I call it the spammer strategy because it sounds nicely controversial.
The Spammer Strategy — Or How To Make Between $120 to $1,200 Monthly On Medium
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not easy and a lot of work.
Here’s what a typical day of a spammer strategist looks like:
- Publish at least one story
- Follow 120 new writers. (that’s Medium daily limit)
- Leave a comment on 100 different pieces. (daily limit)
Many of the writers the spammer strategist followed or commented on will reciprocate.
- Let’s assume a 30% success rate. That’s 30 writers coming to your profile and reading at least one of your stories.
- Let’s assume they spend at least 2 minutes doing that. I think this is very conservative. If the stories you write and the comments you leave are decent enough, you will get much more than 2 minutes of reading time back.
So, the conservative estimate gives you 1 hour of reading time back, or around $2.
On top of that, you get some additional reading time because the algorithm sees your articles get some traction and offer them to other readers. Also, the people who reciprocated and interacted with your content in the previous days are more likely to get one of your articles in their feed because they read you before and because you publish a lot (at least once per day).
Let’s assume these effects combine in a “tail effect” and double the reading time you receive. You’re now making $4 per day or $120 per month.
Playing with the assumptions, we can build two more scenarios:
- Optimistic: $600 per month. 50% reciprocation and 6 minutes of reading. That gives 300 minutes of reading or 5 hours, or $10 at $2 per reading hour. $10 per day is $300 per month, multiplied by two because of the tail effect (as explained above).
- Successful: $1,200 per month. 50% reciprocation and 12 minutes of reading (on average) from the people reciprocating. That’s 600 minutes or 10 hours, or $20 per day. So, $600 per month, times two because of the tail effect.
What drives the earnings of a spammer-strategist from “conservative” to “successful” is the quality of their stories.
And my guess is that successful spammer strategists change their strategies at one point because the time spent “strategically spamming” would be better allocated to writing more stories.
Or one could focus on the writing and hire a virtual assistant to do the spamming. Delegating mindless tasks is often a good idea when a business starts growing.
Why does this strategy work?
There are two reasons, the main one is the reciprocity bias, and the second one is a market opportunity.
The Reciprocity Bias
It “is a social psychological phenomenon where people feel a natural tendency to return a favor or respond in kind when they receive something from others.”
In Medium words, if someone reads, claps, and comments on your stories, you will likely do the same for their articles.
By the way, that’s why social media networks all have a notification feature. At the network level, the reciprocity bias makes users more engaged, which means they spend more time on the platform.
The Market Opportunity
If everybody did this, we (the writers) would all get too many notifications and stop looking at them. And anyway, we wouldn’t have the time to reciprocate all the solicitations.
The strategy works because there are very few people using it.
If you consider the reading time of all the Medium writers as a pie, the spammer strategy is about eating as much of the pie as possible and not so much about increasing the pie.
Side note: it might increase the pie marginally because writers might spend slightly more time on Medium to reciprocate. But I don’t think the effect is significant. Writers allocate a certain amount of time to Medium, and instead of reading something random offered by the algo, they read something by the writer using the spammer strategy.
The true way of increasing the pie is to bring new readers to Medium. That’s why the referral program exists.
Classic extensions of the spammer strategy
I mention them for fun and controversy purposes. (It’s kind of the same thing on social media.)
Creating one or more publications
Creating a generalist publication (generalist means it accepts anything except for erotica, no matter the quality of the article) is a classic step.
Writers are (wrongly) attracted to publications because they think it will increase their views (only a few, very selective, pubs have this effect). The advantage is that writers usually follow publication editors, the names of the editors become known (sort of, “Medium known”), and the publication guidelines make money.
PLUS, as a publication editor, you get to tag all the writers in your pub from time to time (recommended frequency monthly), which means you receive money from their reading time. By the way, are you a writer for The Pub yet?
Pro-tip: to maximize visibility, call your publication by your name or use a picture of yourself as the publication profile picture.
The next step is to create a “selective” publication in the hope that it will attract more readers than writers.
It also gives you the power to reward some writers of the generalist publication.
The chosen ones will gain the right to publish in the “selective” pub. Writers (people in general) love to be part of an exclusive group, even if it’s random and fake.
By the way, would you like to become a member of my Top Hat Seminar?
Creating an alternate profile to write exclusively about Medium (and writing)
Writing about Medium is a niche that can pay off on Medium, but the big bucks are in the boostable topics. Having two profiles means you can have the main one writing about serious stuff and the second one focused on Medium. It’s like having two different models of the same brand.
Having a separate profile also makes sense because you can now double your “spammer strategy” and follow 240 people per day (120 each). There are some synergies, but now, you need to work twice more, write at least two articles, and 200 comments daily. It’s time-consuming.
Alternative: make Medium a family business and invite your partner or your Grandma to write with you.
Creating a “Learn to write on Medium like a genius and make boatloads of $$$ cohort-based” Course
I won’t say much more about this one because it’s hard to miss the topic if you’ve been on Medium for more than five minutes.
By the way, want to subscribe to mine? It’s FREE.
Conclusion
This strategy works only with readers who are also writers. It’s a valid niche because there are many of them. But we need to remember most medium members aren’t writers; they’re readers. Writing for the readers is the strategy Top Writers like Jessica Wildfire or Umair Haque use.
And all Medium writers use the “spammer strategy,” consciously or not.
And at a reasonable level, it’s not a strategy; it’s called being part of the lovely and supportive Medium writers’ community.