Truth to Power — Increase Viewer Read Ratio and Earn More
I spilled the real tea about followers, earnings, reads, and views. Now it’s time to unpack and power up to earn more.
If you are here strictly to become a better writer and you don’t care about growth and earnings, then you won’t find this post interesting.
I understand. We are all on our journey.
However, if you have a follower count that doesn’t match up with your earnings or you don’t seem to be growing on this platform, buckle up because…
Well, up!
In the post, The Real Tea on Views, Reads, Earnings, and Followers, I shared with you some important truths about misconceptions some writers have about Medium and why they aren’t experiencing the growth and earnings their work deserves.
Please read it before proceeding here or most of what I’m sharing won’t make sense.
Yes, fam, we have some unpacking to do so that we can grow and earn as a community. After more research on strategies for growth and earning, I will have to share this post in parts. I don’t want this to be a 50 -minute piece. 😅
To this effect, each installment will cover:
- Ways to increase VRR (Viewer Read Ratio) — This installment.
- Improve the quality of your engagement (how do your comment make writers feel and how do your comments make your readers feel)
- Get those first 10 fans in 24 hours after you publish and start a Fandemic (what? too soon?).
- Strategies for directing on-platform traffic to your stories (you get paid from member’s reading time, not random readers)
- Ways to build a strong and balanced platform on Medium’s Social Media Platform.
For each installment, I will reshare the truth, demonstrate the power behind it, and offer strategies for growth and earnings.
Effective Strategies for Increasing VRR
I know, stats can make you feel like what you’re doing isn’t good enough, but just take it as data, not your Middle school report card…
Truth: As an actionable metric, VRR tells you a lot about why your viewers are converting or not converting to readers.
As I have shared in my Real Tea post, views are not a vanity metric. Here on Medium, we are to focus on Views to reads, the term Viewer Read Ration (here in VRR).
Here’s the breakdown.
If your percentage is less than 33% on most of your stories, then you are not writing content most of your audience finds useful, engaging, or entertaining. You need to spend some time re-evaluating:
- the nature of your content
- what your followers are reading
- the format of your content (read on formatting your content, research how high earners are formatting their posts and stories in your niche, tag, or topic).
On, the other hand, if your percentage is high for your first 10 fans, but as the algorithm sends your content to more feeds your percentage drops, then here’s what you can determine about your content:
Your immediate audience (those you interact with the most, yep the people in those little circles on your Daily Feed page and your subscribers) enjoys your content and finds value in it. However, your broader audience isn’t as interested.
And let’s be honest, your immediate audience, no matter how many followers you have on Medium, probably won’t be much larger than 300 people. And I say this because you can’t interact with much more than 300 people over 30 days unless you are a writing-reading-highlighting-clapping-responding metahuman.
The inability to tap into a broader audience is one of the #1 reasons why some authors and creators can have 10,000 followers on Medium and get less than 100 reads per post.
Therefore, the problem isn’t with your ability to engage your immediate audience, it is your broader audience, instead.
How do you reach beyond those first 300 folks over the span of 30 days? Well, if you’re like me and you started Medium without a huge social media following (in my case, I started with no following at all), what’s your power source?
Power: Reach a broader audience with more impactful, sharable stories.
You have to go broader to earn more. You can have 10,000 followers on this platform and less than 10% may have actually read 1 story from you for the entire time they’ve followed you.
Why?
Medium feeds your stories.
When you click publish your stories go out to the people you interact with the most and once you get a notification that your story “Has 10 Fans” then Medium sends your story to more followers and feeds.
Medium’s algorithm continues with each milestone 50 fans, 100 fans, tags, topics, “chosen for further distribution and so on.”
Medium has to do it this way or we would get bombarded with thousands of stories every minute. It would be chaos and mayhem.
Strategies:
- Strategically Write and Publish more
- Get Curated or “Chosen for further distribution” more often
- Make Your Posts More Relatable
- Start sharing on a Social Media Platform you enjoy.
- Write stories people want to share
1 Strategic daily writing and publishing will improve growth and earnings. Have you ever heard recent risers and high earners (those who have grown on Medium since the algorithm changes) say, “when I started taking Medium seriously” or “I treat Medium like a full-time job?”
You may think to yourself, “what the heck are they talking about?” They are talking about writing and publishing daily and sometimes 2 to 3 times a day.
“Carmellita, I don’t have that kind of time.”
I don’t always publish daily. I understand. But if I want that kind of money I would have to.
But Hey, I’m only reporting what the research shows. Top earners are posting daily or up to 2 to 3 times a day consistently to reach a broader audience daily and earn more coins (that would be money folks💰💵🤑).
The reality is, game knows game. Most of your Top Earners fell during the recent algorithm changes but those who understand the Social Media game and are willing the play it got up, dusted themselves off, flip the script, and got back in the game.
Here’s what I learned. Recent risers (those who have grown after the algorithm changes) publish daily and sometimes two or three times over 24 hours. That’s game. That’s strategic. But they also write well and with a strategy.
Will this exhaust your readers? I thought so when I tried it a few times. But after Medium began notifying creators on who added our stories to their reading list is readers, I discovered reader will your story to their reading list, and get back to you later.
And yes, each time I published daily, twice daily, or thrice daily, I gained new readers — not just followers.
Like many of you, I thought I needed to give a story a little time to breathe, but it’s a misconception. I would look at my earnings on a month when I post more (a previous month) and compare it to a month I post less (a later month).
Duh! Of course, it will look like I earned more posting less because I have more posts in the latter month than I had in the former month. If I post more in January and less in February, of course, I made more money in February. I have more stories in my back catalog.
I missed that one. Brain fart!
Most importantly, you will find, if you use your tags correctly, each story becomes its own piece on Medium.
For instance, if you write three stories about personal development use related tags on your next two stories.
- You may use five tags such as personal development, personal growth, life lessons, self-growth, life on your first post.
- In your second post, you may use self-awareness, self, inspiration, self-development, motivation.
Each is related to personal development, but your stories won’t compete with each other. Consequently, you will reach a wider audience.
As such, to reap the benefits of daily publishing, you have to pay close attention to your tags.
Questions: Do you research your tags before using them? Or do you just use tags five tags you think are related to your story? Do you check to see how the trend list is moving on your tag before using it? Do you know who the top writers are under your tag or topic?
What about the “latest” list? If that feed is moving every 30 minutes to an hour, then you need to use different tags. Relatable tags that are relevant to your story’s topic.
For example, if you are writing a poem about life and you go to the poetry tag and the life tag and it’s moving every hour on the latest list and trending list. Those feeds are hot.
That’s not good for you if you’re not a top writer under that tag or topic (heck even top writers need to reconsider). Choose a related tag such as poem, poetry on medium, life lessons, personal growth.
This gives you a chance to linger in a feed long enough for readers to discover your story. For this reason, I emphasized “strategic” daily writing and publishing.
It may seem that some stories are getting lost in the shuffle, not getting as much shine, but this is where the real breathing comes in. Continue building good content, and those stories will get their shine through your growth.
As of late, it hasn’t mattered if you are with a large publication or a smaller one. It is about the engagement happening on that publication. Choose your publications wisely.
Do your research (more about publishing with the right publications in subsequent installments).
2 Yes, curation or“chosen for further distribution” does matter. I wish writers will stop writing posts about how “Further distribution” doesn’t matter.
That very notion is the reason why so many writers don’t follow Medium’s guidelines and wonder why they aren’t getting anywhere.
Some don’t have a decent title or tagline. Don’t break up paragraphs. Yes, we all make mistakes. I make my share of them, but one big paragraph for a 1,000-word story?
It matters, y’all.
No, I’m serious. Stories that gain traction on Medium are “Chosen for further distribution.” Further distribution means more feeds. Every tag or topic on Medium is attached to a feed.
This is why I say,
“Feed Medium and Medium will Feed you.”
The more feeds you are in and the longer you are in those feed the more on-platform traffic you get to your stories.
3 Make your post more relatable. Yep, have you also noticed some top earners are telling more stories and writing fewer articles?
Some are transforming their typical listicles to relatable stories and going back to their online courses and telling their students to “be more relatable and vulnerable.”
Let me offer a piece of advice here. While game knows game, you can’t fake vulnerability. You can’t fake relatability. Readers pick up on it. Be sincere.
Nonetheless, no one can engage with content that isn’t relatable and engagement is the blood that pumps through the veins of social media.
And if you got to the party late, Medium is a social media platform. You can learn more about how to write relatable content here:
4 Start Sharing on Other Social Media Platforms you enjoy. When you are writing, reading, highlighting, clapping, and responding regularly, you don’t have time to establish a presence on every social media platform you can think of.
Accordingly, find your unique way to build a presence on the social media platforms you enjoy. My unique way has been creating what I call visual storytelling whether it is a collage or a single image.
It is designed to capture the eye and interest of a viewer on Pinterest or Twitter — my two main social media platforms right now (Full disclosure: I am slow as molasses on Pinterest but somehow I still get numerous views from the platform when I pin).
If you’re not great at design, just do a good picture quote somewhere in your post that’s sharable. You can do them for free using Canva.com and its million images or Picmonkey with images from free stock photo sites like Pexels or Pixabay. Make sharable images.
“Wait Carmellita, you know we get paid for members’ read time, not views!”
Yes, but if you want to broaden your audience, you have to find readers off-platform as well. You can accomplish this by using hashtags such as #mediumwriter #mediumcreator #joinmedium and tags related to the topic of your story.
These hashtags have brand awareness already embedded in them. Those who already have a medium membership or are considering a medium membership will recognize these tags. Readers and writers who read will also recognize you as a Medium Creator and they will read and share your stories.
For a platform like Pinterest, make an interesting picture quote as pins (please don’t use Unsplash photos they just don’t do well on Pinterest) and give a good description of your story. Create a variety of boards on topics you write about.
You may not go viral, but you will gain readers who otherwise would not have known you were writing and sharing stories on Medium.
And that brings me to…
5 Write Stories People Want to Share. People share stories that have value and excite them. If you are rushing to putting up content, then you aren’t excited about your stories and no one else will be either. Write impactful stories that excite your readers.
I’ve had other writers share my name on the platform because I published a story or a poem that moved them, made them laugh, or inspired them in some way. And I never take that lightly.
Making some type of impact is why we are here, even if the impact is laughter, humor, adventure, or sharing a memory.
To begin writing impactful and shareable stories, ask yourself, “Why am I writing on Medium?”
And about Peeping Out Other Folks’ Earnings
For those of you who read these stories to see other people’s earnings, I am sorry to disappoint you (not really😏).
Looking at someone else's earnings here on Medium will not help you grow or earn. It tells you nothing. But you can surf around look at the engagement level and you can tell how well someone is doing.
Your best bet is learning and implementing key strategies you can use to create impactful and sharable content that will lead to growth and higher earnings.
Fam, I’m not done yet! And you know I’m curious. Which strategy did you find most helpful? Your feedback helps my research and lets me know if this information is helpful to you.
Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments.
Special thanks to Sahil Patel and the Reciprocal Community for providing a great home for this series. Let’s grow and earn more, fam. We’ve done the work, might as well get paid for it.
And also thanks to all of you who have provided great feedback and helped me continue with my research on growth, earnings, and metrics here on Medium. Please follow these engaging writers and readers:
Bic Wonder, Natasha Nichole Lake, Amanda Laughtland, Rasa Zalite, Yana Bostongirl, Rui Alves 🇺🇦, Sara Burdick, Kamil, Vanessa Sanchez, Gerald Sturgill, Pene Hodge, Annelise Lords, EllenEastwood, Klara Jane Holloway, Rick Allen, Melissa D. Reyes, Mel Bee Millanes, Kurt S. Inu, Henery X, Sarah P, Patrick OConnell, Mireille, Fred: Almost Famous, Chad Miller, Gerald Washington, Eulyn Webb, Delanea D Davis, Benazir Albashir, Barbara Mac, Stephanie A. James, Erica J, Jesse Wilson, Judy Derby BSc., RGomez, Lilit A. Sargsyan, Uwem Daniels, David Perlmutter, D St James, Eko BP, Susan Wheelock, Liberty Forrest, Author, Melinda Van Fleet, Shanice Lawton, Elesha Bennett, Erica Marie, Lola Rose, Mark Kleimann, Ellen Burford, Wes Putnam, Kris Bedenian, Erin M., Janice M. Flanders, A dysfunctional daffodil., Patrick van Raalten, pockett dessert, Christina, Paul Walker, Peter White, Patricia Wright, Janet Meisel, Meïssa D.
