THE SECRETS OF WRITING ON MEDIUM, PART 8

This is How to Write What People Will Love to Read.

Get ready to become rich — it’s waiting right here for you.

I believe I finally broke through the mystery of the algorithm.

For those of you who are new or struggling writers on Medium, the data I’m going to share is NOT a substitute for high-quality writing.

If you want to know about my frustrations and the journey I took the last three years to become a better writer, you can find it here.

I built a publication dedicated to the creative process, the craft of writing, and all the knowledge needed to succeed on Medium.

Over the last two months, I examined and addressed my weaknesses as a writer, took actions to improve those areas, and then went outside of my comfort zone.

Those efforts have paid off handsomely.

I was shocked to see my income for this last week increased by 212% over the total for the previous three weeks.

For context, this single week has only been exceeded by 2 out of the 23 months I’ve been a member of the Medium Partner Program.

We’ll have to see what happens next week. If this trend continues, this month could triple the income of my best month.

And now for something completely different.

I’m going to ask you what YOU want to read next.

Seriously, you have the choice of what information comes next. Please try this and let me know if it works on your device.

Click HERE if you’re a realist, and want more information about how difficult it is to make a lot of money on Medium.

Or

If you’re an optimist, and want to get to the secrets I’ve learned, keep reading below.

Wasn’t that fun?

Are you all still there?

Did even one of you jump to the hard truths about Medium? I doubt it.

There’s a reason why one self-help guru can ignore basic psychiatric knowledge of PTSD and say something as irresponsible as “if you are conscious about your emotions and conscious about your future, then you can turn any negative experience into a lot of gain” and still have thousands of fans.

I get it. We all need to believe in something that gives us hope.

Let’s get to our Medium-hacking secrets.

Secret #1: You can game the curation system, at least for now.

Instead of doing the usual, I wrote a magazine quality article on Rafael Nadal, featuring expert analysis (as a former professional tennis player and coach) about a popular current topic while creating an artsy literary device that ties a cool detail into the larger picture.

Medium’s curators ignored it.

On the other hand, when I linked to the article on Quora, strangers wrote comments to the effect “you should be writing on ESPN,” or “that’s the best article I’ve ever read on tennis.”

I was upset that the best article I’d ever written on tennis was celebrated on one website and ignored by the other.

Then I read a post on a Facebook Medium writer group. A woman wrote that she contacted Medium support and asked if they would review the linked articles she had included in her email.

Most of her articles got curated.

I tried the same thing, and Medium curated my Nadal article three days later.

I didn’t help me get traction because I published the article six hours before the US Open finals, at the moment of peak interest, and tournament was fading into a distant memory.

Still, it was pretty cool to find a way to deal with Medium, instead bumping around in the fog that usually surrounds this platform.

I’m sure that will change soon, as requests start to flood their support staff.

That was a cool secret, right? Are you interested in some information about how difficult it is to make a lot of money on Medium? If you are, click HERE.

Or

If you want more secrets, join the cool cats and keep reading.

Secret #2: Reads are your most important stat.

I was surprised that the Nadal article had earned almost as much as my best-earning article for the month.

Here’s the comparison between the two articles:

• The Nadal article had ten times the views and four times the reads compared to the Satire article.
• The Nadal article was 16 minutes long, while the Satire article was 10 minutes.
• Satire had 2.3 times more fans and 2.8 times more claps.
• Reader highlights completely covered the Satire article, while the Nadal article was virtually untouched (only five highlights).
• Satire had nine times the responses and a ton of reader-to-reader engagement in that section (non-Medium subscribers can’t comment).

Given the discrepancy in the “reader engagement” stats for the satire piece, it shows that all my efforts in this area were a waste of time, from an ROI perspective.

I love my friends and we have a fine time making jokes, but if you want to earn more money, your energy should be put into increasing the number of reads.

So, can I interest you in some information on how difficult it is to make a lot of money on Medium? If so, click HERE.

Or

If you want more secrets, then rock and scroll to the next one down.

Secret #3: Quality beats the hell out of quantity.

I know a lot of the shyster content marketers say you can make it on Medium by churning out two or three posts per day, every day, but I think the evidence I’ve gathered suggests otherwise.

In the first four weeks of this MPP pay period (Aug. 25-Sept. 22), I played the quantity game (for me), writing one piece per day, plus a few hiakus and a couple of song mash ups and an entry in the SlackJaw writing contest.

That’s far short of the 2–3 post average advocated by the content marketers, but a huge amount of work.

I did a rough count and published over 30,000 words.

That’s the equivalent of a third of a novel.

However, my best article represented about 12.5% of the total output, but over 50% of the income.

Here are a few more arguments for quality.

• The only way to get a bump in readership is to land in the featured section of the Medium home page. As I showed before, 99% of those articles appear in Medium-owned publications. And it’s getting worse, as these articles now dominant the feed, as well. If you’re willing to write what’s popular, your best chance of building a readership on Medium is by submitting to their publications.
• If you write longer articles from a position of expertise and show plenty of research to back up your argument, you can submit to a publication like Better Humans. They pay $500 per article. If only 7% of the writers on Medium bust their butts writing 2–3 posts a day in the hopes of making $100, I think it would be a far better investment of time to write great stuff and submit to a publication that pays more money.
• One of my friends on Medium proves the point above. He writes one article per day, almost every day on Medium. He claimed that he earned about $1000 in over a year on Medium, but earned another $6000 by selling his articles to other magazines.
• Finally, do you really think you’re going to be happy writing crap? I noticed that the writing coaches and MFAs trying to play the quantity game suffered a noticeable drop in the quality of their writing, compared to the mega-popular content marketers. (Maybe those people can afford to pay editors.)

The only argument for quantity is the slight hope that you will write one thing that goes viral, changing your life forever. (Don’t bet on it — there are tons of people who have one huge hit and never achieve the same popularity.)

You really don’t want to know how difficult it is to make a lot of money on Medium, do you? But if you changed your mind, click HERE.

Or

If you want more secrets, then follow the partially yellow brick road. We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of tweets!

Secret #4: I finally harnessed the power of social media!

This might have been the most exciting discovery I made.

I did a test on Twitter, and the results seemed pretty spectacular, at least to someone ignorant about social media like me. With 19 followers on Twitter, I’m completely anonymous.

Forgive my ignorance as I explain the basics. If this bores you to tears, just skip down a few sentences to get to the results.

My goal was to use twitter to contact major tennis magazines, in the hope that they might be interested in using my article on Nadal.

First, I found their twitter handle, went to their page, and then tweeted them with my article.

Before I sent the tweets, I thought about addressing a specific audience that follows tennis and added hashtags like #ATP, #Nadal, and #USOpen.

I sent out 3 tweets yesterday sometime in the late morning or early afternoon.

After approximately 36 hours, the article gained 97 more views and 50 more reads. A 51% read rate seems pretty good, especially for a 16-minute article.

In the two days since I wrote about that bump from Twitter, there were another 35 views and 27 reads. That’s a 77.1% read rate.

Is 77% the kind of read rate associated with people who buy magazines?

Admittedly, the vast majority of these reads came from non-Medium subscribers, so I probably won’t make much money off this bump in readership.

But I think there may be a larger issue here than just making money on Medium. The point of the test is that there seems to be a correlation between my crude attempt to use Twitter and attracting new readers.

More important, the read rates grew from the 25% of the first 1307 views that came from Quora and Medium, to the 51% of the next 97 views to the 77% of the last 35 views.

Could that be the first step toward discovering a real fan base that might buy books or online course I might teach?

If your topic has a tiny following compared to the more popular ones, does it make your work any less meaningful if you can give significant help to a small group of followers?

I guess that all depends on how you define your value as a writer.

Now think about the time and difficulty that would be required to attract that many new readers within the Medium ecosystem.

One writer suggests you follow 150 people a day in the hopes that a small percentage will follow you back.

Even if it works and you pick up an extra 30 followers each day, how do we know if any of these followers are interested in your writing subjects?

How many thousands of followers would you need to add in order to find 200 zealous fans who read and clap for everything you write?

I’m closing in one 1,000 followers and I swear 95% of them are either dead, disconnected from the web, or have lost the ability to read.

For the ones who still read, my writing subjects have jumped around so only a small percentage of them would be interested in a sports article, or a writing article like this one.

Are you finally ready to learn how difficult it is to make a lot of money on Medium? If you do, click HERE.

Or

If you want my final secret, keep going, even if you’re dog tired.

Secret #5: Write about your passions, then find an audience that shares that passion.

There’s a simple reason why I rule on Quora and suck on Medium, and it has nothing to do with my ability as a writer.

On Quora, every answer to a question appears on a single page.

If you write the best answer and receive the most upvotes, you can quickly become a top writer based on your merit and the feedback of the entire Quora community.

I’m passionate about tennis and started to answer questions to correct all the incorrect information on the site coming from people who never played or coached tennis at an elite level.

On the other hand, with Medium, and the way they choose the feature and curated articles, the odds are stacked against an unknown like me, writing about unpopular subjects.

But there’s still hope.

I’m passionate about sports, writing, and design, and have professional expertise in those subjects.

Here are the strategies I will work on moving forward:

1. Write high quality articles and submit them to Medium-owned publications. I think my topics will work for two or three of them.
2. Write high quality humor articles and submit them to SlackJaw.
3. Submit articles to other magazines that will pay for stories.
4. Explore more social media strategies to attract new readers on Medium.

The point here is stop feeling terrible about not getting more attention. Instead, find the people who will love your writing.

I’m excited to explore this next writing challenge, and I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I encourage you to work on the craft of writing as opposed to producing a large number of poorly written articles.

There are plenty of online resources and writing coaches.

Okay, this is your final chance to learn how difficult it is to make a lot of money on Medium. Do you want the truth, or is that too much of a buzz kill? If you do, scroll down.

Or

If you want avoid all negativity, click HERE! Yea!!

Let’s keep it 100 (times 100), y’all.

As good as this all sounds, I am not some shyster content marketer trying to promise you rainbow-shitting unicorns that will make all your dreams come true if you sign up for my online class.

Do not quit your day job.

And if you don’t have a job, find one.

Your chances of making $10,000 in a month on Medium are only five times better than the chances of winning the same amount in the lottery. Instead of buying five tickets and simply praying, you would have to work 68 hours a week, every week, to have that 1 in 25,555 chance.

That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?

If you want to jump back up to the secrets, click HERE.

Or

If you want to skip to the end, scroll down and sing Hallelujah.

I hope you enjoyed your interactive experience.

Never let it be said that I refused to p̶a̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ respond to the needs and desires of my readers.

Good luck in your writing efforts and know you can accomplish anything with the right team of social media marketers!

Thanks for reading, highlighting, commenting and sharing.

If you want to read earlier chapters of this writing guide, you can find them in this publication:

If you want to read the next chapter in this guide, click here:

Here’s to better writing.