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How Thomas Smith Makes $5k/Month Writing on Medium


When Thomas Smith started publishing articles on Medium back in 2019, it was just a side hustle.

Over the years, however, he’s been able to develop a strategy to succeed on the platform, and today Medium is extremely valuable for him, providing a large part of his monthly income as well as countless business opportunities.

Although he did peak at $17k in a single month, his recent earnings are in the $2k to $5k neighborhood and has had several 5-figure months.

In this interview, Thomas explains what Medium is and how it works, he talks about content creation and how to do it right, and he shares several strategies for monetization and how to make the most of your presence there.

Watch the Full Episode

Thomas starts by sharing a bit about his journey to date as the owner of an AI-powered photography company. Although that keeps him busy, he also has a passion for writing and publishing content.

In 2019, he discovered Medium, where he started publishing his stories. It went from a side hustle to a core part of his business, and he’s even created a funnel of new business for his agency.

He gives an overview of Medium, which is a subscription-based platform. He explains how it works and compares it to other platforms in the space.

Thomas talks a little bit about his progression on the platform, where he’s published more than 700 articles since he joined in 2019. In May, he earned over $4k and in June over $2k, though he did note that his best month ever was back in 2020, when he earned $19k. Although that figure isn’t typical, it does show you what’s possible.

He also points out that he found his best client through Medium, reflecting the long-term value of this side hustle, and his presence on the platform has also led to many other opportunities.

He talks about how Medium works, the number of paid subscribers it has, how to get started, and why the audience is “high-value.” He also shares how writers’ content gets pushed to readers and discusses in detail about the type of content that succeeds on the platform, which is quite different from the SEO content many people are used to writing.

Then he talks about getting your content in front of the right people and building your own following on the platform. He shares some tips for doing this and tells the story of how he got a foothold on Medium. He also talks about optimizing your content to earn more through the Partner Program and the new Boost Program.

Thomas points out the mistakes people often make and then dives into monetization, of which there are five core ways, which he discusses in detail, from affiliate marketing to using it as a lead generation platform to build out your business. 

He shares a few inspiring stories about how he has converted readers into clients and encourages people to “triple-dip” on the platform.

Lastly, Thomas talks about repurposing old content for Medium, sharing content published on Medium elsewhere, and the other possibilities the platform offers.

Topics Thomas Smith Talks About

  • His background
  • What is Medium
  • His success on the platform
  • How the platform works
  • How to write content that succeeds
  • Getting found
  • Earning money 
  • Mistakes people make
  • Similarities with newsletters
  • Monetization
  • Reusing content

Transcript

Jared: You run an agency photography agency that really harnesses AI. And we are here talking about a platform that you’re succeeding on.

That doesn’t really have any images as a part of it and does not embrace AI in any way. You know, 

that’s the irony. 

Jared: It’s another side hustle that 

I have talked with you about in passing. I think Medium is just such an exciting platform. It’s something a lot of people aren’t aware of. Incredibly viable side hustle.

Jared: But it’s also going to be potentially more for businesses and people listening who want to use it to actually grow their brand online. 

They just exploded over the last year and the platform has just crossed a million paid subscribers. They’re probably bringing in just from subscribers about 7 million, seven and a half million dollars a month.

Tell us about your success. I have published 779 articles on my best month ever on Medium. This was in 2020. I made 19, 199. Wow. I’ve gotten feature story in the New York Times. A feature story in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve gotten writing opportunities in publications like IEEE Spectrum, CoinDesk. I’ve gone on NBC News to talk about AI.

Jared: What beyond! Creating great content, like what makes 

something do well on Medium? I think that’s a great question because it’s very different from a lot of other platforms. So 

Jared: All right, welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today we have a repeat guest. Thomas Smith is joining us.

Thomas, welcome back on. It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you. Joined us, I feel like, uh, I feel like I’m repeating myself. Last week we had a repeat guest as well and Here we have you join us about a year later. You joined us to talk about Amazon Influencer, which was something, um, that Spencer and I were just discovering at the time.

Certainly we’ve talked about it a lot since then, and thanks a lot to your inspiration and your, your guidance and a lot of the great tips you shared in that episode. Today, we’re talking about something that I almost feel is related. It’s not related at all, but it’s related in that it’s another side hustle that I have talked with you about in passing and I’m fascinated to learn how deep you’ve dove into it.

I’m so excited that we’re talking all about medium today. And your longstanding success with Medium, but, um, before we get into the details of all this, can you catch us up to speed on what you do? Um, I, I, I know you did that in a previous podcast, we’ll link to that, but for those who didn’t hear that podcast episode, maybe you can fill us in on who you are.

Sure, yeah, well again, my name’s Thomas Smith, um, I run a AI powered photography agency, it’s my day job, my background is in AI and photography. So that’s sort of the main focus, but I’ve always published content online. I’ve always done a certain amount of writing. And within photography, my background is in photojournalism.

So I do that kind of work. I have a lot of connections to journalists. And I’ve always done a certain amount of writing on the side, writing stories and publishing them in sort of traditional fake publications and that kind of thing. And in 2019, I came and discovered Medium, which was a really fantastic platform for, at that time, just for publishing stories without having to work with a big publication.

And for me, it’s morphed from that into a side hustle and then into kind of a core part of my overall business. So I can talk about that. I can talk about my background there, but, um, really, you know, I think medium is just such an exciting platform. It’s something a lot of people aren’t aware of. And it’s something that at this point, particularly with changes that have happened over the last year is now an incredibly viable side hustle for someone who just wants to use it as that.

It’s also something where you can practically create. Funnels and frameworks that can grow an entire very successful business, even job replacement kind of income. So yeah, I’m just really excited to be here. And again, it was great talking about influencers. Still doing that. It’s still going along great in my kind of overall portfolio of side hustles and I think medium.

As you alluded to is just as exciting and I think even more exciting than that. 

Jared: I really like how you framed it out and I have the luxury of seeing ahead with the agenda we prepared. So I know where we’re going to go with today’s conversation, but I like how you framed it and from listening. I, I think it’s really important to hear that framing it, the way you’ve done it.

It’s both a tremendous side hustle, but it’s also so much more than that. You’ve actually used it to build out other parts of your business, to build out other areas of your business and actually to create a funnel of new business for your, your agency, your primary business. And so medium is going to present itself as a great side hustle.

And if that’s the way you want to go with it, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it’s also going to be potentially more for businesses and people listening who want to use it to actually grow their brand online. 

Absolutely. Yeah. As I’ll get to, I got my biggest client, um, through medium. So, you know, that’s been a huge, huge benefit 

to my agency.

Jared: Let’s talk about medium from a high level. We all have probably heard of medium. It’s a big enough brand now. Many of us, though, might not have used it or many of us have stumbled upon articles but maybe aren’t, say, members or we don’t frequent Medium. And then I also want to hear how it juxtaposes up against other, I don’t want to call them similar because I’m not actually sure how similar they are, but maybe like a sub stack or even lending down the beehive route, right?

Like these other content publishing platforms that are really in vogue right now. So maybe you can tell us about Medium but also how it relates to some of the other platforms many people might have experience in as well. Sure, 

yeah, so Medium is a subscription based platform, and that’s really important to understand.

So people join Medium as this, this entity, and they pay a monthly fee to be a member of that. And for that fee, they can read any article that’s published on Medium. And then on the flip side of that, writers can come along, people like me, and hopefully people like you in the future, um, write a story and publish it.

On that medium platform. And when you do that, your story is placed behind mediums paywall and only people who pay to subscribe to the medium platform, get to read your story. So it’s basically like a subscription community for people who really love reading great articles and the money that people pay to be a member of this subscription community.

subsidizes or funds the writers who come and write those great articles. So it’s kind of a really neat way to take an audience that’s very passionate about reading and pair them up with writers who are passionate about sharing their knowledge and create something that generates value for everybody.

And so, you know, to kind of compare it to like the substacks and beehives of the world. I think the biggest difference there is on substack, for example, you’re typically subscribing to one person. So, you know, you, you find a journalist that you really like, maybe they left their mainstream publication or, you know, they’re a thought leader in your industry and you pay, you know, your 5 a month or 10 a month, whatever to subscribe to them and you just get there.

And that’s great. If there’s one writer that you love and care about so much that you want to do that. The difference with Medium is that you pay that monthly fee and you get access to every single writer that’s on Medium, every story that’s on Medium behind that table. And that ranges from, you know, your Google engineer who just Decides they’ll write up some super dense technical article that’s incredibly helpful, but very esoteric about, you know, some Python module all the way to like Barack Obama is one of the contributors on Medium.

So you get people all the way across multiple different industries, um, people that are sharing their knowledge and by subscribing to the platform, you’re getting access to all that writing instead of having to commit to like, I’m going to pay 6 to subscribe to Jared and I’m going to, you know, pay 7 to subscribe to this other person.

And It’s very much, you buy into Medium as a, as a community, essentially, and you get access to everything that’s on there. 

Jared: Tell us about your success, whatever you’re comfortable sharing, whatever you feel, you know, is relevant for the conversation, just so people get their minds around it. And again, I know we talk about it in terms of like, hey, there’s a monetary success, but you also have other layers of success you’ve gotten from the platform.

Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So I started writing a Medium in 2019. Um, since then, I have published 779 articles on Medium. I just took a look this morning to see, uh, where I’m at, and yeah, 779 articles in Medium. Basically a bit over five years at this point, um, in June of this year, which is the most recent month I have, uh, and stats for from mediums partner program, which we’ll get into.

That’s the, the way that they pay writers directly. I made 2, 306 just from that in May I made 4, 350. So pretty solid month. Um, my best month ever on Medium, this was in 2020, I made 19, 199. Wow. And that kind of, I, I had kind of forgotten about that. It was deep, deep, uh, you know, crazy times at that point. Um, and, uh, I, I looked back and saw, wow, you know, that’s not typical, but that kind of shows you what’s possible on the platform just from that partner program.

Um, In addition to that, again, I got my best client on Medium. Somebody I’ve been working with for about two years now within my agency. So when you think about the long term value of that relationship, it’s certainly way higher than even my best month on Medium. And I’ve landed all kinds of other opportunities through Medium Writing, including an interview in the New York Times, a feature story in the Wall Street Journal, stories in IEEE Spectrum and Coindesk, and all kinds of traditional publications, along with backlinks, you know, back to my agency’s site from those.

It’s a incredibly valuable platform. It’s worked out really well for me, both on the sort of practical, you get paid every month side of things, um, to just those things that really in the long term, grow your business, grow your thought leadership in the industry and give you sort of those new opportunities.

Jared: Okay. So we have a viable platform here that you can earn checks from. We have a viable platform to build a brand. Any other benefits to medium? Like what are we allowed to do in the pro, in the program? And if I’m skipping ahead and you want to talk about that in a bit, let me know. But I’m just trying to give people an idea.

Like you write articles, you create content. Can you put calls to action? Can you link to certain, you know, different properties of yours? Like what does it actually look like in practicality? And I did the math by the way. That means you’re publishing 12 a month for five years. Am I correct in that? In that math?

Okay. Yeah, in math framework, yeah. Okay, so 12 a month. So you’re writing this content. What does it look like in practicality and what can we do inside these articles? What is our intent? What are we trying to do with medium? 

Yeah, so that’s a, I think, great to cover some of the basics there of how the, how the platform works.

So, just to, to start at the, the very basic level. When somebody decides to subscribe to Medium, they pay about 5 a month to do that. And there’s, um, other, there’s other levels. You can actually opt to pay more and kind of support Medium writers with that extra money. A lot of people do that. I was kind of skeptical than anyone would when they launched that, but it’s a very passionate community on Medium and people will do that.

So people are paying money in. And as of the end of the pandemic, so, um, probably about two, two or three years ago, they were at about 750, 000 paid subscribers. They just exploded over the last year. And the platform has just crossed a million paid subscribers. So, you figure each person’s putting in somewhere over 5 a month to be a member of Medium.

They’re probably bringing in, just from subscribers, about 7 million, 7. 5 million a month. And then the majority of that gets paid back out to the writers who are writing on the Medium platform. So as a writer, the way that that looks is you basically create a free medium account. It’s totally free to get started with writing and you sign into the system, you can create a profile.

There’s an about page you can link out to your, your other projects and that kind of thing. You can put in a bio, you know, kind of standard stuff on, on most platforms. And then when you’re ready to write, you get this really kind of beautiful, minimalistic interface. And it’s literally just. A title, a subtitle, you’ve got a blank page, you know, white background, black words.

You type out your story. You can add links. You can add headings, you can upload photos, and you can do embeds. And that’s it. There’s no, like, blocks and, you know, crazy, like, editing stuff that has to happen. Like, if you work with WordPress and you have to deal with plugins and security and, and you have block editors and all this, this crazy stuff.

It’s not there. It’s this very, very simple thing. You can write, there’s an app actually that’s wonderful. You can write on your phone. It’s a, a super simple process. And you type out your story. And the cool thing with Medium is that their audience is massive. Very passionate and they’re there to read. So they’re paying money to read.

It’s not, um, you know, a type of content where you have to bring in the eyeballs and sort of load it up with tons of images and videos and stuff. These are people that want to be reading your story, they will read in depth. I’ve written 13, 14 minute read, you know, articles, 3, 4, 000 words. People will read the entire thing.

You know, about a 7 minute read or about 1, 500 words is a typical length for a medium article. Um, and people will cheerfully read that entire thing. Probably over 70 percent of people will finish a given article that I write on the platform. So, it’s a community that wants to be there reading. It’s also because they’re paying to be there, a very high value audience.

So it’s often people, it’s people who are in tech, it’s people who are looking to improve themselves in some way. So that’s sort of the difference I would say between Medium and just a general, general audience on a blog where it’s everybody, you know, people are there for entertainment, people are there because they clicked the wrong link.

People that are on Medium are there generally because. They wanna level up in some way. That’s the way I like to tell people. And that means maybe they wanna learn a new skill, they wanna get some insight that’s gonna help them somehow in their own business or in their work. They wanna improve themselves in some way.

Um, maybe become more productive, maybe find some, you know, new way of organizing their morning routine. It’s very much oriented towards improvement, towards learning, towards, uh, again, sort of leveling your yourself up in some way. So that’s the audience that you’re working with. And again, they’re paying to be there, and the money that they pay goes back out to the writers.

And the way that works, again, you write your story, um, you have two options once you’ve written a story. You can either just publish it on Medium, and it goes to your own profile. And it’s just sort of out there as you. There’s also publications on Medium. And these are kind of curated chunks of writing around specific topics.

You can think of it almost like a blog within the Medium platform, or like a magazine within the Medium platform. And these publications are run generally by independent editors. And you can submit a story to a publication. And if it’s approved, it will be published both on your own Medium profile, And in that publication and for readers who are on Medium, they can opt to follow you as a writer.

They can opt to follow specific topics. So maybe, you know, you’re really interested in Python. You can follow the topic and you can opt to follow individual publications. So if I write a story about Python and I publish it on my own profile, it’ll go out to my followers or go out to people who are interested in Python.

If I write that and I publish it in a publication that relates to Python or, you know, whatever I’ve written about, then my story will go out to the followers of that publication, my followers, and people who are interested in that topic. So there’s a lot of ways once you publish something to get it out there.

But the, the biggest thing really to keep in mind there is that you’re not finding the audience. You’re not responsible for tracking those people down and kind of bringing them from the general internet and getting them to come to your blog. You know, they don’t need to go to my website in order to find it.

I write something on Medium. And it’s good and engaging, and we can talk about what that means in a lot more detail. Um, Medium will bring the people to me, and they’ll bring them to me to follow me, they’ll bring people in through the publication, they’ll bring people in through their interests, and show them that story and find me an audience.

And if my story resonates with a given audience, Medium will just keep spreading it to more and more people who are similar to that. And that’s how stories can take off, and you can end up with, you know, hundreds or thousands of views, and in some cases, millions. Hundreds of dollars or even thousands or 10, 000, tens of thousands of dollars earnings.

Jared: In, in the world of content creation, you can publish your article with the intent of ranking and getting search traffic. And we know all the different tactics and techniques that we have to do in order to get an article to rank and therefore get traffic. If we’re publishing on like a social media platform, we know virality is important, engagement is really important.

And then there’s techniques we’re going to go through to get our content. To get that virality and try to get seen by as many people as possible. What’s the angle on Medium? I mean, I know create great content, everyone’s just tired of hearing about that though. What beyond creating great content, like what makes something do well on Medium?

What gets eyeballs? You write about Python, but what makes your article the Python article that gets all the eyeballs, for example? 

I think that’s a great question because it’s very different from a lot of other platforms. So, you know, with SEO writing, you’re pretty much writing for a machine, right? And you’re writing for Google, yeah.

For Bing, you know, for, for, and to some extent with even like a video platform like YouTube, it’s the same thing. You’re really kind of tailoring your content to the, to the algorithm. Right. And you’re thinking about like, what is, you know, what’s going to be in my heading that the machine is going to read to understand what it’s, and it’s almost like.

Once somebody lands on the article, you almost don’t even care whether they, they have a good experience at that point. I mean, it sounds kind of awful to say, but it’s like you just are trying to get people there by almost getting the machine to think that your article is good. And then once they’re there, you know, people fill it up with AI.

They fill it up with, with, uh, you know, images and videos that, that, uh, may or may not be actually related. And so in many cases, It’s not a focus on the person and medium is completely the opposite. Um, it is entirely focused on delivering value to that reader. And so a couple of ways that that happens for one thing, medium is basically a fully human written platform.

So there’s, you’re not allowed to use AI writing, basically. I mean, things that you write have to be human written. If it’s AI written, people will sniff that out almost immediately, and Medium’s algorithm will sniff that out, and you won’t get any traction. So it has to be written for a person. And again, I think the biggest difference there is that it has to be engaging, it has to be personal, and it has to really share your experiences, your real world experiences, in a way that helps somebody, again, level up.

And that can be broad. It can be, you know, if I write a really great tutorial about a very specific. AI program, for example, you know, here’s how to upscale your images using this, this AI powered upscaler. And that’s super helpful to somebody who wants to do that. That will do well. If I write a super engaging and interesting personal essay about, you know, a travel experience that I had, that’s really relatable and that people care about, and they’ve had that similar experience and it gets them really interested and excited.

That will do extremely well too. If I write a kind of more like, You know, fitness or, um, personal finance oriented story or a story about productivity or self improvement that kind of teaches people to see themselves or see the world in a different way that will do well too. But basically the, the core is that it has to be engaging to a person.

It has to be personal, kind of in your voice. People don’t like generic writing on Medium. They want to hear from you. It has to be based on your own kind of pragmatic and real world experience. And it has to be helpful, has to help people, genuinely help people learn something, learn to do something better, learn to improve themselves in some fashion.

And if you can do all those things, then that’s what does well across any, any niche and genre. There’s many different kinds of things you can write about on Medium, but that’s sort of the common denominator of what does well. And as a writer, that’s really joyful. Because it’s so fun to write that versus 3000 words about like, you know, um, I’m, I’m going to buy a new microphone and like, here’s the, you know, the, the grill on it is this material and it’s this kind of condenser and the cord has this kind of connector that’s just boring to write about who wants to spend their life writing about that.

A medium, if you come up with something cool and creative and funny and voicey about your real world experience and it helps people and you write that up, you can get hundreds or thousands of people looking at it. 

Jared: You know, Thomas, I find it very interesting. I’ll just make this comment as an aside that you run an agency, a photography agency that really harnesses AI.

And we are here talking about a platform that you’re succeeding on. That doesn’t really have any images as a part of it and does not embrace AI in any way. 

You know, that’s the irony of Medium is that it’s very, it, it’s audience is very high tech. So that’s one, there’s several niches that do really well.

Tech is one that does extremely well. The audience on Medium cares deeply about tech. Um, and so if you write about programming, if you write about AI, that’s definitely a topic that’ll perform well. But the audience wants to hear from people. Thank you. So unlike a lot of platforms that are just inundated with AI and where the platform itself has leaned into AI or looked the other way on it, Medium is aggressively anti AI when it comes to the writing.

So write about AI by, you know, by all means, just don’t use AI in your process. Sometimes maybe you can, you can write something where you disclose that you used AI, but fundamentally it is a platform that’s centered on human writing. And that. It wasn’t automatic when AI writing first came out, Medium dabbled in it, allowing people to use it.

And what they realized is that their audience didn’t care for it. And so being a private platform, that’s very oriented towards keeping subscribers, and there’s no ads on Medium. That’s another thing that’s really important to know. There’s no ads on it. So they’re a hundred percent beholden to their subscribers.

And if their subscribers like something, that’s the direction Medium is going to go. The subscribers said very clearly, we don’t want a bunch of AI drivel on this platform. Medium bandit. And you know, now that’s the, that’s the, one of the selling points. If you subscribe, you know, you’re going to hear from real people.

You’re not going to be reading ChachiPT’s thoughts on. 

Jared: So let’s break down what a successful article looks like. You’ve alluded to a lot of it. Longer form. Um, super personable approach to the writing style. Very helpful. Um, what are the mechanisms, is it just, I get paid by the number of eyeballs that view it, or are there any other things that can help someone get more eyeballs?

Or is there any of the things that can help someone. Get more dollars per eyeball. Like what are the mechanisms of earning through medium? 

Yeah. So I think there’s, there’s kind of two parts to that. And let’s, let’s start by talking about the, the partner program, because that’s where I think a lot of people are going to start looking at medium.

Again, I think there’s much better ways to monetize long term on medium and we can get to those too, but looking just at partner program earnings. Um, two things, you know, the article itself, you need to optimize that, and then getting it in front of the right audiences, and that’s the second part is the hardest thing for new people on Medium.

Um, the article itself, again, being, you know, having a long enough article makes a big difference. Writing to topics that you are really knowledgeable about makes a big difference. It’s not a platform where you can just sort of breeze in and write about anything. It should be something that you have a lot of deep knowledge on.

Um, Writing in a way that’s compelling without being click bait y. So headlines, like many platforms, are very important, but Medium’s audience is very sensitive to click bait, and they will stop reading your article if you kind of tempt them with something that you don’t deliver on. But certainly a compelling headline, a compelling featured image makes a big difference in getting people there.

Um, the sort of elements of, of good writing that would have applied in A hundred years ago in journalism, really still apply on Medium, a lot more so than on other sort of more algorithmically driven platforms. A great intro that gets people excited that, you know, shares something really compelling right off the bat and makes them want to continue reading makes a huge difference.

Structuring the article in a way where there’s not a lot of fluff, you know, I think SEO writers, we get used to just throwing words in and sort of keywords and expanding and, you know, it’s not great for people. So an article that’s fairly structured and tailored that makes a huge difference. Um, again, you know, writing for the right topics for your audience.

So, tech, self improvement, personal writing does extremely well on there. If you’re writing, you know, tutorials, that kind of thing, software tutorials does really well. If you’re writing something like poetry, you can find an audience on Medium. There’s certainly people who are passionate about most anything on Medium.

I think you’ll have a little bit harder time of that. Science fiction, you’ll probably have a harder time writing about that. It’s very, the stuff that does well tends to be more, again, oriented towards learning to do something new, learning to improve yourself in some fashion. But certainly there’s a lot of strategies around Kind of optimizing the time people spend on the page.

The other thing that’s really important to understand is that through the Medium Partner Program, the chunk of that subscription money that you get is dependent on largely how much time people spend reading your stories. And interestingly, it’s done at the level of an individual user. So that’s where it’s a little bit different from a typical platform.

So, you know, if I subscribe to Medium and I pay my 5 a month and I go and read 100 articles on the platform, my 5 is going to get distributed among those 500, so, or 100 people rather. So they’re, they’re not going to get a ton of money out of that. If I pay my 5 and I only read one article in a month, all 5 is going to go to that writer.

So, there’s a strategy, I think, in what you write, and again, it’s very freeing if you enjoy writing, because you can write something that has a very broad appeal, and you’re going to get a bunch of people, you know, voracious medium readers that, again, read, you know, every day for hours a day, Reading your story.

And that’s great. You know, they’re, they’re going to be excited by it, but you’ll probably get little tiny bits of their subscription, but at the same time, you can write something that’s so specific, so, you know, there, maybe there’s 20 people that care so deeply about this thing. And if all 20 of those people, that’s the only story they see and care about reading, you know, in a given month, and they click through and read it, then you’re gonna get their 5, you know, subscription fee from each of those 20 people.

So, I’d say that, you know, unlike on a lot of platforms where it’s really just purely, you know, how many eyeballs can you attract, there’s different ways to, to approach it. You can write, again, broad interest stuff that’s gonna get little drips and drabs from a bigger group of people. Or you can write for a super specific niche audience that in some cases, maybe they subscribe to Medium literally just for you and they’re there to read your stuff, or, you know, they care about, um, the, the NLTK module in Python.

If you read a story about that, they’re going to read it. That’s the only story they’re going to read a month and you’re going to get their five bucks. And that’s all they care about. And to them, that’s worth it. You know, five bucks a month to hear a couple of great stories about the NLTK module in Python.

Fantastic. You know, there’s a lot of ways to approach it as a writer. So that’s, that’s the first piece you can write broad. You can go in depth, but really just queuing to your interests, writing something that delivers value for your reader, and that’s the first piece. And that is compelling and well written is, is the first piece of it.

Second piece is getting it in front of that audience. Because you can write something and Medium, again, will find the audience for you. And that will happen over time organically. But it happens a lot faster and a lot better if you kind of help that process along. And there’s a couple of different ways to do that.

One is to actively build your own following on Medium. So you can comment on other writers stories, for example. You can talk to other medium writers. There’s all kinds of communities of writers where people connect. It is a very sort of community driven platform. So people are there to help each other out.

There’s not a competitive element like there is an SEO. It’s sort of a, the more people we get reading on medium and you know, if they have a great experience, they’ll keep subscribing. So let’s all sort of help each other out. So if you work with other writers and get people, you know, reading your stories, responding to your stories.

That makes a big difference for new writers. Getting into a good publication can make all the difference in the world because there are some publications on medium that might have 200, 000 or 300, 000 followers just on the publication. And so if you come in as a brand new writer, you’re not going to have any following of your own on medium.

But if you can write a great story and pitch it to that publication with 300, 000 followers. And get it published, then you could get an audience in the thousands or tens of thousands, you know, overnight, instantaneously by kind of piggybacking on the success of that publication. So publications make a huge difference, and it’s hard sometimes to get into a good publication.

The way I kind of broke out on Medium was, I was writing for my own profile, and my stories did reasonably well, and then I wrote for a publication that no longer exists, but it’s called OneZero. And I pitched the editor, you know, it’s a very manual process, like I wrote emails to the editor and said, you should publish my story, and for probably four or five stories, she rejected everything I was writing, you know, this isn’t a fifth, not a fifth.

Finally, I got a story in, it did incredibly well, it’s still earning money, you know, now probably four years later. And that got my foot in the door. Then I had, um, people, you know, following me on the platform and that started the snowball effect of other people reading my work. So for new writers, getting into a good publication is a huge piece of it.

There’s also a new program. On Medium that is extremely powerful for getting found. And this is new over the last six months or so. It’s called the Boost program. And it’s basically Medium’s response essentially to AI content and the, the growth of AI content on other platforms on the web. And basically it is a system that’s driven entirely by human duration.

So there’s an algorithm on Medium. Assign stories or connect stories to people who might be interested. This is a totally manual addition to that. Okay. And the way that it works is medium basically went out and found about, it’s about 80 people now that are subject matter experts in their own fields.

And it’s all kinds of different fields, everything from like parenting, you know, to, to computer programming. Um, They are called boost curators. I actually happen to be one. I’m a boost curator for generative AI and boost curators run their own publication on medium in their area of expertise. Mine’s called the generator and writers can come along and submit a story to your publication in your area of interest, where they can pitch stories to you in your area of interest.

Often boost curators will help people kind of hone their story and get it into a form that. It will do really well and will work for mediums audience. And then when the public, when the story gets published, the boost curator can nominate that story through a manual process, uh, to mediums own team and an actual person on the medium team will look at it and look at the, the nomination and your pitch and decide if it gets a boost.

And if it does, then the story is assigned this boost status. And that basically, in my experience, results in about a 10x increase in earnings and distribution. So it’s huge. I mean, it can go from like, a story would earn you, you know, 100, instead it’s gonna earn you 1, 000. You know, 150, 1, 500. That’s a big way that writers can make really solid money on the platform.

You can get paid the same or what, or more than what you would earn for writing a story for like a big name application and you get your story out to this huge audience, you know, overnight when you get that boost status. And I’ve seen totally new writers come in who just know a lot about a really valuable or interesting topic.

They’re great writers, they write a fantastic story, they pitch it, you know, to me or another Boost curator, nominate it to Medium, their team decides to Boost it, and somebody who maybe has written one or two stories on the platform, And has almost no followers can overnight get, you know, 10, 000, 20, 000 people looking at their story.

So the boost program, it’s, it’s unpredictable, you know, it’s very selective, um, you will get rejected a lot. So, you know, just be prepared for that. But if you write something really fantastic and you really put the effort into it, and I can talk a little more about what that involves, but. Um, Medium actually, unlike a lot of other platforms, I’m not going to name names, they’re very transparent about what they’re looking for.

You can go, you can read all the guidelines for what makes a story boost worthy. Um, there’s tons of, you know, practical advice, right, from Medium’s team. In my experience, it’s very accurate, they’re very honest about what works. And if you can get that boost, then that’s a huge benefit. So again, just to sort of recap, great writing, um, well structured stories, you know, practical experience, helping people level up.

That’s the stuff you can do to optimize the earnings on your story. Create the audience, engage with people, build your own audience, or piggyback on a publication. And then if you can, try to find those opportunities to get boosted, because you probably won’t be able to do it right away. Most new writers can’t.

But if you just happen to be a great writer, or you write something that really resonates, then that can be an overnight, you know, ticket to, to medium success, 

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Jared: Can’t help it, be remiss of saying it sounds like Google from 10 years ago. Yeah. Great, great content that people love.

Uh, be unique. Uh, occasionally go out and pitch your content so you get a few links and a few mentions and round and round we go. You know, 

it’s so, yeah, it’s so refreshing compared to other platforms because. It, all the incentives are aligned towards creating great stuff, you know, it’s, there’s not this extra incentive of please the advertisers that you have on so many platforms or.

Please the algorithm, you know, or sneak in the AI, because we say we don’t want it, but really, you know, we want it. It’s very much, if you can write something that’s great and that people love, that works for Medium because it keeps people subscribing, works for the reader because they feel they get their money’s worth out of their five bucks or seven bucks or whatever it is a month, and it works for you because you get paid and you get this really passionate audience reading your work.

Jared: I mean, it, it does sound like, Even at its worst, as a great side hustle for a content creator, that it has those, has the muscle memory, has the skill sets built up about writing content that’s compelling in an ongoing basis. Um, maybe this is a good time to like, what are some tips you have for succeeding?

What are some things that people can avoid, maybe mistakes that you’ve made or you’ve seen people make along the way that you can share with people so that, you know, people can almost like skip some of the processes of learning these things on their own? 

You know, I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make writing on the platform is writing in the way that you would write for SEO.

Like kind of thinking that you have to hold back and you have to avoid saying anything really decisive or voicey or critical or, you know, You know, controversial, it’s not that platform. So if you write really bland stuff and you sort of trained yourself to write the kind of bland stuff that algorithms like, then you really have to unlearn a lot of that because what people want on medium is you, they want to know what you think about stuff.

And so if you are used to writing without any voice, or you’ve never learned to write in your own voice, then that’s something where you want to, you want to change. I think early on in the. In the process, I was writing sort of more like, you know, what you would do of a tutorial on your blog. Here’s how to use this software, like very practical, walk through the steps, screenshots of each step.

And that can do well, that can perform well on the platform. But, when you really start to kind of let loose and share what you really think about things, and talk about your failures, and curse, and like talk about stuff, you know, stuff you would never do in an SEO article. Um, then that’s when you really develop that personal relationship.

So I think that’s a mistake that I made early on. I still think I, you know, I tends towards that more like neutral journalistic type of writing and it can be hard, but the writers I’ve seen do really well are the ones that have something interesting to say, like it can’t just be a rant, but you know, they also have a voice, a very clear voice.

And if, if you can do that, then that works extremely well on the platform. I’m trying to use it for Parasite SEO. That’s a huge mistake. I see a lot of people make, and we’ll talk a little bit about, you know, the strategies for monetization beyond the partner program so far, really been focused on that because again, I think that’s where that’s the quickest way to make money on there, on the platform.

But going beyond that, there’s a lot of SEO opportunities through medium, but you can’t abuse it. So if you think you’re going to go there and like write about sketchy topics, um, you know, I think we all know what those are from the, from the, uh, the SEO space. And, oh my gosh, you know, I’m going to write these, these articles and I’m going to basically use this as a parasite platform, like I would use, you know, the Times of India or one of these other websites that’s kind of developed the relationship for that.

And that doesn’t work. Um, people on Medium won’t read it, therefore it won’t get any traction and you’re likely to get your account banned because Medium is very aggressive. About banning people who misuse AI, don’t disclose their use of AI or write content that is that, you know, that is parasite SEO. So that’s not something you can practically do on Medium.

Um, I think another way that people kind of make a mistake there is they don’t focus on the community element of Medium. They kind of think of it as another, you know, blog or another TikTok or something like that. Where. It’s very much transactional, like people come and they read your writing and they leave and that’s pretty much it.

You know, maybe you’re answering a question and they get their answer and they don’t care about you, they don’t care about coming back to your, to your publication again. Medium is not like that. It’s very, very community oriented. And if you write something good, you’ll have 20, 30 people writing long, in depth comments and questions on your article.

And to the extent that you have the time and the bandwidth to do it, if you can engage with those people and write back and talk to them. Then that builds that community element and those can be people that will follow you for the next year or two years or three years and, you know, will share your writing.

There’s an ability and medium to clap for stories. It’s sort of akin to a link on a traditional social media platform, but it is, um, it’s granular. You can clap up to 50 times on a story so people can clap once to just say, yeah, I read it. It’s cool. 50 times they have to hold or click that button 50 times.

So there’s a little investment of time and energy to clap, you know, 50 times for a story. So if you can engage with people, if you can create that personal relationship, you’ll kind of develop like this army of people who care about your writing and who will clap for your story. You know, there are 50 times and that again can, you know, increase the, uh, the reach that you get.

So certainly building that community and building up that audience and engaging actively on the platform makes a huge difference. I just want to get to the monetization. 

Jared: Tips beyond this and what I’m about to ask or at least share it dovetails really closely to it. So, um, just, I know we’ll get into talking about some of the other aspects, but as I hear you describe medium for the last 35, 40 minutes so far, to me, it feels like writing a newsletter, a personal branded newsletter in many, many ways, right?

Like, cause I have the weekend growth newsletter, a lot of people listening. Have developed newsletters. And what people really want to hear in their inbox is these very kind of personal takes on things. They want you to have personality. They want you, but they also need to have value to it, you know? And so it’s not just about, you know, kind of sharing where you are in the world that week.

It’s about delivering value, but from a perspective. And so it feels like a lot of people who have developed newsletters would experience a lot of success on Medium. Is there that parallel there? Is that a good way to kind of make it akin to, for those of us who, Subscribe to certain newsletters or maybe have a newsletter of our own.

Is that somewhat similar of the vein we’re supposed to look to achieve? 

Yeah, I would say it’s like a newsletter with a, you know, a paying audience of a million people plus, uh, tacked onto it and a DR 94. A searchable newsletter that has a ton more power behind it than any of the ones we subscribe to.

Exactly. So certainly the kind of writing that’s personal, that’s value oriented, that works in a newsletter. Works really well in medium. I’d say the only difference is that with a newsletter, aside from the practical that they’ve, they’ve got an audience to bring to you in a way that newsletters generally don’t, and they pay you in a way that newsletters don’t by default.

Um, the, the big difference is that a newsletter can be very sort of free form. 

Jared: Yeah. 

You know, you can ramble and you can rant and people are there for you. And so they’re kind of, they’re a little more tolerant of that, I find. On Medium, I think the, the principles of good writing, like keeping it succinct, having a compelling intro, having a really great title that delivers something that gets people excited or interested, or has some information gap that isn’t clickbait, the kinds of stuff, again, that would do well in traditional journalism, or that would have done well on Google, you know, ten years ago, Applies a bit more.

There needs to be a bit more of that structure, certainly a bit more kind of citing of sources, bringing in quotes, that kind of thing, particularly if you want your story to get boosted, then you would get in a traditional newsletter, but yes, absolutely. If you succeed as a newsletter writer. You can very easily port those skills and possibly even port some of the stuff you’ve written for your newsletter right over to Medium and be very comfortable and build up 

Jared: an audience.

Okay, just wanted to continue to frame out how we think about writing on Medium versus maybe some other platforms that we’re used to. Okay, the one we all want to hear about, monetization. I mean, we know how we make money in the Partner Program. You referenced it, it does sound a lot like maybe the YouTube, uh, Uh, monetization, uh, a partner program side of things where you kind of get just get paid based on the number of ads that are served.

But really it’s just about how many people view your, your videos, right? And you get kind of a portion of that, of that revenue. But let’s talk outside of that. Let’s talk other monetization or other just ways to benefit from your, your audience on Medium. 

Yeah. So I found in, you know, five years of writing on the platform, there’s basically five core ways that you can monetize.

Um, Yeah. And the partner program is the first one. Again, it’s a great way to get started because if you do really well and a story takes off, there’s like that immediate excitement about, you know, I earned like, I think my first month on Medium, I earned seven bucks. I was like, Oh yeah, instead of 7, I’m making money on this thing.

And then, you know, when it gets to 100 or 200 or 500 and then 1, 000, you know, there’s just an excitement and a baseline level of earnings. And that’s really great. So the partner program, I think you’re exactly right. It’s like YouTube AdSense revenue. There, it’s generally recurring. And it’s just nice to have that base.

And there are people who make all of their money on medium through the partner program. If you write like really compelling productivity or self help oriented, self improvement oriented stories, you would lead the super interesting life. You can write stories every day about that and monetize entirely through that program and make thousands of dollars.

I know writers that do that and that’s great, but I always encourage people to think of it as one piece of the puzzle. Much as you think of. The AdSense revenue on YouTube is being kind of like a bonus on top of the other stuff you can do right on YouTube. So the, the second strategy for monetizing is affiliate marketing.

And you asked about this earlier. Yes. You can include affiliate links in your medium articles. You do have to disclose that they are in there and they can’t be excessive. So you have you and you can, you can pepper them in. You can put one in at the end. But you don’t want to be, you know, kind of beating people over the head with them.

Affiliate content can do extremely well on Medium. It is different from the kind of affiliate content that does well on a traditional affiliate site. So people aren’t coming to Medium to read about, like, the best pair of socks. And I’ve written that article, it does perform well. You know, the roundups of, like, the five best socks, here’s everything you need to know.

That will not do well on Medium, because the audience really isn’t there for information. They’re sort of there, again, to, like, learn or level up in some fashion. But if you can share, for example, a really in depth review of a great piece of B2B software that’s going to help somebody’s business do better, and you can show why and how it’s helped you, and then you have an affiliate link to it.

That does really well and I’ve done things like I’ve written about specific AI tools and included affiliate links to them and I had one tool for a while I was making over 1, 000 a month just on affiliate commissions from three medium articles I had written about that tool. And again, I helped people, right?

I helped people learn to use it. It helped them level up, help them use this tool better. And so they clicked through and bought the tool and, and, and I made affiliate commission from that. So affiliate earnings can do great. Um, I know writers that just do affiliate articles and that does extremely well too.

So that’s a, an addition, you know, to the partner program. You, again, you can still collect your partner program money from those articles. Uh, the third strategy is to develop thought leadership through the platform. And again, you know, I talked about how mediums audience is very high ballot or people who are paying to be there and a lot of journalists, a lot of bookers for, uh, TV shows, for news broadcasts, for podcasts, read the platform, and so if you can write a story.

About your field that takes off and gets a lot of traction, you will get in front of those people and you will get people reaching out and asking to interview you, asking for a quote, asking for you to come on their podcast or come on their program. And so out of writing on Medium, I’ve gotten feature story in the New York Times.

A feature story in the Wall Street Journal, again, about my business and my work. Um, I’ve gotten writing opportunities in publications like IEEE Spectrum, Coindesk. I’ve gone on NBC News to talk about AI. You know, again, very much related to, to my own sort of day job. And, um, I’ve gone on, you know, numerous podcasts and other kinds of platforms.

I’ve gotten my writing republished on all kinds of different websites too. So that thought leadership element, if you’re trying to grow your business or establish yourself as an expert in a particular field, again, having, you know, now on wherever I go, I can say as, as seen in the New York times, you know, Thomas Smith and, and that’s very valuable to build credibility in your own business.

If you’re building a blog and you care about SEO, think about the backlinks that you get from a New York Times article and a Wall Street Journal article and, you know, all these high level things. And again, because you’re sharing value on the platform, and the people are, again, often journalists or they’re, you know, representatives, it’s an incredibly good platform for getting that kind of, those kinds of placements, that kind of, building that kind of thought leadership.

Um, the, the fourth way, um, and this is something I’ve just started in the last year or so. Is to basically leverage Medium to build your own newsletter. Um, and that’s, again, I had never done a lot with newsletters before. I know you have a lot of really great experience with newsletters. But, I decided, you know, I launched a newsletter that really focused on AI.

And I decided I’ll write, I’m writing AI articles already, I’ll throw a call to action at the end of each of my Medium articles with a very simple lead magnet about AI. It’s a, you know, guide to chat GPT prompts for creators, and I’ll just see what happens. And I’ve started putting that at the end of each of my Medium articles about a year ago, and I’m now at, I think, about 3, 000 subscribers on my newsletter just from that.

Yeah, totally passive. I didn’t, you know, pay for anybody. I didn’t have to do anything really to build that. All I did was just write great articles about AI, throw this thing on at the end, and people subscribe. Medium also has an ability for people, when they follow you, to actually subscribe to you on Medium via email.

And so they can click a button. A minority of people do that, but the people who do tend to be really engaged. When they opt into that, every time you publish a new Medium article, they actually get it in their email, almost like a, you know, being subscribed to a newsletter. Medium allows you to export that list of, uh, subscribers.

You can get those email addresses and load it into ConvertKit or whatever your, your, um, platform is. So I probably have 600 subscribers that have come in addition to my, uh, CTA just through that. Medium basically sharing, I’m sharing my own subscribers, uh. Um, emails with me, which again, what other platform does that when you’ve got a follower on Facebook, you know, they’re not going to, they’re not going to hand you their email address.

It’s again, a platform that really wants you to succeed. And I think that’s really helpful. Um, so certainly building a newsletter is a very practical way to, uh, to monetize. And then the fifth one, and I think this is for a lot of people, the most powerful is lead gen. And basically using medium as a way.

To grow another business, to grow a service business, to grow, um, a consulting business. And the great thing with Medium, again, great audience, but also when you’re writing on the platform, you’re kind of, you’re, you’re showing people what you’re able to, to do. You’re not just sort of telling them, oh, I’m an expert, you know, here’s my landing page.

I know a lot about AI, you know, trust me that I’m, I’m the right person to hire. If you write a great, compelling, engaging, insightful story about AI and people read it, they know from reading that that you’re an expert. They know you know what you’re talking about. And so they’re very interested in many cases in hiring you.

And again, as I, as I mentioned earlier, there’s an about page that you have on Medium where you can put your contact info, your email address. You can include, you know, a form if you want people to click through and fill out a form to work with you. You can include a call to action at the end of your articles.

It’s as simple as like, you know, did you love my article about Python? I’m available to consult for you. Here’s my email address. That’s totally fine. And Medium, you can have that call to action. And again, I got my best client, right? Not even intending to, I wrote a story about a topic, a tech topic in their industry, and they read it and they thought it was great, and they emailed me and said, Hey, we read your article on Medium.

This is awesome. Can we hire you? And then I of course said, yeah, let’s set up a call. I worked with them. And now two years later, I’m still working with them on a daily basis. And, you know, I know a writer who built an entire, uh, writing, coaching and editing business just out of media, just out of lead gen on media.

So she puts, uh, you know, writes stories about writing, you know, here’s practical tips for getting published in big name publications, you know, here’s a way to make your intro more compelling. People read that and they go, wow, this really helped me out. At the end it says, do you want personal, you know, feedback and advice on your writing?

Email me, you can hire me. And she’s built a very successful business just out of lead gen. So to me, that’s probably for a lot of people and particularly our businesses. You know, if you’re thinking, well, this is cool, but you know, I, I run a big business. I don’t really want to, you know, spend my, an agency like you, you know, I don’t want to spend my time writing about my practical personal knowledge, you know, a couple thousand bucks a month.

Isn’t going to move the needle. You could go on there and write about the work you do at your agency and share practical SEO tips and share, you know, side hustles, like Amazon influencers that people should get excited about. And link out to, you know, your own page and bring in clients through that. And so lead gen, I think is one of the most exciting.

And again, you can double dip, you can triple dip with these different ways of monetizing. So you can write a great article that really, you know, shares your knowledge about a particular topic like tech, get money from the partner program, from everybody who reads it, include a CTA for your newsletter to get people who maybe aren’t ready to make a purchasing decision, and And then have a, uh, uh, you know, email address in your, in your medium bio that says you can hire me to consult on this topic and you can capture people at any part of their journey and any part of the value.

Double up, you know, triple up, maybe even have an affiliate link if it’s about a specific product. So when you get to that point, medium becomes not just a side hustle or another platform to tack on to. You know, your existing stable of, you know, probably 10 or 20 other platforms you should be content on.

It is its own ecosystem that you can use not only to make money right there on the platform, but to enhance all of the other stuff that you do, or even to build, you know, a, a hugely successful in some cases, business out of just the leads and the people that you find on the medium platform. 

Jared: Well, I think that’s the perfect way to transition.

As we start to close is this idea of getting multiple value points from a medium and a lot of people listening are going to not, not be starting their journey and content creation, but are been going down that road for a long time. Many people will have established websites, established businesses, a newsletter, places they publish content and have historically published content is medium of place as we kind of start to bring this to a close is medium of place where we can repurpose content.

Or reshare content, or are we going to need to look at Medium as its own platform where we go to share an idea and we don’t share it anywhere else? 

You can absolutely repurpose. They actually have a tool to import stories from your existing blog. You literally paste a URL in, it grabs everything and loads it up into the Medium editor.

You can make some changes. Publish it. It automatically canonical links back to that original story so that you don’t lose any of the SEO value. So absolutely you can take a, an article you’ve published before and repurpose it for the platform. You can write stories for medium and then publish them in your own newsletter or later on on your own blog.

You can publish on medium and then pitch your story to another publication, traditional publication. They are very, as long as you’re delivering value to medium readers, that’s really all that the platform is focused on. And if that means republishing something from your blog, and people might not have found it otherwise, and now they can find it on Medium, totally fine.

It’s a great way to get started on the platform. I would encourage people to think about writing at least a few stories that are tailored specifically to the medium audience, particularly if you’re not used to writing in that sort of more voicey, more engaging type of a way. But yes, absolutely. This is something that, especially in the beginning.

Can be a complete addendum to something you’re already doing. You can pull those stories in. You can republish them on Medium. You can start out in that fashion. And if you find success or you find an audience on Medium, then you can decide if you want to start writing content. You could also do things like embed a YouTube video inside of a Medium article.

I have a YouTube channel. I will often drop a relevant video into a Medium article. If that article gets, you know, 10, 000 views or gets boosted, Then my YouTube video is suddenly going to get a bunch more plays and it’s going to boost the performance on that other platform. So absolutely. There are a lot of ways to do that and to repurpose or to tie medium into your existing content ecosystem.

Jared: Yeah. And even thinking out loud, like maybe I’m thinking of in my mind, an article I wrote, um, for my agency blog and it is optimized for search, but thinking about taking all the concepts from that article, but then. adding a lot more personal inflection and personal anecdotes and basically personalizing that story could also be an approach that you could take where you’re taking content, you’re not directly repurposing it on Medium, but you’re almost modifying something you’ve written for your newsletter or for a blog or for a website, and you’re tailoring it towards the successful Medium strategies, but taking the core concepts and kind of using that to publish in multiple places.

Oh yeah, I mean, and if you’re like, if you’re the kind of person who really cares about good writing. And you’ve had to write a story and then degrade it, essentially, to make it work for SEO. You can take that and make, like, the Taylor’s version, you know, to allude to Taylor Swift, of the, of the story, where, the way you would have done it, the way you know it should be done, and publish that on Medium.

And as a writer, as somebody who cares about writing, that’s so refreshing, it’s, again, so joyful to take a story that you had to, like, degrade. It’s simply dumbed down for an algorithm and write it back in the way that you would write it for a real person. It’s a take off. Absolutely. I encourage you, if you’re fed up with having to write for computers all the time, just unlearn that.

Take that, walk it back, take that content and write it for a human and it will do well on Medium. Hey 

Jared: Thomas, this was amazing. I can’t, that hour truly, I’ve said it a lot, but that hour truly flew by. Um, where can people find, you have stuff, you have resources for people on Medium, where can people follow along with what you’re doing?

Um, and especially as it relates to, to, to learning more information about how to succeed on Medium. 

Absolutely. Yeah. So I have a new course that’s just out. It’s called Thrive on Medium. And the, the theme there is to build your dream job through writing on Medium. And it focuses on the practicalities of starting on the platform, repurposing content, what works and earning through the partner program.

But it also focuses on these much bigger picture things like using Medium for lead gen, starting a business or, or growing a business. Through the medium platform. And so it’s great if you want to just learn the basics about the platform, you’re curious, I think it’ll be a great resource for you if you want to do this as kind of a side hustle and.

Maybe you’re in a couple hundred or a couple thousand bucks a month through the Partner Program, and I think it’s particularly a good resource for you if you want to kind of take it to that next level and use it, use Medium as a way to kind of enhance your existing business or build your own freelancing or consulting business using, you know, lead gen on Medium as your main source.

Jared: It’s great. We will get that link in the show notes so people can go check it out. Thomas, uh, I think, uh, your second time on the podcast was, uh, I think technically really we’re talking about a third time cause you did also guest host on the, uh, the news podcast episode that releases every Wednesday, but, um, great to have you back.

Thank you for sharing so much about this. Clearly a very in depth platform that has so many benefits for content creators, and I think for a lot of people probably got their eyes open to it. It’s not just another publishing platform. It’s got so much more going for it. I know I certainly did. So thank you for being here and thank you for bringing so much value.

Absolutely. 

Spencer: It was so great. And it’s great to talk with you. 

Jared: All right. Talk again soon sometime. Bye bye. 



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