5 Thoughts On the New MPP, New Case Study and My Content Plan Moving Forward

Its a new day at Medium here is how I plan on seizing it.

1. Your Back Catalog is Golden

Of my 126 articles, I earned at least a penny from all but 35. Now no one is suggesting a penny is a lot of money, but pennies add up.

When I wrote an article that didn’t immediately pop, I was still able to consistently make more than $10 a day because of my back catalog.

Keeping that catalog alive and kicking is going to be a big part of making money in this new MPP. Not that it didn’t matter before, it seems to matter a great deal more now.

2. Niche Matters. A Lot.

In the clap system, each new article was like its own silo. If you had a built-in following or could market the single article to the right audience, you could collect your claps and move on.

The new system based on reads works best if you can develop a loyal following who regularly returns to read what you are writing.

You can’t quantify read time in the same way you could claps, and while some people will develop an audience based on their personal brands, most people will have the most success building an audience by niching down and choosing one topic or subtopic to focus on.

3. It’s a Mixed Bag Money Wise

Hanging around the Medium Facebook groups, based on the first four days of the new system, it seems that a third of the writers are losing money, a third are making money, and a third have stayed about the same.

I don’t think we’ll really know how well it checks out for most writers for another month or two. There are still bugs to be worked out, and it will be interesting to see how money fluctuates over an extended period of time.

4. Quantity is Still King

As I’ve already mentioned, you need that back catalog.

The quicker you can have a backlog of articles; new readers can access or use to discover your profile, the better.

Also, as I said out of 126 articles, I was earning money on all but 35 over the four day period. That’s roughly 70 percent of my old articles earning me money.

If I had 500 articles intead of 126, how much more money would I make over the course of a month? You need to give your readers a reason to keep coming back to your writing. If they’re not reading you, they are reading someone else, might as well keep them coming back for more.

5. Publications are a Must Now

Before they were optional, whether submitting to them or building your own. Not that they weren’t important, they were, but you could do without them.

Now, not so much.

This new system based on reads means you need to get your work in front of the most eyes possible, and publications do that. Particularly if you’re struggling with curation, getting in a publication means new eyes for your work.

On the flip side, if you’re trying to build a following, starting your own publication is an important part of that goal. You can house all your content in one place and make it look pretty to boot.

It’s where you’ll send new readers when you market your work. It’s where they will return when they look for what you’ve published for the day.

If you don’t have a publication, now is the time to start one as I think those who create and grow their own publications will be the biggest winners under the new MPP.

A New Case Study

Or a continuation of an old one.

Initially, when I started on Medium 2.5 months ago, the plan was to see if I could make 1000 in 90 days. I shifted it down by half to $500 and focused on getting to $500 a month last month. Well, we all know how that worked out and if you don’t know you can read about it here:

Now the smart thing to do is not to aim to make more money this month even though I didn’t meet my goal last month. Yet here I am, the goal is to clear the $1000 threshold in three (full) months. Basically, I’m going back to my original goal.

If I keep up my current pace of earning for a month, I’d be very close to $500, so it makes more sense to have a stretch goal for the month, and $1000 is that stretch goal.

So the same deal applies as the original case study, once a week updates on how I’m progressing based on the plan I’ve laid out.

Which brings me to the final part of this article:

My Content Plan Moving Forward

After thinking about things over the last four days, and how I think it is best to move forward and maximize the changes to the MPP, I decided to split my content up and stop writing certain types of content altogether.

I decided I’m going to wall off my content into sperate accounts.

I’m separating my writing/medium content from my sex/relationship content from my poetry, and I’m giving up on pop culture content altogether.

Even with the MPP changes, I’m still not sure if it is worth my time to post my pop culture content here, and I’m likely going bring back from the dead an old blog I had in the past for my pop culture and celebrity content.

I’m moving the sex and relationship content over to the newly created Sex With T.S. account. And I will likely do something similar with my Naughty Scribe content.

The reason I’m making the change is because it is much easier to build an audience with a highly focused niche than when I was combining the two (four) topics. I’m not really selling myself here as much as I am my content.

I can build an audience of those who want to read the sex and relationship stuff and an audience who wants to read the medium and writing stuff, but having the two together wasn’t really working.

People who come to read my writing and productivity work aren’t likely here to learn how to give a better blowjob. Separating the content means I can laser target my ideal audience and create content specific to that niche and their needs.

So moving forward, as I try to crack the $1000 mark, I’ll be posting two to three times a day on this account, one to two times a day at Sex With T.S. and once a day on the as yet created poetry account.

Moving forward, I’m going to focus on the following:

1. Building a highly targeted niche audience for each account by continuing to follow 125 people a day while engaging with and promoting other writers’ work.
2. Focus heavily on SEO. I haven’t dealt much with SEO at this point because external traffic on Medium was mostly worthless. But with the new changes, external traffic has some value, so ranking my articles high in Google is now a priority for me.
3. I’ve dusted off my social media accounts, and each publication will have its own set of social media that I will actively be using to promote my content to a wider audience and grow my brand (goodness I hate that term).

That’s pretty much it.

I was trying to get away from my blogging days when I started writing on Medium. However, with the MPP changes, I’m right back to being that blogger, social media, and all.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a world I understand and know how to navigate, and I’m ready to dive back in. My Medium vacation is over. Time to get back to work.

’Til next time.

And as always: Happy writing.

This is How I Made $135 Dollars in My First 30 Days On Medium

Only seven to nine percent of writers make at least $100 each month on Medium. I did it in my first month. Here is what I did each week to achieve my goal, hopefully, you can use my journey to $100 a month to achieve yours.

If you enjoyed this case study check out my latest case study:

How to make $100 a week on Medium.