Earn a Lot More From Your Medium Stories with Evergreen Content

Medium income is a long-game if you don’t want to trade hours for dollars

Current or evergreen, which method to choose? In one camp we’ve got the viral, wildfire stories, sure tickle the search engines this morning. In the other camp we’ve got evergreen. Not nearly as sexy or popular as current, but they’ll feed you a lot longer.

I choose evergreen. You might want to write the same way.

I never was good at being a fad-chaser, so it was natural that I was terrible at it with writing. There’s a lot of fast-money to be made chasing fads, boosting your name to the front page of Medium.

But as fast as those posts go up, they fall just as hard.

Yes, writing for current events is a strategy that works for some writers. But this writer will keep on the evergreen path. And I’ll show you why.

Medium isn’t the only place I want my content to live.

I don’t want to have to write the same story twice. I want my content to have multi-purposes. A story might be a book chapter, a blog post, a YouTube video, or a podcast (or all those things).

When we create evergreen intellectual property (IP), we build an asset that will keep us fed over the long-game.

I’d much rather have a story earn $25/week, every week, for a year, than I would to have a single viral hit that earns me $500 once.

When we write current content, it’s hard to re-purpose it later. There’s an expiration date on the attention it’ll gather — a shelf-life. I want a bag of salt on my shelf, not fresh bread.

Evergreen content stays fresh all year

No matter the weather. No matter what topic is hot this morning. Your evergreen content solves a particular problem for a particular person. The solution will be just as relevant next year and three years from now, as it will today.

When you write evergreen Medium stories, you can link to them repeatedly, with no worry about the current relevancy.

If you only write current stories, those links won’t mean much to your readers next week — long after the headline story has moved to something new that bleeds louder.

Evergreen content stays fresh all year (even if it drops a few traffic needles over time)

There are unlimited evergreen problems to solve.

Be as specific (or broad) as you wish.

Your readers will have the same relationship/creativity/psychological problems next year as they do now.

We all have a content choice.

I choose evergreen.

Evergreen content earns you more money over time

No, you won’t have one of those Medium stories that gets featured in the monthly earnings newsletter. You know the ‘most-income earned from a single story this month’ story.

…but you’ll earn a lot over time.

These evergreen stories add-up. While the traffic doesn’t last forever you can keep them alive through linking. Each month, approximately 25% of my stories earn for me. The more I write the larger that 25% grows.

Old posts still earn, they just don’t earn consistently.

You’ll be surprised. One month you’ll see a boost for some evergreen story you wrote ten months ago, with radio silence in-between.

No, you can’t predict which of those 25% will earn money for you.

The best thing to do is keep writing. Every day. Build a group of people around you who love your work and want to return for more of your writing tomorrow.

There are easier ways to earn money than writing on Medium, but you can turn this into full-time money with part-time writing (if you create enough evergreen content).

Evergreen content helps grow your list longer

One of the biggest perks of evergreen Medium stories is your ability to have each story earn new email subscribers for you. It’s like a thousand little salespeople, all working on your behalf.

If you write current stories, you call to have people join your list may seem out of place — or it could be really hard to gather a tribe around a single theme, if you spend all your time writing current stories in random niches.

Evergreen returns. Steadfast. And back to the basics.

The reader doesn’t care that I wrote this story three years ago. The answer solves her problem today. She’ll be more-inclined to join my tribe today. Maybe she’ll tell the others.

If you want to use evergreen content to grow your email tribe, tap the link below.

If you start building your tribe now, you’ll have a pre-made, rabid audience, ready when you launch your next book (or re-launch your last books).

This should be a list you own (instead of relying on social media or some other big-business platform). Tap the link below. Enroll in my Tribe 1K indie email masterclass. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (and your next 1,000) without spending one hot nickel on ads.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.