Pleasurable Earnings Achievable After 3 Months on Medium With Titillating Headlines
Thanks, Tony Stubblebine!
It’s been 3 months and the learnings keep coming! Annnnd the earnings are there too — slow growth is better than no growth!
As a summary, here are my learnings and earnings after 3 months of writing on Medium:
Learnings
1. Use the Headline Analyzer Tool!
Who knew? Well, probably lots of people, but I just found out thanks to this article by Tony Stubblebine and am excited to try it out! — I also realize that I am way late to this game!
After trying it on this article I went from a score of 53 with my original headline to one of 75 with the current one. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out … my editor (and husband) thinks it now sounds like gibberish, but we will let the numbers decide!
Haven’t heard of the free Headline Analyzer Tool? — try it out here!
2. Medium’s recommendation boost works
This really is a “Captian Obvious” point, as my editor also noted, however, it also qualifies as a learning for me, because I didn’t realize it was “a thing” before reading this article from Kristina God, on Medium’s new article recommendation notification.
Upon closer examination I realized she is right — there is a significant recent uptick in stats for stories that received a notification like the one shown in Kristina’s post.
So far, I have received 6 of these notifications for 6 different stories:
When I checked the stats for my articles today, I found that 5 of my top 6 earning articles this month are Medium recommended (as a note, all 6 recommended stories are also with large publications, which seems to help as well).
What is also interesting, (and maybe less obvious?!?) is that the views tend to come in waves, which I am assuming are related to recommendation output from Medium, as visible in these stats from my top-performing article:
3. Publications deliver views
Again, Captain Obvious! But, I think it is interesting to see in the data that publications deliver views.
So far, and perhaps it is because I am a new writer with less than 500 followers, the stories that get accepted into publications (the bigger the better) perform best.
It will be interesting to see if this balance shifts at all as follower numbers (hopefully) continue to grow.
4. Tweaks that would improve the Medium experience
The number indent function: Add the ability to write a paragraph within continued number formatting. Right now number formatting works like this:
- The number one item is formatted as per the current number formatting. If I continue writing and take up a full line of text, the paragraph remains indented.
However, if I start a new paragraph under #1, I can’t continue the numbering with #2 below:
2. Instead, I have to manually type in #2 as part of the text. This changes the paragraph formatting and makes everything look a bit messy.
It would be lovely if I could choose to “continue numbering” and have consistent paragraph formatting.
Earnings
It is really fun to see the earnings climb and I am very happy with the uptick in earnings for December.
The biggest credit for my earnings to date goes to the Medium recommendation boost — cheers to more of these for us all in the future!
Happy writing!
For more like this, sign up here. Kind thanks for reading, Julianne