TCC Podcast #419: Writing on Medium with Thomas Smith

The publishing platform Medium’s been around for years. But the company has made a few changes recently that might make you reconsider whether or not you should be writing on Medium. Our guest for the 419th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Thomas Smith. I asked Thomas to share some of the reasons Medium has become a place for readers to find great content as well as a place for writers to not just share their thoughts, but also to potentially earn a respectable income stream by posting thoughts there instead of social media or your own blog. Why Thomas? Well, he’s earned more than $19,000 for a single post on the platform, and well over six figures over the past couple of years. So he knows a thing of two. And he shared it all on this episode. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

Thomas’s Thrive on Medium Course
How to Find Clients 36-page Mini-book
The FREE Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  It’s been said so often that it’s almost become a meme… there’s this idea that successful millionaires… or maybe its billionaires, I can’t quite remember, but successful millionaires have on average seven different streams of income. They may have a salary or income from a business they own, they earn dividends on their investments, maybe they have income from property they own, and so on. And people share this idea with the intention that those of us who hear it will also think about ways to add different potential income streams to our businesses.

But as a content writer or a copywriter, you may not have access to investment that pay dividends yet. Or property you can rent out. Or many of the other more traditional ways these very wealthy people earn money. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t options for us. In fact, some of these options may be easier for you and me, than for the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world to capitalize on.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with successful Medium writer, Thomas Smith. Thomas has been writing on and making good money with Medium. He recently released a course that shows how he does it. And I wanted to chat with him about the possibilities for content writers and copywriters to use Medium as a potential revenue source—especially for the kinds of writing we might want to do for ourselves instead of our clients. If you write for you… you may want to listen to this episode twice so you pick up on all the ideas Thomas shares about growing an audience and income stream using Medium.

Before we get to that though… you hear me tell you about several resources that we’ve put together to help you build and grow a writing business. I’m going to quickly list a few of them here so you can get the help you need… we have a free facebook group called The Copywriter Club. You can find us on Facebook and request that we add you to the group where you’ll find seven years of threads about all kinds of copywriting and business questions. Obviously you know about this podcast. You’re listening to it right now and there are more than 400 interviews with successful copywriters and other experts in our backlist. Once you’ve listened to this episode, scroll through to find interviews with people like Seth Godin, Jay Abraham, Jereshia Hawk, Joanna Wiebe, Todd Brown, Kennedy and so many others. Honestly, it’s the best free library of copy, content and business ideas that you’ll find anywhere. And it’s at your fingertips. And right now you can get our free, 36 page mini-book called How to Find Clients when you go to thecopwriterclub.com/findaclient . I guarantee you’ll find at least one and probably 5-10 ideas you can use to find a client for your business. We’re here to help you build a business, so be sure to take advantage of all the free resources we’ve provided for you.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Thomas Smith.

Thomas, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I’d love to start with your story. How did you become a content consultant, a writer, creator, I mean, of your course, Thrive on Medium, which I should just mention right up front, it’s a course not just about writing for Medium, but actually making a living from it. So how did you get there?

Thomas Smith: Yeah, so my background is actually in AI, going way back to before it was a thing. I have a degree in cognitive science with a focus on AI from Johns Hopkins University. I was studying that kind of technology when it was literally on a whiteboard. You were drawing neural networks with a dry erase marker. So it’s come a long way in the time since then, but that was my original background. And I’m also a professional photographer. So I combined those two interests. I launched a company that uses AI to help archives, understand what’s in their archives, find photos in their big collections, get those out there for people to use. Been doing that since 2010. And along the way, I really learned how to kind of take those two interests of AI and photography and combine them in my own business, but also to explain them to people because AI is super confusing and photography is very technical. It’s also creative. There’s a lot of things that people have to understand in order to do both of those. So I kind of developed an expertise, I would say, in explaining those kinds of complex technologies in fairly simple terms and started to publish articles about photography and about AI. And originally I was just writing for publications in the photography space. I was writing for some bigger publications too, like IEEE Spectrum and that kind of thing. And I came along Medium, found Medium, this was in 2019. And I can go into a lot more detail about exactly how Medium works, but it just felt like it was going to be a great home for my writing where I could Basically talk about these topics that I’m very passionate about and have a lot of real world experience in and explain them to people and kind of share how to, how to use AI and how to do photography and how to build a business. All the stuff I picked up along the way in a way that would be really helpful. And it turned into not only a successful kind of platform for me, but also something that helped me launch. a consulting component to my business, where now I’m not just doing photography and using AI and helping archives, but I’m actually helping other companies understand how to tell their story in that space, how to share what they’re doing on Medium and on other platforms. It’s turned into essentially a content consulting business. That’s now almost the size of my core business with photography and AI. So Medium has been a huge piece of that, not only direct earnings on the platform, which I’ll get into, but also the way it’s helped me kind of add that onto my existing business.

Rob Marsh: That’s, yeah, that’s amazing. So as I hear you talk about this, I’m curious, and maybe this is where we get into how Medium actually works, but why Medium over, say, my own blog or Substack or some other publishing platform where I can share what I write? What’s so great about Medium?

Thomas Smith: Yeah, so I think, you know, it probably makes sense to step back and talk just briefly about what Medium is. I think everybody’s probably aware of it, especially if you’re a writer, you’ve seen it, it’s out there. But basically to break it down to the very basics, it’s a subscription platform. So people pay $5 all the way up to around $15 a month. There’s different levels that people subscribe at. And in exchange for that, they get access to all of the writing on the Medium platform. And a lot of it is behind this Medium paywall where you have to be a paying subscriber to have access to it. At the moment, Medium has about a million paying subscribers. They’ve grown tremendously over the last few years. They were around 750,000, uh, coming out of the core pandemic time when people were, you know, at their computers all the time, they’ve since grown even more dramatically up to around a million. So they’re bringing in probably five to $7 million a month from these subscribers. And they basically send that back out, the majority of it back out to writers who contribute on the platform. And so what I really loved about it initially is that I was an AI expert. I was a photographer. I was working with archives. I had all this knowledge, but I didn’t really know how to build an audience on a blog. I didn’t know how to create Substack. I don’t even think it was necessarily a thing at that time. It was, it was in its infancy, but you know, I was pitching these big name publications. I get a lot of stuff rejected. It was a lot of work just to keep pitching. Uh, I didn’t know how to launch a blog and build an audience around a blog. And what appealed about Medium is if I went and just share really useful stuff that helped people based on my experience, Medium had this built in audience. of, you know, that time, probably 500,000 people. Now it’s a million people. And if I’ve just shared stuff that was great, they would bring that audience to me and monetize it for me. And I could just focus on the writing and focus on being helpful. So I really love that element of it, that it didn’t require the expertise and the work of building an audience. It just required writing great stuff that people found useful.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I like that too. I think one of the big challenges of getting the word out is having your audience. It’s great to drop an email to your list, but if you’ve only got say a thousand people or maybe even 200 people on your list, that’s the limit. Whereas there are platforms like Medium where you can get so much more exposure. Let’s talk about how you do that then, because it’s one thing to write something great, hit publish on Medium. I’ve actually seen that happen where you do that and then crickets, right? So obviously there’s some tricks here.

Thomas Smith: Yeah, so it’s definitely, you can publish stuff and it can go nowhere. You can publish stuff and it can take off. My best story ever on Medium, and I should just preface this by saying I’ve written about 790 articles. on the platform now. Um, it’s changing every day cause I’m always constantly adding to that. Um, my best article ever got around, I think about 11 million views. So yeah, when you say the sky’s the limit on it, you know, I don’t have 11 million people on my newsletter. I can tell you that. Um, So there definitely is the potential for a story to go big and go out to a broad audience. Basically, fundamentally, there’s two ways that you get traffic on Medium. One of them is Medium’s own internal audience. So again, that’s a million paid subscribers, but there’s also people who create free Medium accounts and are on the platform. I don’t know exactly how many people there are, but there’s this internal audience that Medium is sending stuff out to. And the other piece is there’s an external audience, which is basically the entire internet and Medium is tied into that very well. So you talk about SEO and SEO topics here on the podcast. Medium has a domain rating of 94. So if you’re in the SEO space, you’ll know that’s a very powerful domain. It ranks really well in search. So people come in from there, um, all kinds of aggregators like Google news will pick up Medium stories. people will link to them and cite them in other places. So there’s external traffic, which is all the traffic from those sources. And then there’s the internal traffic that comes from Medium’s own audience. And to get the internal traffic, there’s a couple of different ways to approach that. One is to build your own following on Medium. So like most social platforms, you can write a story on Medium and people can follow you. And kind of opt to get more of your content going forward. And you can do a lot to connect with people on the platform. It’s a very kind of community oriented platform. So yeah, if you just publish something and don’t do anything, it’s probably not going to go anywhere. But if you publish something and go out and find other people who are writing about similar topics, chime in on their, uh, their stories and share, you know, some kind of useful insight, cause you can leave comments on a story that can help to build your audience. If you publish something there and share it with an audience on another platform, like if you do have a newsletter, you can send your Medium stories out to them. If you’re active on social, you can do that too. You can share stories with clients directly and bring people over to the platform. You can also, if somebody comments on your story, which happens quite a lot, again, it’s a kind of a community orientation there. You can respond to their comments. Medium seems to be really prioritizing that now. If you do that, that helps to build your following. And basically over time, by doing those things, you’ll build up your own following on Medium. And when people follow you, it doesn’t mean they necessarily get every single article that you publish, but Medium sends everybody who’s a subscriber to the platform, something they call the digest every day. And it’s basically a set of stories come through person’s email to basically an email newsletter that’s automatically generated. based on their specific preferences, stuff they like, stuff they’re interested in, stuff they do professionally. And Medium learns this about all of their subscribers over time. And so if you write something and people come and read it and they have particular preferences and interests, then Medium will start to send your story to your followers in their digest who have similar preferences and interests. And as you can imagine, as you build your following on the platform, there’s more people who can potentially get each of those stories. As you cover a broader range of topics, there’s more kind of topics that you can cover. And Medium will even send things that are three or four years old in some cases. So as you build up the number of stories and the followers, you can get traffic on stories you wrote, you know, five years ago, even. I’ve seen that happen. So it’s sort of a cumulative thing. It’s a slow build on that piece of it. There are, however, a couple of ways to accelerate that internal traffic. Um, one of them is to get into a publication. So Medium has these almost like internal collections of stories is the way I think about them. They’re still on the mMdium platform, but they’re called publications. They are run by an editor. Most editors are volunteers, so they, they aren’t getting paid. They’re not taking any of the earnings from your story. Um, and they basically curate stories and then you can submit your story to a publication. And if the editor decides to publish it, it’ll go out not only on your own Medium profile, but also on the publications page. And a lot of publications on Medium have their own very large following. So people can follow a publication just like they can follow an author. And so some of the bigger and more established publications could have 200,000, 700,000 people following them. And if you can get a story in there, even if you’re a fairly new writer, then you get access to that big audience. And that’s going to get your story out to a broader set of people again, through that digest and the recommendations Medium sends out. And then that’ll kind of come back to you too. So if you engage with that audience, then people will not only follow the publication, but they’ll follow you. So getting into a publication is a great way to increase that reach, kind of catapult yourself a little further ahead. That’s how I got started. I published basically crickets for a long time. I pitched a big publication no longer exists. It’s called One Zero. About three or four times the editor rejected me. Finally, I got a story in there and that really started that snowball effect of accumulating followers. Now the, I think the biggest way though, and the one that’s most exciting, there’s a new program on Medium. It’s been there for about a year. It’s called the boost program. This is basically Medium’s response to the huge amount of AI content. It’s out there kind of polluting the internet at the moment. Uh, it is a human focused program. It’s a human curation program. And so basically Medium went and found over a hundred at this point, subject matter experts. in every field you can imagine, physics, parenting, all kinds of stuff, travel. I’m personally one of the subject matter experts for gender of AI, for example, based on my background, and found all these people and turned them into boost nominators. So basically, we can go and have a publication on the Medium platform. We can find stories that are in our area of expertise. When we do that, we nominate those stories to the Medium team. Again, very manual process. Um, the Medium team will review that story and if they think it’s great and it’s pretty hard to get boosted, it’s a, I can’t say the exact number, but it’s a fairly low success rate. But if you do get boosted, it’s means you have really fantastic writing. And, um, that story will go out generally do about 10 times more people than a typical Medium story would. So I’ve seen writers come to the platform who are brand new, who have three followers. And in the first week, if they read a great story and it gets boosted, they can get thousands of views on that story and pick up hundreds of followers pretty much overnight. So that’s sort of the swing for the fences. You’re probably not going to get stuff boosted early on. Even as a veteran writer on the platform, my success rates, you know, probably 30, 40%, but when you do, that’s the best way to grow that audience and earnings too, which we’ll get into very quickly.

Rob Marsh: Okay. So I’ve got a lot of questions about this then. As far as Medium goes, it feels like it’s a little bit of a library or wild, wild west of content. You could basically write about anything. So again, considering our audience, copywriters, content writers, They may have personal things that they want to write about. Maybe I want to write a Western fiction story of some kind. Maybe I want to write about technology like AI. But for the core business things that we write about, how good is Medium for business compared to platforms like LinkedIn, where you expect to have business articles on the feed all the time?

Thomas Smith: It’s actually, I think, one of the best things to write about on Medium. So yes, it is a platform you can write about anything. That said, Medium’s audience cares deeply about specific topics. And the ones that are biggest, I would say, are kind of, it’s really anything that helps people level up is the way that I like to put it. It’s kind of like If they can learn a new skill, if they can find a better way of doing something, a way to optimize something in their life or their work, that’s why people are on Medium. And there’s certainly, you can write poetry, you can write fiction, but the majority of people want to learn some new skill. They want to improve in some way. And so learning a new business skill is a really fantastic way to, you know, something people want to do on Medium. And sharing a way to learn that new business skill is a really great way to you know, engage with that audience. So I would say topics that relate to running a business to building a business are definitely one of the most engaging topics on there. And so if you’re writing about, you know, how to win clients in the copywriting space, if you’re writing about how to edit a story to get it into a big name publication, or how to start a local newsletter or anything like that, that content would do extremely well. Again, If you’re helping the person level up and learn some new skill or improve their skills in some way, then that’s a great thing to be sharing on Medium.

Rob Marsh: And then you kind of answered this question already, but how long can it reasonably take to build up an audience or to get to the point where you’ve got the views that you want or that you’re even making money in doing this?

Thomas Smith: You know, it really depends, um, on what you’re writing about and if you can get something boosted early on or not. If something gets boosted in the early days, you can earn substantial money just through the Medium partner program. But let me step back for a second. There’s a bunch of different ways to monetize on media. I’d say there’s probably five core ways that you can monetize. The one that most people jump to is the partner program and Medium is kind of unique in this area. A lot of partner programs, like if you’re going to publish on Tik TOK or something, you really have to have a huge reach before you’re going to make any money at all from it. Even something like the Facebook bonus programs is one that I think a lot of people are focused on right now. You need millions of views. You need a lot of followers to even get into the program. The Medium Partner Program, all you have to do is become a paid Medium subscriber. So you got to pay your five bucks a month and you’re pretty much into the program. You have to live in a geography that’s allowed, but there’s about 70 countries now where you can be in that program. And once you’re in the Partner Program and you pay all your content on Medium, you get paid for every person that reads that story. And there’s a whole formula that determines exactly how much getting things boosted makes a big difference. Having followers makes a difference. The amount of time people spend reading the story makes a difference, but fundamentally you’re getting paid for every person who reads that story from literally day one. So, you know, are you going to earn a ton of money from the very get go? If you get something boosted, yeah, you can earn hundreds of dollars on a story in your first week. Um, I work with somebody who. Came to the platform, got a story boosted in this first week and was at about $115 in a week on the platform. Most people, it’s probably not going to be that quick of a build. It’s going to be something where you build up a set of stories over time. Maybe you sometimes get stuff boosted and get a big bump, but it’s going to be this gradual sort of cumulative building of the earnings from the partner program. And at this point with almost 800 stories on Medium, If I just sit down and do nothing on the platform, if I literally don’t publish a story for a month, I’m still earning about $1,200 or $1,300 a month from the partner program, just from that passive set of stories that I’ve built up. So, you know, it’s not going to be job replacement income for most people, but it’s a pretty nice passive thing. If I write more stories and I get stuff boosted, then the earnings go up from there. In August, for example, I made $4,424 on the platform. My best month ever when I got that 11 million view story was $19,000. And a single month from the partner program. Wow. So again, that’s a lot. I mean, that’s nothing to sniff at. Yes, exactly. That would be nice if it was every month. It’s certainly not. Even the 4,000 was a particularly solid month, but that gives you a sense of the potential there. It’s a, it’s a slow build as you build up your collection of stories with these big spikes, if you get stuff boosted, essentially. Um, there’s plenty of other ways to monetize though. I think the partner program is maybe my number two or three way to monetize on the platform. Let’s talk about some of those others. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the best one and probably the one most relevant to folks here is to use Medium as a lead generation strategy for your business. And what that looks like is you publish a story on Medium about something that you do. And that could be, again, for copywriters, it could be, you know, how do you write in a way that doesn’t sound like AI? You know, how do you write a landing page that encourages more people to sign up for your newsletter or to purchase a course or a product or something like that? It could be, you know, tips for using AI effectively in your writing. It could be tips for tools that you could use, really anything that would be relevant to your target customer and you share something useful to them. And then at the end of your story, you include a call to action that can be as simple as, you know, if you wanted me to do this for you, or you want to hire somebody to do this work or to coach you through it, here’s my email address. And it can be literally again, as simple as that. If you have a newsletter, you can include a call to action for people to sign up for your newsletter. That works extremely well too, especially if you have a lead magnet, if you’re giving away a guide or an e-book or something that people want, that can be a very effective strategy there. But basically, you write about the stuff you would want people to hire you to do. It can’t be salesy. It has to genuinely deliver value. And again, at the end, you put in a CTA for people to contact you. And I know writers and writing coaches who have built a whole business just out of that. You know, sharing tips for editing, for example, sharing tips for getting into big publications. They include a call to action about hiring them. They’ve built a whole client base just through writing on Medium. In my case, again, I added a whole consulting arm to my company. basically by writing about what my company was doing and then including my contact info. And I had people start to reach out and say, you know, Hey, can you just do this for me? I don’t, I don’t want to learn how to do it. Can you just come in and do this work? And, um, I’ve started to do content consulting. I’ve started to teach people how to use Medium. Um, I’ve done, uh, PR consulting. I’ve done anything that revolves around content essentially out of that. So just write about the stuff, you know, deliver value, include a CTA. either to your newsletter or directly contacting you. And again, Medium’s audience is there to learn. They’re there to level up. And if the fastest and easiest way to level up is to hire you, people on that platform will go ahead and hire you.

Rob Marsh: Makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So that’s two of the four or five ways to monetize. What else?

Thomas Smith: Yeah. So, you know, I think Those are the two there I would split out into two different ones. So there’s the partner program, there’s lead gen and there’s newsletters. I kind of lumped them together, but in reality, combining those together, the newsletters and lead gen is probably, there’s probably people who will do one or the other. So even if you’re not trying to bring in new clients to your business, You can easily capture people’s email addresses and build a newsletter, uh, publishing on Medium. So that would be again, including a CTA, ideally, ideally a lead magnet. You can build your own list. I use Convertkit. A lot of people use MailChimp. There’s all different kinds of programs. You can even pitch your Substack on there. A lot of people have a Substack already and they come to Medium and use it as a way to grow their Substack. So you can basically have a CTA. It says, if you want more of my writing, you know, subscribe to me directly on this other platform. Even if you’re not immediately selling something or you don’t have space for another client, that allows you to capture that person’s contact info and send your new stories out to them. You know, send, if you have a course, you can pitch that to them. If you have other tools where you’re an affiliate, you can, uh, you can pitch that to them. And it just, it’s in a way to, to capture that relationship and take it off of the Medium platform. 

One of the cool things with Medium, they actually encourage you to do that. So anyone who posts on like Facebook or even LinkedIn knows if you try to bring people off platform, you kind of get penalized in your reach. Like they don’t want you to do that. Medium is different. Um, doesn’t, doesn’t seem to impact reach at all to include those kinds of calls to action. And Medium even gives you a way to put a subscribe link in the CTA. That’s all within the Medium platform. People can actually press a button and get on your email list within Medium, and you can export those emails and put them in Convertkit or MailChimp or whatever. So, partner program, lead gen, building an email newsletter. 

Another great way is to use Medium as a platform for what I think people would call kind of like thought leadership, or it could also be considered almost like a PR platform. And I know you recently had a guest talk about, you know, PR and going to PR through, through a different approach. I think a lot of the tips shared there are very relevant here too. I have gotten coverage for my company in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Coindesk, a very specific place talking about crypto. And a whole bunch of other publications through writing on Medium. And the reason for that is that a lot of journalists are media members. It’s a platform where journalists might publish their own work. They read each other’s work on there. 

There’s big name people like Barack Obama who published stories on Medium. So journalists are there and following along. And so when I’ve written pieces generally about my company, but with some kind of, um, broader tie-in. I did a story about how a tool from Microsoft called Copilot—this was early in the generative AI days—was helping me to code better, to write Python code. Even though I’m not a great coder, I could use this tool and sort of improve that. And this hybrid of me and the tool was more powerful than me or the tool alone. And a journalist from the New York Times read that story, reached out, asked if he could interview me. and ended up doing a feature story about my company and how we’ve used AI and this specific tool. 

As your guest before had shared, it’s incredibly impactful to your business, both in terms of SEO, backlinks, that kind of thing, but also just notoriety to be featured in these big name publications. So using it as a platform to connect with journalists, using it as a place to publish those kind of thought leadership pieces, to get speaking engagements and that kind of thing, I’ve found can be really effective. It’s a little more indirect way to monetize, but if you’re building a business, it really helps when I can say, you know, my business will go to images, go to images as seen in the New York times, you know, does blah, blah, blah. It establishes that credibility. And that again, all came through Medium. 

The final way to monetize. And this is one that I do a bit, but I’ve seen other people do incredibly successfully is through affiliate marketing. So if you have tools that you use. that you find to be really effective in your own work, you can often sign up as an affiliate for that tool, where if you promote that tool, or it could be somebody’s course, you have a friend who has a course, and somebody purchases that, then you get a commission on that sale. And I’ve done this for everything from like, I wrote a story about the Swiffer Wet Jet, which is a cleaning cleaning product, all the way to—I’ve written detailed software explainers about AI tools that I use in my company. And as an affiliate, you can write about that on Medium. You can include a link to that tool with your own affiliate tracking code. That’s totally fine with Medium. You have to disclose that it’s an affiliate link. But if somebody clicks on that and makes a purchase, then you end up with a commission. And again, thinking about the fact that Medium has a DR 94, it ranks very highly in Google. 

If you wrote a great software explainer about some, you know, high price, complex piece of B2B software, even something as simple, you know, in the copywriting spaces, like I’ve reviewed grammarly and talked about grammarly. And how it fits for specific parts of my business and where it doesn’t work and that kind of thing. I’m in their affiliate program. I include a link. If somebody decides to check them out and click through, I got a commission on that. There’s so many affiliate products. And if you write good reviews, not sort of… There’s a lot of affiliate stuff that gets a bad rap, I think, because it’s not well done, but if you write a really good and helpful review and you include an affiliate link and disclose it. And people click through and buy. I’ve had single stories on Medium that have earned over a thousand dollars a month for in some cases, a year and a half, just from the affiliate links in those stories. So yeah, that’s the final piece. So basically partner program, affiliate marketing, thought leadership, building a newsletter, which again, you can then use for all of the above. And then, I think the biggest one, the best one is direct legion.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, all of that stuff that we probably should be doing in our own businesses, even if all you do or think of yourself as a copywriter or a content writer, there’s so many different ways that a platform like this can help boost a business. So as you were talking, I noted down a couple of additional questions. You mentioned paywalling your content. Is there ever a reason why you wouldn’t want to paywall your content? Obviously, you don’t make money on stuff that’s not paywalled, I believe. I could be wrong about that. But, uh, you know, is there ever a reason why you would want free content on Medium?

Thomas Smith: Yeah. It’s a question I get asked a lot. You know, if I’m doing lead gen, should I still pay wall? I tell people in general default towards paywalling your content. And the reason for that is that I have not seen a big difference in, external traffic to articles that are paywalled versus articles that aren’t. So Medium, like most platforms, is not going to kick out like the Google bot or the bots for search engines or, you know, AI tools and that kind of thing. At this point, they’re going to be able to see the article. They’re going to be able to index it. And most people have a certain number of free Medium stories they can read remaining in their account. And I don’t know how many Medium gives them before they pay wall stuff and sort of make it a hard paywall. But most people can read a couple Medium stories per month, um, before they get sort of kicked out of the platform. They can’t, they have to subscribe to access. 

So what I find is that most of the time, if I write a story in paywallet, the people who are coming for that one-off, you know, external view, like they’ve searched the topic on, on Google and they come to Medium, they probably have a free story and they can probably read it and still click my affiliate links and still find my lead gen CTAs and still get on my newsletter. It’s not going to make a big difference, but the people who are within the Medium platform who are in the paying subscriber list are still going to see that story and read it and also get paid through the partner program. So I think of it like YouTube, most people who are on YouTube and are monetized, they’re not making a living off of the AdSense income that comes from YouTube ads from Google. What they are doing is making an income from sending people to their business, any people to their newsletter, you know, getting sponsors, that kind of thing. But the money you get from those ads, those ad sense ads, on there, it’s nice. It’s a little extra bonus, even if you never get any other benefits. You can still pick up a little money there. Maybe it’s latte money. Maybe it’s not, you know, life-changing, uh, income. I would think of it as being very similar to earning on YouTube. And, um, I think that, you know, you’re, you’re still going to make that sort of background layer of income from the partner program. The majority of the income is going to come through those other opportunities in the, you know, in most cases, but just like with YouTube, where if you have a video that really goes viral and takes off. suddenly, you know, those earnings from the AdSense trickle, you know, it’s normally just sort of like supplementary income can become very substantial. And that’s the same way to think about it on Medium, the partner program earnings are kind of that nice baseline, it’s passive income in the long term, it’s a little bonus on top of what you’re going to get through those other strategies I mentioned, but As you know, my $19,000 a month illustrates if something gets really a lot of play, which can happen or in the new environment on Medium, if it gets boosted, then you can really make substantial money just from that partner program. So I wouldn’t cut that off. I would leave it paywall for that possibility that it’s going to go viral and then you can make a huge amount from it or over the longterm, that little trickle. that comes in and cumulatively builds to $1,200 a month or whatever it is for me now. But at the same time, if you do pay wallet, you’re probably not cutting that many people off. The only exception I would say to that is if you’re writing a story where really your only goal is affiliate marketing, we’re trying to rank on Google, you’re trying to bring people in and send them over to a tool that you use or something like that. Sometimes I will take those stories out from behind the paywall, just because that’s my main way to monetize. There’s probably not going to be that much internal traffic to them on Medium. So you might as well just take that paywall down. Otherwise, though, I just encourage people don’t be afraid to paywall it because it really doesn’t seem to turn that many people away.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. So another question, you know, you’re talking about pitching publications, pitching your stories, your articles to publications. Would you pitch old stories? You know, you’ve got 800 stories. Hopefully most of them are good. Would you ever go back and say, OK, well, I wrote this two years ago, but it’s still relevant. It’s still good. Can I pitch that to a publication or are they really only interested in the newest stuff?

Thomas Smith: Mostly it has to be, you know, under six months old to get into a publication. It can vary, but that’s sort of the sweet spot. You can actually send a draft to a publication before it has even been published. A lot of publications like that because then they’re sort of the first ones to publish it and get it out there. So ideally you write a draft, you submit it to a publication, they accept it, they actually control when it’s published, and then it goes out and you get access to that audience. One thing that can happen that is another nice thing about Medium If you write a great story and it starts to get traffic on Medium independently of a publication, um, a lot of publication editors were also reading Medium. We’ll see it. And people will actually reach out to you in many cases and say, Hey, I think this story would be a perfect fit for my publication. Do you want to submit it? So a lot of it can actually come about organically just by publishing stuff that you know about and then waiting for, um, for editors to approach you.

Rob Marsh: Makes sense. And then are there, uh, rules or, or maybe a Medium culture about submitting to multiple publications at the same time? You know, is it not cool to do that or, you know, how does that work? If I’m a publication editor, am I going to get mad if I see your article show up in somebody else’s publication after you’ve pitched me?

Thomas Smith: Yeah. So you can’t submit to more than one at a time. So the submitting to the publication. It’s to get into the publication in the first place. It’s usually a very manual process. It’s literally like every publication is different. Some have a Google form. Some have just an email for the editor. Um, some have submission guidelines. Some of them it’s, you just have to kind of guess. Uh, but you basically connect with the, with the editor of the publication. They can then add you as a writer on me. Once you’ve done that, it’s all on the platform. So you can have your, you can write your story when you’re in the draft, you have a little dropdown and you can choose any publication that you’re a writer for and choose to submit the story to that publication. When you do that, the editor will get that story and they can decide to publish it. They can make edits to it, or they can decide to reject it. If they reject it, it comes back to you and you can still publish it on your own profile or find another publication. But you can’t submit it to more than one publication at a time. So it is this serial process. And, you know, that can be frustrating because, uh, publication editors are volunteers. Some people get a very small stipend to participate as, um, nominators. Medium is very straightforward about that, but it’s, it’s small. Um, so it’s mostly a volunteer opportunity for editors. They don’t get a cut of your partner program earnings either. You still get all of that. So it’s usually sort of a labor of love, um, or, you know, somebody who’s building a publication that relates to their own business. So the times to wait. Depending on the publication can be weeks in some cases. So you do have to prepare yourself for that. Um, but no, unfortunately, you know, you can’t directly send it to multiple publications. One thing you can do, and I encourage people to do though, once something’s published on Medium. You can pitch it to as many traditional publications as a reprint as you want to. Um, so I’ve had a lot of stories on Medium that then end up getting reprinted elsewhere in much bigger publications. And again, if your strategy is lead gen and thought leadership, that sort of follow on effect and ability to double dip, um, can be really substantial too.

Rob Marsh: That’s almost my next question. You know, I know that there are some adjustments you can make to a Medium article once it’s gotten its popularity or it’s gotten a lot of traffic where you can adjust the canonical back to your own website if you’re republishing. But, you know, what should I be thinking about as far as republishing? Should I publish on my blog first, publish on my substack second, Medium third, Medium first, substack second? Like, what is the optimal way to get it in front of as many audiences as possible?

Thomas Smith: It depends on the story. Medium is, is very okay with, um, posting content that you’ve published somewhere else. So even for boosted stories, it’s not going to hurt you to take something that you wrote on your blog and publish it on Medium. So yeah, some people think, oh, it has to be original. That’s not the case. They’re fine with stuff that’s republished as long as it’s yours. The one thing they don’t want is you taking somebody else’s story and then trying to publish it on there. Um, so that’s the first piece is you can always publish it on your own blog. You can always publish it on your sub stack. And then publish it on Medium. As you mentioned, you can canonical link back. So basically all of the SEO impact of that story will pass through over to your blog. It won’t steal, you know, traffic from your blog, um, to, to republish it on Medium. So that’s the way I see a lot of people do it. They publish on their own newsletter first or on their blog first, then they republish the story over to Medium at 48 hours later, in some cases, uh, sometimes, you know, months or years later, if they’re, if they have a big blog or a big newsletter, and they want to add Medium as kind of a new, like separate channel, they’ll go back and take their back catalog of content and just go through and publish it on Medium, maybe tweak it a bit to fit the audience, throw in some CTAs, submit it to a publication or publish it on their own. That’s a very legitimate way to do it. Another way I’ve seen it done is to write the story on Medium first, publish it on Medium, try to get it boosted, see where you can go from there, and then later publish it to your newsletter or your sub stack or publish it out on your blog. I think if your audience overlaps between Medium and those other places, that’s a better way to do it. Um, because Medium will send the story out to. All the people in, you know, all your followers in their email. So if they do that and the person gets the story and then, you know, you go ahead and take that story and send it later, or you sent it to your sub stack and then they get it on their Medium digest. They’re sort of getting the same story multiple times. And people sometimes unsubscribe or they get upset because they feel like they’re getting spammed. So what I like to do is publish it on Medium first. And then I actually have a tag in my newsletter software that says that the people who are my subscribers on Medium basically leave them off of the email when I send a Medium story out. And that way it avoids them getting the story twice. If you published your substack or your newsletter first, And then publish on Medium, you can’t tell Medium, hey, don’t send it to all the people who are sub stack subscribers. So that’s the one where if you have a very overlapping audience, maybe do Medium first and then set up that manual exclusion. So you’re not kind of spamming people. Yeah, that makes total sense.

Rob Marsh: How about like, as far as publishing goes, let’s say that I’ve, you know, published a bunch of articles, I’m getting the hang of it, I seem to be getting a little attraction, should I start my own publication? Or am I better off using other people’s publications as an audience tool?

Thomas Smith: What I tell people is only start a publication if you’re planning to A, connect a domain name to it, which you can do, or B, accept stories from other writers. If all you’re going to do is publish your own stuff and you’re not going to connect a custom domain to the publication, then there’s really no reason to do it. You’re better off just publishing to your own profile. Um, if you want to connect a custom domain, which Medium lets you do, that’s great because you can then connect it to Google search console, for example, and see where people, what people are searching for to land at it on it. You can have a, basically a brand that you build around it. That can be a great way to kind of take the Medium platform and use it almost like your own personal blog with monetization and all those tools still enabled. The downside is you lose the SEO impact of Medium’s, very strong domain. So if you’re trying to get stuff to rank on search, it’s not as good of a solution, but again, if you want better analytics and you want to build your own brand within the platform, uh, creating a publication, connecting the domain, it’s a good way to do it. I have one about, um, so DIY life tech. It’s a Medium publication. It’s a got its own custom domain. It’s tied to my YouTube channel in that case. So I’m not as worried about getting traffic within Medium, but it’s cool. I don’t have to run my own separate blog if I want to link to it, you know, from YouTube and I can still monetize on Medium. The second one is if you’re going to get stories from. Other writers. And if you want to do that work and be an editor, um, that’s fantastic. You know, you’re doing a real service to the Medium community by doing that and build up that publication. Pitch, basically go out, find stories you think are a fit, message the author, say, do you want to be in my publication? You can get people in there. Over the long term, it can be a great thing to do, especially if you’re running a business and you can say to your colleagues, hey, you should publish a story on my Medium profile. It’s a great offer for people. It’s a great way to meet new writers and build a community. I run a publication called The Generator about generative AI. It’s a lot of work. It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work. So I would not bite that off until, you know, you really feel like you have the time for it. Um, in the early days, I would focus on submitting to other publications or publishing on your own profile. Again, with the exception, if you want to connect a custom domain.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, we’ve talked about all of the reasons we should be doing it, all the benefits. Let’s do a quick primer. How do you get started? As my first article to publish, what are some guidelines here so that maybe I get a good first bang for my buck and I feel really good about the process and I’m willing to invest in this thing?

Thomas Smith: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is getting started is very easy. You create a Medium account. It’s free. You subscribe as a paying member. It’s $5 a month, so it’s not a big investment. Once you do that and you publish your first story, you can apply for the partner program. You connect Stripe to it. You fill out a tax form and you’re monetized. You can do it in an afternoon. It’s very, very easy. So that part is quite simple. choosing what to write and deciding how you’re going to build an audience on the platform, I think you want to look at what are skills that you have in your professional life or experiences that you have in your personal life that you can write about, you would enjoy writing about, and that other people would, again, get some benefit from. They would level up in some way. They would learn something new from that. And if you are a copywriter, that could be copywriting. It could be editing. It could be Pitching stories, could be working with journalists, writing sales page copy that converts, building a newsletter. All the stuff you do for your own business is all fair game to write about and would do well. It could be case studies. I did this for a client and here was the outcome. There’s a bunch of different ways to approach that. That would be a great place to start based on your own work experience. Personal stories though can do extremely well too. So if you went through something, if you experienced some life challenge. Um, maybe, you know, your business didn’t go well when you first started it. That’s also a great thing to write about. It really just has to be based on something, you know, in the real world. It’s not like SEO writing where it’s kind of, you adopt this generic voice, you know, it’s not you. It doesn’t have your own voice in it. Medium is very different. People want to hear from you. They want to know about your expertise, your experience, your trials and failures and successes. And they want specific, you know, real world data. So anything where you feel you can do that. and deliver some value to the audience. That’s a great place to start. I also encourage people look at the topic list for Medium. There’s actually a Medium. You can go to Medium. If you search Medium topics on Google is I I’m sure we can include a link too, but there’s a actual list of all of the categories you can write in. Um, and that can give you ideas. That’s how I got started. I went through, I was like, Oh, photography. Yes. You know, art, yes. technology, Python coding, like all these things. Yes, I can write about all of those. So that can provide you some inspiration. And that can get you started. If you can get a story boosted in the early days, that’s a huge, you know, win for for your motivation. But I encourage people to really come in thinking about it as a long game. Yeah, don’t think about it as something where you’re going to get even into the $100. Quickly, it takes time, like my first month on the platform, I made $7. And I probably published like 10 really solid stories. So it’s a cumulative thing. It builds over time. You need that followership. You need the community. It’s not a get rich quick type of thing. It’s not a side hustle where, you know, you can do it, you can launch it and be making tons of money in the first month. Um, it’s something that’s going to be a slow burn and you have to be ready for that and ready to keep publishing. Like any writing, you’re going to get rejected. Things aren’t going to do well. You’re going to write a great story and it’s going to get zero traffic. Um, that’s going to happen. So if you can weather that and keep publishing and keep writing great stuff, cumulatively over time, that’s where you’re going to start to see. Those benefits. And it was probably three years into writing on the platform that I really started to get clients out of it and build that content consulting piece to my business. I’m still earning money from the partner program along that whole, that whole route, but kind of think of it as something you’re going to do over the longterm. And that’s going to set you up for success. And ultimately those bigger wins down the line.

Rob Marsh: Two things that I really like about this for copywriters, content writers, is number one, we spend so much of our time writing for our clients and writing marketing materials, but at the same time, we often have ideas of things that we want to write for our own. I mentioned maybe I want to write a Western or maybe I want to write something else. Uh, and, and this seems like the place where you can really broaden your reach of your writing skills and just have a place where there’s an audience to consume some of that stuff. So I love that. And it, it can be done for fun, but also may lead to a little bit of income for you. And then the second thing that I love about this is just the opportunity that’s there. Like you said, so many different ways to grow a business. We’re already writers. We know how to catch attention with great headlines. We know how to write hooks. We know how to hold attention as we write an article or a story or whatever that is. having the extra exposure of a Medium audience over a personal blog where you might get a dozen web visits a month or whatever. It just feels like it’s an opportunity that if you’re doing writing anywhere, if you want a place to explore, this is a good place to do it. Really low risk with the potential, certainly no guarantees, but the potential of a decent reward, especially over time.

Thomas Smith: Absolutely. And it’s just very freeing. That was my, you know, the thing that keeps me there beyond the benefits to my business. It’s just that, you know, you write for SEO and it’s, you really, it’s just boring. You don’t know who wants to write a 3,000 word article reviewing, you know, some, some very specific, you know, appliance or something like that.

Rob Marsh: Must include this keyword in the second headline and that keyword in the third headline. Right. All of those kinds of things are.

Thomas Smith: Yeah. You’re writing for a machine and it just gets boring and Medium is, is so freeing because it’s your voice. you can write about whatever you want you can find an audience is gonna be people on their care about it you build community there’s a lot you a lot of feedback you start a lot of great conversations get people engaging with your work and especially if you’re kind of in the space of just writing for clients. Or, you know, you’re writing for SEO and you’re writing for machines all the time. Uh, just, just try it. And I guarantee you’re going to feel so much better about the stuff. It’s going to engage you creatively in a way that that kind of writing, you know, sometimes does, but often it can become just sort of wrote. And I think it’ll be a better writer across your business. If you have that outlet in addition to, you know, sometimes that kind of writing that you just. sit down and write from the heart or your own experience in your own voice, that ultimately actually drives even more interest in the business. So yeah, it’s very freeing. It’s a wonderful experience just to be on that platform as a writer.

Rob Marsh: That makes a lot of sense. So Thomas, I know because of the success that you’ve had and the experience that you’ve got writing Medium, you’ve put a lot of this stuff into a course to help other people do this. Obviously, you’ve given us enough to get started here, but if somebody wants to go even deeper, figure out, you know, exactly step-by-step what they need to be doing to – I guess a great word would be to thrive on Medium, where would they go or what should they be looking for?

Thomas Smith: Yeah, so you can go to thriveonmedium.com. That’s the page that I have all about this. And I share a lot more detail there, you know, totally for free. You can go, you can get on my newsletter too. I send out all kinds of stuff about optimizing headlines, choosing topics, finding the niche that’s going to work for you. you know, case studies, like breaking down exactly how much specific stories stories have earned and that kind of thing on there. And then yeah, if you want to dive even deeper, my course is probably 25 video lessons at this point, talking about everything from getting started getting monetized through to pitching publications, how to get boosted, I have a whole module about that. If you sign up on the website, I have a boost checklist where you can check through and see if your story is boost eligible and tweak things and fix them. I have a getting started checklist again, totally for free. So yeah, head over to thrive on Medium. You can access all those resources. And then if you want that really like sequential walkthrough of everything I’ve learned on the platform, those five different ways to monetize exactly how to do all of that and all those case studies. Um, then that’s the, that’s the course. And again, you can access that on the thrive on Medium site.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, we’ll definitely be looking at that and I’ll link to it in the show notes in case anybody’s driving and they can’t type that in really quickly. One last question about that, the boost program. So there are these boosters who can find content. Is there a list of these people so that we can forge personal connections with them or is it purely by luck they have to discover you?

Thomas Smith: Yeah, so it’s a combination. Um, I would say probably about 80 of the boost nominators have chosen to be public about it. You know, obviously I’m one of them. Medium has a list of all of the boost eligible publications. I linked to it from within the course. I’m sure you can find that the link we can share here too. Um, but you can start there and it has contact info for all of the people as well as what topic their publication covers. And again, it’s everything. Don’t think, oh, I’m, you know, I’m not a Python programmer. I don’t, you know, I don’t do natural language processing. I’m not going to be a fit. There’s boost nominators for every topic you can possibly imagine. Um, there’s also people who are like, you know, the Michelin inspectors of the world who choose to remain anonymous and they will find you, or you may publish in their publication and not even have any idea that they’re the one, you know, nominating your story. Medium also has their own team of boost nominators, very secretive, we don’t know exactly who they are, that go around and look for stories on the platform to boost independently of them being nominated by a subject matter expert. So their own team is out there searching too. And all that’s really just to say, if you write something really great, and it does have to be really great on the platform, it’s likely that that’s ultimately going to be found and boosted. There’s a lot of different ways to get into that program.

Rob Marsh: But this gets my brain going, you know, because I’m writing in so many other places. And especially when we talk about repurposing content, if I’m already writing it in one place, why not have it in Medium just in case? And, you know, with all of the potential that’s there. Uh, it seems like a no brainer in a lot of ways. So I just, I want to thank you for sharing so much about, you know, this, not just the platform, but you know, how to get started and your approach to it. You mentioned the Thrive on Medium course, but if somebody wants to follow you personally or see what you’re up to, maybe on Medium, maybe elsewhere, where else can they find you, Thomas?

Thomas Smith: So I’m on both Medium and X formerly Twitter as @TomSmith585. So you can find me there. You’re also totally welcome to email me directly. It’s Tom at gadoimages.com. Happy to answer questions. Happy to, you know, send along links and send you over to the course. If you, if you can’t find it, um, or to add you to my newsletter, feel free to reach out anytime, just, you know, directly by email.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. And someday we’ll have to have you come back and talk about photography and AI, uh, some of your other expertise, but I appreciate your time, Thomas. Thanks.

Thomas Smith: Thanks so much for having me.

Rob Marsh: Thanks, Thomas, for sharing so much about how he’s been successful on Medium. This isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to bring you money overnight, but Medium could be a long-term play for you to bring money into your business, especially if you like writing about different topics, or you write fiction, or you just want to get your ideas out into the world and not have them get lost in a social media feed. Now, a few weeks ago, we interviewed Gloria Chow on the podcast. That’s episode 413. She talked about PR as a platform for building authority. And Thomas mentioned something very similar about using Medium for this task. 

The one thing that I like about Medium’s potential for this is that they have an engaged audience of readers who are there waiting for great content. They’re not browsing through social media, trying to find something to entertain them, but they’re actually there looking for good content to read. And the audience is so much bigger than you’re ever going to be able to attract on your own blog. And there’s almost certainly more people on Medium looking for your content than people who are going to find you on social media or LinkedIn, where they’re going to see your thoughts before they scroll onto the next thing. Even beyond the potential to earn money, it’s a great place to build authority. And who knows, maybe you’ll get noticed there and be added to an even larger platform. And we heard Thomas talk about that earlier. If after listening to this episode, you try out Medium or maybe you’ve been writing on Medium for a while now, I’d like to hear about your experience. Hit me up at rob@ thecopywriterclub.com and let me know how you fared at Medium and maybe keep an eye out there for some content from me and possibly The Copywriter Club in the future. Who knows? Maybe someday there will be a Medium publication by The Copywriter Club where we can all share and boost each other’s writing. 

Thanks again to Thomas. Be sure to go to all of the places that Thomas mentioned where he can be found. We will link to his course in case you’re interested. Those will be in the show notes. Also to his LinkedIn and various places where you can find him.