear instructions and find clearer explanations. For that, I can also use the comments of readers asking questions.
- Secondly, I will improve the style and language of the article since I am not a native speaker. I expect that this improvement will also increase the credibility and readability of the content which may also have a positive effect on the conversion.
2. Record a video tutorial
Regarding tutorials, I am not even sure which medium is more relevant: text or video. Nevertheless, Google shows video results even before text results, so I assume that some of my potential readers don’t make it until my text-based tutorial.
If I could manage to rank as good with a video tutorial as with my story, I am sure that this will have a positive outcome on my number of readers.
But also on my other main goal, which is to improve the value for the audience, a video would be beneficial: In the video they would be able to see each step which would it make easier for them to build the implementation themselves.
3. Sharing code on GitHub
That one is quite straight forward: In terms of an added value for the reader it would be good providing the code of the Node-RED flow trough GitHub.
This would also enable for common development of the idea and engagement on this project which could finally lead to more visitors on the original story.
4. Write a story making use of Raspberry Pi + RFID reader
As I mentioned in part I of my series, I assume that most of my readers already own both devices, which is bad for my conversion. The idea behind this action is therefore to write a tutorial on a specific use case / project, that is making use of a Raspberry PI and an a USB RFID reader.
With that I may attract people with the outcome or the use case. Among them wanting to create this project on their own, there maybe readers that are not having a Raspberry Pi so far.
Additionally there is the potential to include another devices or products. On the side of the added value for the reader there is the added inspiration on how to use the setup for different projects.
5. Add an attracting visual
I recently learned about on how to include Gifs as the header image of a story. That could also be applied on the my tutorial-story. I was thinking about a little gif showing the running solution. This would add the value that the readers gets a more vivid idea on how the solution would look like.
Also, moving image content is just one of the hotter things in the internet so it yields opportunity to differentiate from other stories and to better engage the readers.
6. Recreate affiliate links
Being a newbie to amazon affiliates, I made a big mistake that I was not aware of for six long months. I could imagine that this was one of the major reasons that conversion stayed low most of the time.
I could have avoided this mistake with reading books like Amazon Affiliate: Make Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program (affiliate link) by Armann Kholie earlier, but sometimes making your own learnings is more lasts longer.
The mistake I made is, that I had a german amazon PartnerNet account and therefore created affiliate links pointing to the german amazon platform. Since my story is in English, most of my readers ended up on the wrong landing page with products that would probably not even be shipped to e.g. the US.
Having learned from that now, I will recreate the affiliate links by creating a PartnerNet account for amazon.com, selecting products being shipped to the US and exchanging the existing links.
I assume that this will for sure have a positive impact on my conversion, but it will also help readers willing to make project getting their required products faster and in a more convenient way.
7. Place more affiliate links in the story
In the first version of my story, I am having the affiliate links only at one place in the article. In order to improve the conversion I should include the links at more places in the article for being able to convert readers at different stages in the story.
I expect that this will at least lead to more clicks on the product links and eventually to more sales on Amazon.
What comes next
After setting up these 7 tactics for more readers, I will implement them step by step in my original story. There are some steps that will be easy and quick and other steps that would need a lot of effort. The video tutorial is definitely more on the time-consuming side. But doing it will be again an interesting excercise since I never have published video content at youtube.
In the third part of the series, I will have a consistently updated workshop report on how I realized the steps.
After having presented my seven steps, I am interested in your opinion! Which of the steps do you think will have the biggest impact? Is there another action that I should do to increase my numbers of readers?
If you have not read the first part of the series, you can find it here.
