3 Ways to Earn Money With the New Medium Partner System
Did you lose money due to the new Medium remuneration scheme? These (ironic but true) tips will improve your earnings.
1 Improve the read-through rate
The most critical factor in the new remuneration scheme is the read-through rate for which the definition was changed. An article does not count as a read-through when somebody scrolled through the whole article but when the reader stays on the page for 30 seconds. If your read-through rate is low, you do click-baiting or low-quality content. To improve your quality I have some advice.
Do something catchy in the beginning
Use a crazy picture. In the best case something that moves. Even if the people do not like your content, they will be at least confused enough to stick with it for 30 seconds.
Do not use links
If you link to another article, e.g. to the article in which the new remuneration scheme originally is announced, you risk that people click on it. The problem is that if they do this in the first 30 seconds and the person does not return or does this on the app they will destroy your read-through rate. Therefore, do not use links at all!
(Bonus tip) Shorten articles
Because a read-through counts after the first 30 seconds, you should not write longer than that. For real, who wants to read a longer article in the time of TikTok? I advise writing articles with at most 2 minutes of reading time. If you have a catchy moving image in the beginning the text can be shorter.
2 Write only about topics accessible to everyone
If you want to earn money, you want to get boosted. Medium does not really want to boost niche articles. If you write about programming with Python but nobody from the curators knows something about programming or Python, your article can be perfect but it will not be boosted. The same applies to other more niche topics. Therefore choose a topic like personal growth that every person can relate to. This increases your chances of getting boosted and thus earning money.
A nice side effect is that if you write short articles about topics accessible to everyone you can also get more clicks because of the broader audience.
3 Improve engagement
Force all your family members, friends, coworkers, and people in the subway to engage with your articles. This means at least a clap, a read (30 seconds), a comment, a follow, and a highlight.
Conclusion
If you want to read my unironic opinion about the new Medium Partner Program, check out my article: The New Medium Partner Program is Bad for Quality Writing! (2023).
