My Medium Journey: Episode 3
Not exactly evergreen, but I’ll take it.
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This is a monthly feature in which I document my solopreneur journey from start to … uh … whatever comes after the start. Fail or flop, I hope we can all learn something from my experience.
Last month I only published two stories, but still managed to bring in $300.
First of all, what happened to my productivity? Well, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. My number one goal is to serve people. My number two goal is to become a skillful writer. For goal #2, I’ve been upping the ante with the amount of research I do for my stories, including interviewing folks (mostly over email).
Well, it turns out that responding to my emails is not on top of everyone’s To Do list. So my story pipeline got backed up. Now I realize I need to have multiple stories in progress at any given point in time to churn out one quality piece per week.
With multiple stories in play, I’ve started tracking them on GitHub. There are simpler project management systems out there, but I wrote software in a previous stage of life so I was already familiar with it.
How did I manage to nearly match last month’s earnings with fewer stories? My stories from the previous month kept earning. Naturally, they all were decelerating, but they had enough momentum coming into this month to still do reasonably well.
What I seemed to do right
While publishing fewer stories is not a winning long term strategy, I think getting organized and working to continue to dial up the quality of my stories absolutely was.
Also I have been trying to better align the topic areas of my stories with my newsletter and coaching offerings. This has definitely produced an uptick in subscribers coming to my newsletter.
Not every story needs to be on topic, but a good chunk of them should be.
Once again I had a story picked up by Medium’s “recommended reads” email digest for Health & Wellness. This produced a big spike in views for that article…
