Why I’m NOT part of Medium’s Partner Program
and why I’ll make more money this way
I’m not part of the Medium Partner program for one simple reason.
See if you can guess it from looking at these stats.
Give up?
Nearly half of my audience are people not subscribed to Medium.
So if I were part of the Partnership Program and put this piece of content behind a paywall, it’s potential reach would be cut in half.
My approach is to sacrifice the short-term income form the Partner Program in order to dramatically increase the reach and exposure of my content.
If you’re a writer who’s struggling to make money doing what you love, I gottchu.
I send out a daily 500 character, 3 bullet-point email with business instructions and tips for writers.
Here is the business strategy:
The growth of an audience for a business comes down to 3 sectors.
- Exposure
- Community
- Sales
This is a concept I learned from Ryan Moran — the CEO of Capitalism.com — and you can learn about it from him here if you’d like.
Exposure
An influencer typically has a lot of exposure, but nothing else.
This is why Influencers are typically broke — because they don’t have a sales platform on the back end, nor do they have a community who trusts them. trust.
They simply have a lot of exposure.
Community
People who have a community but no exposure and no sales channel have a discord group with 4 people in it.
A very small audience with no way to grow it and no way to monetize it.
Sales
People who have a sales platform with no exposure and no community have a landing page.
No sales are being made because they have no audience to tell about their sales page.
So it sits there collecting digital-dust.
My goal
To use Medium for the exposure and community side.
And then use email to deepen the community and as the sales side.
This means, I intentionally craft posts that are designed for my avatar — around the interests, pain points, and desires of the person that I want to serve.
And I craft them in a way that increases the likelihood of them going ‘viral’ — and that means I have to put 10 times the amount of work into each post.
I’m not simply throwing up a post and moving on.
I’m writing incredibly in-depth value-driven posts in order to get the most reach out of each individual post as possible.
This increases the exposure and deepens the community (Win-Win).
Where I’m at today
I’ve gone from 35 followers to a 117 over the last 2 months.
And I’ve built an email list of 32 over the last 2 weeks.
I am at the very early stages and I can do the unscalable things.
I can do the things that foster community.
If you join my email list, you get a personal Loom video of me welcoming you to the email list (if you don’t believe me, join my list here and see for yourself).
In the email list, I deepened that community even more by sending a short 3 bullet daily newsletter around productivity for writers.
These are tips, tricks, ideas, tools that have helped me and that I find all across the internet.
This helps build trust and through consistency as well as through value.
Then eventually, once I’ve delivered A TON of value and built A TON of trust, I can make money through affiliate offers, trainings, communities, or masterminds.
Conclusion
The idea is to give a ton of value to as many people as possible.
In the short term, I could make more money by joining the partnership program, but I would cut my reach in half.
I would rather build an audience as large as possible by offering the most value I can to the most people.
Then in a year, I can offer solutions to their problems and they are much more likely to say yes because I have over delivered so much value for such a long period of time.
This is my long term strategy for building my personal brand and building a business, while using Medium for Customer Acquisition — without participating in the Medium Partnership Program.
If this interests you, not only am I consistently writing about productivity and growing your business, but I’m also documenting the journey of this business here on Medium.
Feel free to follow me here.
And if you’re interested in learning the business skills of writing, Click the link below for to join the email list.
I’ll see you inside.
PS. First 12 days of the month has been going pretty well
