Six Little Tweaks to Boost Your Medium Earnings this Week

Add more income to your writing and publishing business by next Wednesday

No one likes earning less next week than they did this week. We work hard to grow our Medium following, so it’s important we do the best we can to keep the graph moving up and to the right.

There are six things I do on a regular basis to keep my Medium account growing. Although there are many factors out of our control, a lot of skepticism of the partnership program, and somewhat mystical earnings process — we do have control of our future on Medium.

Whether you start today, or you started last month, these six tweaks will help you earn more money from your stories over time.

While there’s no guarantee how much your account will grow, maybe you’ll make an extra hundred, maybe ten — I can say with this kind of consistent,, daily publishing practice your account will grow over time.

We all have peaks and valleys on Medium.

You can tell when they changed the algorithm or tweaked the way our writing gets discovered. Suddenly, our traffic nosedives.

Sure, these moments are frustrating, but the traffic comes back over time.

If you choose a publishing path and stick with it, like you would anything important to you — Medium will reward you well.

Six little tweaks to grow your Medium income

1. Stay in your lane —

This one is not a universal truth. Some writers do very well writing all over the place on Medium. I would say if you have no intention of building a back-end publishing business off your Medium tribe, writing across multiple niches is probably a good strategy.

I can’t say for sure. I haven’t done it. But there are many who do and they do well.

However, if you do want to build a tribe you control, away from the Medium platform (i.e. email) it’s important you choose an niche to serve and stick with it.

If you don’t stick to one particular niche of people, you’ll end up with a list that’s too eclectic, which will make it near-impossible to offer them additional books, courses, and consulting later.

2. Don’t forget to link —

Link to your best work to keep it alive. Whether you use the interrupting article boxes or you link to direct lines of text, it’s personal preference. The in-line text is more subtle. The story appears more like something you’d read in the paper, giving a cleaner experience for the reader.

The downside of those in-text links is the reader has to guess what the link is about. She may click-away only to end up on a story she didn’t want to read.

Conversely, the article boxes (copy the link address, paste it into your Medium story, hit ‘return’) are more disruptive to the reading process, like a banner add. They do break the reading flow, but the reader will have a better idea of what she’s clicking before you taps the link.

3. Serve your niche before yourself —

Readers come to your writing so they can get some kind of transformation or escape from where there are now to where they want to be. Sure, we can tell personal stories with the goal of helping others (this works very well, as you can see them all over Medium), but we shouldn’t write to be self-serving.

Serve your reader first. Give until it hurts. Then give a little more. Share your best stuff. If the reader loves what you write, she’ll return for more — maybe even buy something from you later.

4. Be thoughtful with your subject lines —

Don’t make the reader guess what your story is about. Clever titles don’t do well here. I need to see your title and make a yes/no decision quickly. There are thousands of other choices to read.

Why should I choose yours?

What problem of mine will you solve?

Will I get the result you offer in the title, or did you trick me to click it?

There are a lot of humor writers here who use clickbait titles in their stories. If I don’t recognize the publication as a humor publication, I won’t know the story is farce until I click it.

Sometimes humor stories can be very misleading. So can sarcasm.

Tread lightly with your story titles. I experiment all the time. You should too. But the ones that have worked the best for me, have been straightforward. The reader knows what she’s getting into before she opens the story.

5. Publish to publications as often as you can —

If you need to, create your own publication to serve your niche. Medium would rather curate stories published under a publication. Look at the homepage. Look at the featured stories. Look at your results.

Not only do they prefer publications, but they only feature stories written under one of the Medium publications. I choose not to play that game and focus on the daily work instead.

Although I won’t earn as much from a single story, the cumulative effect of all my content still earns me plenty of money. You’ll have to choose your own strategy with publications — something that fits your writing pace the best.

Publications take awhile to build. Mine is still small, but growing. You can create as many as you wish. Some authors have three or more. But when you own a publication you have the ability to reach your followers through email, with letters.

6. Always encourage readers to join your tribe —

Medium can become a grind if you’re not careful. It takes a lot of perseverance to write here every day.

If you want a more hands-off, more-automated way of earning extra income, it’s important you build a tribe you control — away from the fluctuations of another platform.

Right now Medium owns your traffic. If they want to cancel your account and delete all your stories tomorrow, they can do so, with little or no repercussions.

When you build your own list, you’ve got an insurance policy against the actions of a larger platform.

Start building your tribe yesterday

As indie writers it’s frustrating to trade time for money. When you own your list, you can establish automated ways to sell your books, courses, and consulting.

There’s no better feeling than waking-up, checking your phone, and finding you made five sales while you slept.

You need a way to get a hold of your tribe. You need traffic you own. If you don’t own your traffic you don’t have an indie publishing business.

This should be a list you control (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.