Tag Archives: Online Business

8 Blogging Lessons I Learned from My Medium Stats

Medium is a great website for aspiring writers. It’s a great way to practice your craft, reach out to people, and build your audience. You receive a lot of feedback, in the form of comments and stats, which you can use to improve your writing.

I have my own WordPress blog hosted at ideavisionaction.com, but I import all of my blog posts to Medium with their import tool.

Since their import tool uses canonical links, importing your content to Medium is believed to be not causing any duplicate content penalty and to benefit the SEO of your blog.

Since the Google algorithm is an ever-changing black box, no one can say anything definitive about SEO, but in either case, I have read the statements above from Medium’s own documentation.

How to Use the Medium Stats

I appreciate the responses and claps very much and I find the Medium stats insightful as well. The Medium stats include views, reads, read ratio, and the number of fans. The only stat that I focus on is the number of fans.

I sort my stories, i.e. my Medium posts, according to the number of fans and analyze them in that order. I use those stats to populate the featured articles on my blog, welcome email of my weekly newsletter, Medium, and Twitter profiles.

I also try to learn lessons from my stats. Here are 8 lessons I learned so far.

Lesson #1: Get Published in a Medium Publication with a Big Following

There’s no way around this. There’s a huge difference between my stats before and after I was started to get published in the Startup publication.

How to get published in a publication?

Please refer to my post about How to Succeed in Your Craft in the Age of Technology for the answer to that question.

Lesson #2: Publish Every Day, At Least on Working Days

If you don’t publish at least on every working day, you’ll have a difficult time building a following. Publishing every day helps people getting familiar to you. When people get familiar to you, they are more likely to read and like your content.

There’s a balance between quality and frequency. Ideally, you have to deliver both. If you mess up with the quality, you’ll lose followers. If you mess up with the frequency, you’ll lose your followers’ goodwill. It’s like a dating partner that doesn’t show up on a date.

So, if you can’t hold that balance, tilt it slightly towards frequency, but not too much. Otherwise, you’ll be risking losing your followers altogether.

Publishing every day also helps you building momentum. Once you build your momentum, writing a post becomes much easier.

In a sense, publishing every day is easier than publishing every once in a while.

Lesson #3: The Title is the 90% of a Post

This is a lesson I learned from Tom Kuegler and unfortunately it is true. Only your diehard fans would read whatever you post online and your diehard fans are probably only 1% of your audience.

The rest is going to make a split-second decision about your content just by the title. If they like the title, they are going to read the rest of the post and probably like that too, unless you mess it up.

This lesson might sound like a click-bait, but it’s not the same. With a strong title, you’re making a promise. It’s up to you to follow up on that promise with your content. Otherwise, your credibility with the readers will erode and they won’t click on your posts no matter how great your titles are.

Lesson #4: Offer Silver Bullet Solutions

We are living in the age of distraction. People are bombarded with information from all directions. They don’t have the time to read a book, digest a complex personal development or weight loss system, and apply it in their own lives. Or at least, they think so.

As a result, people are looking for simple solutions. They are looking for one simple solution, exercise, practice, or principle to turn around their lives. That’s why posts like, The Principle that Explains All Human Behavior, This Is the Only Way to Solve Problems, Create Your Dream Life, 15 Minutes a Day receive a lot of claps.

Make no mistake, it’s not sufficient to promise those solutions in the title. You have to deliver on them. The solutions you promise should indeed solve the problem that the user has. So, you better think very hard or do your research to come up with those solutions, principles, and practices that are actually silver bullets.

Lesson #5: Offer Counterintuitive and Original Content

Everybody knows that they have to save money and invest. So, if you write a post about that, it won’t be read by many people.

But if you write about using Buddhist principles in business, a lot of curious readers will flock to your content. Curiosity is an important motivation.

Again, you have to deliver on your promises. You can’t publish nonsense just for the sake of being counterintuitive and original.

Lesson #6: Lists of X Lessons, Secrets, Principles

People are drawn to lists posts. They are easier to digest. People also assume that they could find at least one useful idea even if the rest of the list is useless or irrelevant. That’s why posts like Four Secrets of Leadership attract readers.

Then again, make sure you deliver what you promise.

There are posts that consist of extra-long lists, such as 100 lessons, 50 principles, and so on.  I haven’t experimented with them and I’m not opposed to them. If you can deliver on those promises in a blog post, more power to you.

To me extra-long lists seem to be more appropriate for a book title and who knows I might structure my book using the extra-long list method.

Lesson #7: Use Strong Language

Titles that include powerful words attracts readers. By strong language, I don’t mean using explicit language. It’s a matter of style and I don’t use explicit language often, but that doesn’t mean I have to use weak words. There’s a difference between strong language and explicit language.

Strong language attracts the attention of people. That’s why titles like How to Boost Your Mind Power, How to Develop Superpowers in Business and Relationships, and A Billion Dollar Disaster of a Business Model work.

Lesson #8: Combine These Lessons

If you can combine these lessons, you’ll boost the impact of your titles. Consider the title One Habit That Can Turn Around Your Life. It’s a combination of lesson #4 and #7. As a result, it’s more powerful than One Habit That Can Improve Your Life or How to Turn Around Your Life.

Aren’t These Click-Bait Techniques?

Not necessarily. As I have repeated multiple times before, it is only click-bait if you fail to deliver on your promises.

If you’re confident about your content, you might as well take your time to come up with several titles using these lessons and choose the most powerful title.

Moreover, as a writer, I truly believe that my content can make a positive difference in people’s lives. As a result, it’s my responsibility to get it in front of as many people as possible without hurting the message. If I didn’t want people to read my content, I’d write it down in my Evernote and be done with it.

So, if you want people to read your content, you better take your time and make the necessary effort to use these lessons to reach as many people as possible. Otherwise, you might write your ideas down in your journal and be done with them.

Conclusion

If you want your blog to be read a lot, import your content to Medium and work your way up to get published by a Medium publication with a large following.

Publish at least every working day to build momentum as a writer and to get familiar by readers.

Make sure you pay as much attention to your post titles as you pay to your posts. Come up with silver bullet solutions and counterintuitive, original content that delivers what it promises.

Using strong language in the title, coming up with list posts, and combining any of these lessons will improve your results as well.

Your Turn

  • What do you think about these lessons?
  • Are you going to give them a try?
  • What are the lessons that you have learned about blogging?

How to Monetize Medium

What could be an alternative to the premium membership model of Medium?

Medium is a social platform that focuses on long form text based content. This type of content isn’t appreciated as much as it used to, because of the switch to mobile devices.

I’m a big fan of Medium as a writer as well as a reader. As a writer, I import all of my blog posts to Medium. I appreciate the views, reads, claps, responses, and private notes I receive on Medium as well as the followers.

Medium gives me the opportunity to be featured by online publications with tens of thousands of followers. This gives me an almost instant reach to their audience. If you’re just starting out as a blogger, those numbers are well out of reach, unless you stir up waters in social media.

Moreover, I like the interaction with the editors and reader of those publications. I learn a lot from them. The themes of those publications are steering me towards certain topics such as entrepreneurship and investing.

As a reader, I get to read the posts of writers who are enthusiastic about what they are writing about, not to promote their latest online product. The Medium posts that reach my recommended list have a higher standard than other social platforms; much higher.

In summary, Medium is a fantastic platform for people who like to write and read long form text based content. They do a great job managing this community. But at the end of the day, someone has to pay for all of that great job.

Current Business Model of Medium

Medium’s current model is based on selling premium membership. Premium members get to read the premium posts. As far as I understand, the only difference between a premium post and a free post is that the author decides to offer their post as a premium post. In return, the author gets some fees based on how well the post is received by premium members.

Medium’s premium membership is not compelling enough for me to buy a subscription. First of all, my reading, listening, and watching lists are already full of free content. Second, my reading and listening lists are also full of premium Kindle and Audible content. Both lists would take me a few life times to consume. Medium’s premium membership is squeezed somewhere in between the tons of quality free or low price premium content.

Now, you can accuse me of being stingy and tell me to cough up the $5 per month to keep my favorite social platform afloat. Sure, I can do that, no problem, but it’s not only up to me. In order to succeed with a fundraiser, it has to be announced as such.

At this moment, the premium membership is marketed as something that would add value to my life. I don’t see how a premium Medium membership adds any value on top of the quality free and low cost premium content available.

The issue here is not money, but the time to consume all the content that is already offered. I pay for premium membership of Spotify. I buy Kindle books. I have an Audible subscription. I’m convinced of the value offer of these products and services; and I use them.

If Medium announces a fundraiser, I’m willing to contribute, as I contributed to Wikipedia multiple times. But as we all know, Wikipedia has a different structure. They are a non-profit. I don’t think all the venture capital investors of Medium would be willing to accept that.

If membership wouldn’t work for Medium, what would?

Medium can use the promoted post model of Twitter and Facebook. I know this sounds scary to a lot of Medium fans, but stick with me. Forbes has something called Brand Voices, where corporations pay to promote their posts on their platform. The promoted post system also works fine for Twitter.

There is a conflict of interest when you use the promoted post model. On one end of the continuum, there is Medium, where writers pay nothing to publish their content. On the other end of the continuum, we have Facebook, where the only way to get your content in front of eyeballs is to pay.

The Medium model results in high quality posts and publications bubbling up to the homepages of readers. We all know what the Facebook model results in, but they make money. However, there are infinite points in between those two extremes.

Medium can receive promoted posts and they can adjust their algorithms to turn profits, sufficient enough to satisfy their investors without going full Facebook. The Facebook model reached a point where it isn’t sustainable anymore. They want to fix it as well.

Another argument against promoted posts could be that Medium has already tried this. Times change. An idea that didn’t work a few years ago could well work now with a few twists. It’s well worth trying if it would keep Medium afloat. The only alternative I can see is Medium going non-profit.

What I definitely wouldn’t like to see on Medium is those shady online marketing ads that we come across even on the websites of established publications.

Summary

The premium membership model doesn’t offer enough incentive to users to purchase it. It has to compete with an abundance of free and premium content available online. Promoted posts would be an alternative. A balance between user experience and profits needs to be maintained to keep the business sustainable.

There are two more alternatives. The first one is going non-profit, which would be the last resort given the venture capital Medium has already received. The second one is receiving ads, lots of them, which would reduce the user experience.

How to Grow Your Online Business

I received a comment from a young entrepreneur, Jan, who wanted to discuss ways of growing his online business. I researched this topic and experimented on it considerably in the past and here’s what I have found. The post is composed based on the comment of Jan. So, if you have further questions or remarks, please feel free to reach out to me with comments or private messages with the contact form.

Ad Networks

The major ad networks AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads are expensive. They are useful in two cases. The first case is that you already have a profitable business and you want to accelerate it. The second case is you have cash to burn and you want to experiment, a.k.a. gamble. In the second case, your goal is to find a cash flow positive business model.

I have experimented with the second case and didn’t succeed. I came to the conclusion that the only way to create a profitable business is through good old hard work. Once you develop a cash flow positive business model through organic methods, then you can use online ads to accelerate it.

The major ad networks reward the first strategy by offering you cheaper ad placements. They punish the second strategy by offering expensive ad placements to the not-so-well-established websites.

Google Analytics

I find Google Analytics to be a distraction for the starting solopreneur. Once you have Google Analytics set up on your website, guess what you do the whole day? Yes, that’s right; you check the number of visitors visiting your website the whole day, instead of creating valuable content and building relationships with other content creators and potential customers.

If you grow your business to a certain size and you have to start making decisions, such as which promotion method to invest more time and money, then you can set up Google Analytics to make those decisions.

If you’re a starter and your number of visitors don’t add up to a meaningful sample size, it doesn’t make sense to waste time and effort on Google Analytics.

The Best Way to Go

The best way to promote your business is through hard work on social media. The first question to ask yourself is what do you like to do the most. What comes natural to you? Do you like to write Facebook posts? Do you like to participate on Twitter? Do you like to write blog posts? Do you like to create images with quotes on them? Do you like to record audio and publish it as a podcast? Do you like to shoot videos and publish them as vlogs on YouTube? Do you like SnapChat? Do you like to answer questions on Quora? Do you like to use another social media channel that isn’t mentioned here?

Find what comes natural to you. Find the one medium where you can create valuable, premium quality content on autopilot like a machine. Focus on that medium, produce and publish massive amounts of valuable, premium quality content. Next to that focus on building relationships with other content creators and potential customers. Once you have done that you can add other methods on top of those methods, such as adding other social media channels, or using the ad networks.

Whatever you do, don’t expect to get massive results within two years. As a matter of fact, don’t expect to get any results at all. If you are in need of urgent money, get a job. If you want to build a business that would bring you long-term value, be ready to invest at least two years of your life without seeing any result in return.

Nowadays, my medium is writing blog posts, publishing them on my blog, importing them to Medium, participating on Medium responding to other content creators’ posts, and participating on Twitter. There are dozens of other channels out there that I can use, but I want to focus on this chain first to build a base and then add on op of that step by step. Maybe I wouldn’t add any other channels at all.

How to Monetize

Don’t start a business with the question “how can I make money?” Start a business with “how can I add value?” When you add sufficient value, the market will find a way to compensate you. This is counter-intuitive, but this is how it works in this day and age. Not the other way around.

In the past, I started websites with the only intention of making money. The first thing I’d do is to find something to sell, such as products on Amazon, Audible, ClickBank, or other affiliate programs. I’d then create content around channeling my audience to those avenues. That doesn’t work anymore, if it ever worked.

My strategy now is to create 1000 diehard fans, provide them insane value for free, and let them tell me what I can do for them they’d pay for. If I can’t create those 1000 diehard fans, then it doesn’t make sense to develop a product in advance and trying to sell it to random people online. So, that’s my benchmark to start creating a product or service. I expect that to take me six months to two years. So, before that benchmark is hit, you won’t see me selling anything here.

SEO

I don’t believe in hacking your way to fooling search engines to sending you more traffic. Especially, using obvious techniques such as link exchanges are easy to detect and ignored, if not punished, by the search engines.

Here’s the mindset I have on SEO. When I start a website, I completely ignore the search engines. I act as if they don’t exist. I try to create the most valuable website that I can create and try to grow it in organic ways as explained above. I see the search engine traffic as by-product, not the main goal. People who see the search engine traffic as their main goal are one Google algorithm change away from getting broke. It happened before; it will happen in the future.

By the way, importing your blog posts to Medium through their importing tool would improve your SEO.

References

I’d like to say that I was the top expert on this issue, but I’m not. I have some experience over the years. When it comes to online marketing, the only person I look at is Gary Vaynerchuk. I listened to all of his books on audible and checked his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook on Kindle. I believe Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is the right place to start. And of course, his podcast is a great, free source to learn from.

Be careful that this is time sensitive information and try to grasp the mindset instead of the techniques. Because the techniques change over time. The techniques that worked last year might not work this year. However, once you get the mindset of the Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, you’re set up for life. I have learned the concept of 1000 true fans from Tim Ferris’s book Tools of Titans.

If you have more comments and questions, let me know in the comments below or via a private message. Thank you.