Why I’m All-In on Medium

Whatever you focus on will grow

It’s hard to choose one place to focus your writing. As creators, we’re bombarded with advice about how often and how many places we should spread out content.

Although I promote my Medium stories on social, I spend almost no time there.

I have a semi-secret reason I chose Medium as my all-in place for content. I’ll share that in a minute. I didn’t want to waste my time developing a blog from nothing. I didn’t want to spend all day chasing social fans (with a questionable return on the time invested).

Medium is as close as I can get to the source.

When you go all-in on one platform, it makes your daily job so much easier. You can focus your energies in one place, connect with your people, and keep creating content on a daily basis.

If you don’t have a Gary V-level team around your content strategy, it’s almost impossible to keep up with a be-everywhere-everyday strategy. You’ll lose focus in one place as you pay attention to the next.

You can’t automate your social media posts and engage with people, simultaneously. Something will break if you try to be everywhere.

Instead, I choose to put all my eggs in the Medium basket. It’s not perfect, but there are no ads. And I like a good platform with no ads.

The real secret I’m here

Medium, like Amazon is a collection of people who already have vote with their wallets. Medium isn’t open to all. The free readers are limited to a few stories per month. Most-everything else is behind the pay wall.

The readers on Medium have chosen to subscribe and pay for their content.

They voted by paying for a subscription to read our content. They found enough value in the content we generate, that they’re willing to pay $5/month to get as much as they can consume.

When people pay for things we know what they value.

Our readers value content. As a writer and creator, I generate content in many forms. These are the type of folks I want in my tribe — people who are willing to pay for great content, not just someone who reads all the free information they can find from a deep Googling.

The more we keep our paying readers engaged with our content, the more they’ll keep coming back for our next content.

This creates a loop of growing readers who want more of our work.

Eventually, if we please the reader enough, she’ll want even more and join our tribe (more on that below). When we grow a tribe filled with people who already pay for their content, there’s a much-higher probability they’ll be willing to pay for our content too.

I let Medium pay me to build my tribe

The second big reason I’m all-in on Medium is that they’re willing to pay me to build a tribe from their fans. Not only do I earn a great income while writing on Medium, but they also let me gather my tribe onto a platform I own.

Building a sustainable tribe is important.

If you don’t own your traffic you don’t own your business. I don’t want Medium to shut me down and take away my income. I want a platform I control. They can change the payment rules any day, but that won’t affect the income I earn from my email list.

If you want to build a sustainable publishing business, you need an automated email series to do the selling and heavy-lifting for you.

You’ll have more time to write and you don’t have to spend so much time doing all that dirty, sales work to move your books.

Email is the golden key for indies.

If you’re ready to get your first 1,000 subscribers (or your next 1,000) without paying a hot nickel in advertising, tap the thingy below to enroll. You’ll have your first lesson today.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my 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.