Analyze Your Referred Memberships With This Maths Formula

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Referred memberships are a significant boost for Medium writers.

Many writers adapt their writing strategy to focus on referred memberships: They prioritize quantity and write shorter posts.

This strategy supposedly increases your total reach, leading to more external views. Having more external views increases the probability of converting readers to members. Also, these writers promote heavily their membership link.

Personally, I don’t use this strategy. I think overadvertising can hurt your growth. Besides, I just hit 46 referred memberships without ever posting my referral link.

However, chasing referred memberships is tricky: Each writer gains and loses referred members at different speeds. Why is that?

Let’s dive in.

On Referred Memberships

Dear writers, if you don’t remember or you are not aware of how referred memberships work, read the following articles:

• https://blog.medium.com/evolving-the-partner-program-2613708f9f3c
• https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405927192215-About-referred-memberships

There are two notable things you should know about referred memberships earnings:

1. They are recurring.
2. But not always. Sometimes you lose members. And most importantly, the main Dashboard does not show this information (it only shows the cumulative sum). To access the Dashboard, go to your Medium Partner Program and select the Download CSV option.

That file contains much more information, including how many members you lose each month. We will use that file for our subsequent analysis.

Types of Memberships

When I started gaining referred memberships, I was baffled by one thing: Why does each membership gains you a different amount of money?

Actually, there are two types of memberships. Monthly and Annual. Each type awards you a different amount:

Thus, when you acquire an annual referred membership, you gain a slightly lower amount. On the plus size, it is guaranteed that you will continue to get earnings from that member for at least 12 months!

Analyze your memberships

Figuring the type of memberships you earn is crucial.

One way to do that is by being on the lookout for every new membership (and documenting everything).

There is an easier way to do that, with the help of Algebra. But don’t get intimidated by that! I will show you an online tool that will make the calculations for you!

Let’s use my earnings to calculate an example. The goal is to calculate the following values:

• X : the number of monthly referred memberships
• Y the number of annual referred memberships

And the known values are:

• The monthly membership amount: $2.27
• The annual membership amount: $2.01
• The total amount I earned from memberships: $102.08
• The number of my referred members: 46

We have a 2x2 linear system: Two equations with two unknowns: The equations are the following:

Equation 1: 2.27*X + 2.01*Y = 102.08
Equation 2: X + Y = 46

The first equation refers to the total amount earned by memberships. The second equation refers to the total number of your referred members.

To solve them, go to this page.

You will see a 2x2 equation solver. Let’s input the correct values into the boxes, according to our example:

When you are ready, click the button ‘Execute’. And that’s it! Let’s see our solution:

We have:

• X=37
• Y =9

Therefore, I have 9 annual memberships and 37 monthly memberships! Which means that approximately 20% are annual memberships.

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Thank you for reading!