So it finally happened I hit 100 followers and signed up and got accepted to the Medium Partner Programme. This was very exciting for me as it feels like the first substantial step toward making money out of my blog. It has not happened overnight for me and I have read other writers that have hit this target in weeks but it took me a while to understand the platform and really get going.
I started my Medium journey in Jan 2022 after reading some good things about it as a blogging platform. I had been debating it for a little while but in the end, decided that I would join up and give it a go. I started uploading a few of the blogs I had already published on my website but really didn’t get any traction.
From January through to April I had very little growth only gaining 19 followers, this was a bit disheartening at the time. It wasn’t until May that I really started to see my followers and viewing stats start to grow.
What changed?
I did some research mainly on Medium itself and also read a great e-book by Mark Ellis Reviews and implemented a few key things that I believe made a big difference for me.
1)Publish Consistently:
As it seems to be in the world of content creation it’s about consistency. I made a decision to just focus on my writing as a side hustle and make sure that I was posting 2 blog posts a week. These go up on my website first followed shortly by an upload on to medium. This has seen views on both my website and Medium increase. It’s about showing up for the audience that you are creating for.
2) Publications:
I joined publications and signed up to be a writer for them. Now when writing an article I will submit it to a relevant publication to be accepted and published. The reason for this is that publications have a bigger audience so it’s a great way to get your articles in front of a different audience.
3) Writing better content:
For me, I think that this has come with just publishing more articles and content online. I am not saying that my content is brilliant, I still have a long way to go and a lot more learning on how to construct these articles better, but I like to think that there has been a marked improvement over the past few months.
4) Sharing on Social Media
Medium has the function to share your latest articles on social media. This is not something that I had been using at the beginning, I would generally just share the post on my website. I haven’t seen too much come through but I have had some success from this, so I think it’s worth a go and will continue to share my articles across all my social media accounts.
What next?
Continuing with the above points is the first thing that I intend to do in order to keep growing my audience. I am also looking at joining a couple more publications which cover the kind of content that I am writing. I have also found that some of my articles have been chosen for further distribution so fingers crossed this continues as this will again get you in front of a wider audience.
One thing that I really want to do more and have just started is to comment on other writers’ articles more. I have seen some growth through this and I also think that it’s nice to share feedback as certainly appreciate comments on my articles.
I am also considering increasing the number of articles that I publish weekly to 1) Grow my audience, and 2) improve my writing skills in general. Hopefully, this will lead to me starting to get paid from Medium in the coming month and moving my goal of monetising my blog that little step closer.