3x Your Views and Money in 15 Minutes
How to use your Medium content in other places
If you’re writing solely for the Medium platform and not posting your writing in other places, you’re short changing yourself both in viewership and in actual money.
If you’re not Tim Denning, you’re probably not making thousands of dollars for every article you write on the Medium platform. That’s fine. We’ll all hopefully get there soon. But, for now, don’t let your good writing be seen by only your followers on Medium. You’ve worked hard on your writing (and if you didn’t, I’d highly suggest it), so take a few extra minutes every day to make your writing work three times as hard.
You own the things you write for the Medium platform, so you should not feel bad or guilty about posting them elsewhere after they’re published. Unless you have a specific agreement with a publication that is different than most, you have the right to use what you have created in whatever way you want. So, do it!
Here are the three things I do with my Medium stories that make me more money and get me more views outside (and inside) the platform:
Book
After I post to my blog, I’ll paste the story, if applicable, into a Word doc which I then turn into self-published books on Amazon. Because I write largely about self improvement and productivity, I can gather my stories into bundles and publish books accordingly.
I just submitted a book yesterday for review called A Little Bit Better — 52 weekly readings to make your life a little happier, healthier, and more productive. I simply chose my 52 best Medium pieces in the realm of self-improvement and productivity, reread them and changed any bits that weren’t evergreen, pasted them into a document, and then formatted to fit book requirements.
Kindle Direct Publishing makes it ridiculously easy to publish a book, create a cover, price it, and sell it. Here’s my book (don’t worry, this isn’t a self promotion — it’s not even available yet).
I get $6.10 for every paperback book priced at $18.99 that I sell on Amazon. Even if I sell one to my mom, my 5 best friends, and two of my neighbors, I’ve made more than many of my articles on Medium. And the great thing is . . . I’ve already written it.
This is simply a cut and paste situation with very minimal edits that takes about five minutes which equates to more readers and more money for the same writing. (FYI — It does take a day or so to complete book formatting after it’s all done).
Blog
I have a personal website through Wordpress and a blog that I have monetized with ads. I have chosen to place ads at the bottom of my pages only, so I don’t make a ton of money yet from viewership, but I do make a little bit. And, because I have been regularly posting a blog every day, I gain anywhere between 2 and 5 followers per day which, when I post the next blog, gets me that many more views.
After one of my Medium pieces is published by whatever publication to which I have submitted it, I cut and paste (preferably before people can highlight the heck out of it) into a post on my blog. I add 2–3 photos from Unsplash (and credit the photographers), add tags and an SEO description, and voila! New blog.
This entire process usually takes me less than five minutes and reaches a completely different audience that is outside the Medium paywall. It also helps create a landing page for my work that anyone can see, so I often refer potential clients to my blog as well.
I also post my pieces to LinkedIn as articles as well. I don’t necessarily get any extra money for this, but I have received a lot of other interesting offers to write for companies and/or be on podcasts, etc. from my presence on LinkedIn. Again, I use the same writing, but I reach a completely different audience.
Since I’ve been posting articles to LinkedIn, I’ve had the opportunity to write for companies that never would have found me otherwise, so I believe that it’s worth the five minutes it takes to cut and paste. Sometimes I alter my pieces a little bit to be more professional-sounding before I paste into LinkedIn, but overall, I usually just use the same article.
LinkedIn can be a great way to approach clients in a professional manner and it helps to have a body of work readily available to show them. And, LinkedIn doesn’t care one bit about calls to action, so if you have one at the end of your pieces, it can drive traffic back to your blog or to your Amazon author page and make you some more dough.
All in all, this cross posting takes me less than 15 minutes per day, continues to grow my readership on a regular basis, and allows my words to be read on different platforms by different people. There are other platforms like Quora and Ko-Fi which I hope to explore at a later date, but right now, if I can 3x my viewership and money, that’s a pretty great first step for me.
Click here to get the 27 things I learned while getting my MBA. (I’ll save you the $75K of tuition).
