The advice I usually see in my feed is aimed at full-time writers, aspiring full-time writers, and other folks who are willing to replaceâŚ
The advice I usually see in my feed is aimed at full-time writers, aspiring full-time writers, and other folks who are willing to replace their own preferences with SEO. Such people are bound to make more money, but itâs also possible to increase your earnings without becoming a one-man clickbait content farm. Here are some tips.
Even if you canât write that single thousand-dollar article, itâs fairly straightforward (if you publish frequently) to have a stable of hundreds of one-dollar or ten-dollar or fifty-cent articles. Sometimes articles blow up months or years after they were written, as a new audience discovers them. Your old articles will continue to make steady profit, and the more you have, the bigger the profit you get from new fans (who will often discover you from one article and then read a big chunk of your back-catalogue). All these older articles also have a steady chance of being picked up and shared by readers.
If you rely on internal Medium recommendations, you will need every article to be curated â and curation is a crapshoot. There isnât much you can do (beyond the basics described by Medium itself) to improve your odds of curation. But, you can still get high view numbers by promoting your articles elsewhere â view numbers that will increase the likelihood that your article will be shown prominently to your existing followers â and create a record that can lead to new readers stumbling upon your articles in the future.
My best-performing articles have owed their traffic to cross-posting to reddit, facebook, twitter, and hacker news.
A friends link prevents non-registered users and non-premium users from hitting a paywall, while not affecting your income from premium users at all. In other words, there is no downside to always sharing the friend link, on every platform.
A publication has a lot of the same benefits as a large back-catalogue, but it lets you pool labor with other writers. The writers in a publication can aid in promoting each otherâs articles as well â participating in discussion on link aggregators, or sharing links to specific platforms. Sometimes, the writers in a small publication may pool editing labor as well.
[As much as I absolutely hate it](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/an-alternate- medium-style- guide-263e067f6481?source=friends_link&sk=d203a7da03ef436c6108ac0ca70a66e4), articles on Medium that donât have a header image are at a disadvantage â they show up with a big, ugly green moire thing thatâs the Medium equivalent of an egg avatar. This has led to a tendency for authors to slap the same ten or fifteen royalty-free stock images on their articles â the Medium equivalent of having âlife coachâ in your twitter bio. Donât do this.
Instead, I recommend putting together some relevant collage art or grabbing a public domain asset that is specific enough to not fit anybody elseâs article on the same subject.
Itâs easy to figure out how to target the center of some particular audience â so easy that everybody does it basically the same way.
Writers (and âwritersâ) get pages and pages of recommendations with the same five stock images of women flying with books or cups of coffee on top of journals, near-identical titles leading to near-identical articles laundering the same advice (why itâs important to write every day, why itâs not important to write every day, how to avoid/conquer writerâs block, why writerâs block doesnât exist, why to follow the heroâs journey, why not to follow the heroâs journey). They target the same cliche ideas about what kinds of hangups writers have: impostor syndrome (âyou are good enoughâ, âpitch your dream publicationâ), writerâs block, self-obsession (âdonât write what you knowâ, âwhy itâs ok to write what you knowâ). Programmers (and âprogrammersâ) get the same sort of thing: pages of the same stock photos of green binary over shitty CG androids, with titles promising âlife-changing tricksâ you remember from the first page of every language tutorial. If you target the center of the audience, you have a lot of competition.
If you target two audiences at the same time, you will come off as different from the norm for both, and youâll probably introduce folks in one to the concepts from the other. When I combined [leftist politics, cybernetics, and the church of the subgenius](https://medium.com/the-weird-politics-review/the- divine-transcendence-of-slacking- off-1fe7bccb57d2?source=friends_link&sk=64d1a8a89740eadbcc677a4600fa8da8), or [free software with leftist economics](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/freeing- software-3e3ede439f20?source=friends_link&sk=faeed756e13f8fefd93c6c599199dd3b), or [media theory with sociology](https://modernmythology.net/the-mythic- function-of-the-zombie-apocalypse- narrative-515fe4eece53?source=friends_link&sk=f548fde4560c81d8dc5beadeb89f7b6d), I got views I wouldnât have gotten from a straight shot.
Clickbait is when your title is more interesting than your content. You can get pretty close to clickbait without screwing yourself over if you identify the most interesting or paradoxical part of your point, and use it as your title. These clicks tend to turn into reads, as they did for my articles [A Libertarian Case for Social Justice](https://medium.com/the-weird-politics- review/a-libertarian-case-for-social- justice-23ee2237b6f5?source=friends_link&sk=11db912d7205c9635aaf146534741203), [Silicon Valley Hasnât Innovated Since 1978](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/silicon-valley-hasnt-innovated- since-1978-f98f315f2bf?source=friends_link&sk=3c0faf3a17892ebbde287000b3c40518), [Love Hina Ruined Harem Anime for a Decade](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/love- hina-ruined-harem-anime-for-a- decade-c8b06084d52a?source=friends_link&sk=1c28a05890ee4851455f61043d04e6cc), and [How Mamoru Oshii Ruined Ghost in the Shell](https://movietime.guru/how- mamoru-oshii-ruined-the-ghost-in-the-shell- franchise-c8d3671a7ae?source=friends_link&sk=e6771ebdc359c7375dd3f8047842a9e6).
By John Ohno on April 23, 2020.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/yet-another-article-on-how-to- make-money-from-your-writing-on-medium-6806b5045eea)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.
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