331 – Get paid to write: Tom talks Medium.com

Episode 331 – Medium.com
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode three hundred and thirty one of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about medium.com.

[00:00:34] Normally I tell you about things that have made me or saved me a lot of money. Not today. So far I have made 97 cents on medium.com. I'm not kidding.

[00:00:50] And and I did get six new subscribers. So let's say they were the subscribers were worth like a buck apiece. So I've made six dollars and ninety seven cents for about four hours work on medium.com.

[00:01:06] Oh, you know why I'm doing it. And and I think you might want to do it to.

[00:01:12] Well, that's what I'm going to talk about in this episode three thirty one, I hope you didn't miss Episode 330, Becca Tebon was back and she is a 56 year old woman that you would swear she's 25. All right. She has this 17 minute fitness program that's getting spectacular results. Well, what's this got to do with entrepreneurship? Well, it takes a lot of energy to be an entrepreneur, and she shows you how to get it. Now, how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the Commute? Well, if the shows helped you out at all in your business or giving your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit, screwthecommute.com and look for a little sidebar that says send a voicemail. Click on it and talk into your phone or computer. Tell me how the shows helped you and also put your website in there so you can get a shout out in front of thousands of people and grab a copy of our automation ebook. This ebook, just one tip has saved me seven and a half million keystrokes, literally, and it's got all kinds of tips in it to make you work faster and easier. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're at it, again over at screwthecommute.com we have all kinds of good stuff for you. Get our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app and you'll be able to put us on your cell phone and tablet. And it has all kinds of cool features and we got videos and screen captures the show you how to use it.

[00:02:54] All right, everybody still freaking out about working from home and and what's going to go on with this pandemic? Well, I don't want you to have to suffer like that. People call me up. This known me for 20 years. Hey, you OK? You OK? Yeah. Why? You know, I've been sitting here selling stuff just like always throughout the pandemic, before the pandemic, and I'll be doing it after the pandemic. So I want to teach you how to do this. I want your kids to not be saddled with massive debt, going to a four year college and they get out with no skills and competing for jobs at Starbucks. So get in touch with me and let's talk about my school. We got people making money a few months into the school because the skills we teach are in high demand. And it's and yeah, we need plumbers, we need mechanics and all these kinds of jobs that are beautiful vocational jobs. Well, guess what? Internet marketing is considered vocational. It's a skill, but it's not the kind of skill where you're digging ditches. These kids love this kind of stuff. They're on their phones all day long anyway. Why not make some money from it? So we teach that in this school. So get in touch with me. Get a scholarship for your kids, your nephews, nieces, grandchildren or yourself, because a lot of people are still wondering how they're going to make money from home while this is how you do it. I've been doing it for 26 years straight, so I'm not giving you any kind of book report. Get in touch with me. You can check the school out at IMTCVA.org. That's in the show notes if you want to take a look and then give me a call, we'll discuss it.

[00:04:39] Oh, let's get to the main event. Medium.com is a place where you can post articles, podcasts and videos. And the longer the members there read and watch your stuff, the more you get paid. I mean, it's very possible to make a full time living writing for Medium and certainly possible to make hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars per month as a side hustle. So what's the deal with my actual cash earnings of 97 cents? I got motivated to do this from a webinar I hosting with Jeff Herring and Tim Maudlin. Both are prolific writers. Now, they know all the tricks of the trade using Medium.

[00:05:29] Now, everything we do online has tricks of the trade that separate the people that make money from the stuff, as opposed to the people that complain that a certain course of action online doesn't work. No, it's usually they didn't work. They didn't take the time to learn how to do it. Now I have a link to the webinar in the show notes. If you want to see a whole webinar with a bunch of tricks of the trade on how to make money on media. Now, do you have to love writing or be great at writing to do this? Absolutely not. You could put up transcripts of things you've already recorded on audio or video. I mean, I highly suggest you at least have them edited so that they read nicely as an article, but all this stuff can be outsourced very cheaply. All right. Now, let me get to the money, the real money aspect of this. Sooner or later, you might not want to listen to the rest of this episode.

[00:06:26] The way you get paid is based on how many of their members at Medium read your article or stay on your article page, like how long they stay on it. You can now you can read up to three articles a month on medium as a free member. You don't get paid anything if a free member read your article only when a paid member does. Now to be a paid member, it's only five bucks a month, which is highly worth it because there's tons of good stuff there and you have unlimited access instead of only three articles a month. Now, just to note, you don't have to be a paid member to write for them. I just think it's worth it. So you can see lots of examples of what others are doing. So you put your stuff up there, tie good keywords to it, and they even have a little keyword generator right there on where you're put in the article up, and when their members read the article, you get paid. Now, you do have to sign up for a stripe account. Now, that's a competitor to PayPal. It's like a payment gateway thing so that you can get your money as direct deposit. All right. Now back to my 97 cents.

[00:07:49] Now, how do you get decent money? Well, from my research. Everybody starts out with a few pennies here and there, everybody. But I know one girl who made a few dollars the first month and then six thousand dollars the next month from just one article. All right. And that article is still bringing in over a hundred dollars a day. Now, I'm certainly not saying you're going to do that, but you could and here's how it happens. There's two major ways that it could happen. Either medium.com notices your article, see, they see all the articles coming in, they got all kinds of editors and curators, I think they're called, and so they see all that's coming in. When they see a good article that they like, they could put it on their homepage, which would give you tons of I mean, there's millions of visitors there and or they could email without in their daily emails that go out to people based on what they're interested in. So you could go from zero to one hundred miles an hour overnight if you catch their eye. Now, another way that you have more control over is if you submit your article to what is called a publication.

[00:09:14] And let's talk about publications, see various people on medium, you could do this if you felt like it, I don't want to, but various people on medium have made their own areas up there called publications, where other authors on medium can submit their articles. So let's say you have a marketing article, you can submit it to the publication called Better Marketing that has many thousands of subscribers that are all members. So if your article is accepted by better marketing, you could now be seen by thousands of their members and you get paid when they read and stay on your page. Better marketing doesn't get that money. You still get the money. Now, you can even start your own publication if you want, but I prefer to try to get accepted by others. So, you know, for me, it's hands off. I don't want to have to be reading all the submissions to a publication. See, better marketing gets thousands of submissions a week. I don't have time to fool with that. And they've got a bunch of editors probably that's too much work for me, but it's zero work for me to submit an article to them and if it gets picked up, I start getting paid.

[00:10:32] So why am I putting time into this? Well, you know, with again, I've only got 97 cents to show for it. Well, several reasons. One is I like the idea of my work bringing in passive income.

[00:10:47] But even bigger, I like the idea is to have my stuff exposed to many thousands more people and medium or the publication owner doesn't get and if they don't get an affiliate commission, if someone buys big stuff from me, I mean, oh, my God, is that like manna from heaven?

[00:11:08] So just for the if I don't get any big stuff sales, I don't care how much money I make.

[00:11:16] I just love the fact, let's say an article would bring in ten dollars a day.

[00:11:21] That's three hundred dollars a month, and I don't care how much money I make, I just love the idea of money coming into my checking account. I don't I mean, I love it if it's coming into your checking account. That's why I teach all this stuff. I don't love it as much as when it's coming into my cave, but I do love it to see you making money to say. But then the other beautiful part. Oh my God.

[00:11:50] Is that people will be exposed to me by the thousands with my articles.

[00:11:57] And if they come over to my bio or my profile, it's called on Medium. There's a link that they can sign up for free automation book like you just got for listening to my podcast. Well, now they're on my email list and hearing about all my other stuff, you see what I mean?

[00:12:18] So in a medium or the publication owner does not get a commission if they buy anything.

[00:12:25] See, even I give a podcast owner or if I'm doing a podcast interview with somebody else and somebody buys something because they heard me on his his or her podcast, I give them a commission and I'm happy to do it, totally happy to do it. But I'm even happier when I don't have to do it. All right. So so that's that's the beauty of this, to be exposed to enormous numbers of people with your stuff.

[00:12:52] And and these don't have to be enormous. Three, four or five, six, seven, eight thousand word articles.

[00:13:02] These can be things you already have on your hard drive, or maybe you recorded something that had it transcribed or, you know, so I'm just putting up stuff that I've already got. And they have a very easy to use system, an interface.

[00:13:17] So it's very easy for you to just paste your stuff in there. And they even have a direct link to a free graphic site. So right in medium, you can search and then insert copyright free pictures to jazz up your article. There's millions of them and if I can't find something I like, I can take my own picture, put it up there or use pixabay, pexels. I love pexels or I happen to have a paid account to clipart.com so I can use those to jazz things up, say. Now, to make the most money you would want to be submitting regularly and having your body of work keep growing and growing and you know, a couple, if an article brings in a couple dollars a day and another one brings in five dollars and you hit on a big one that brings in 50 a day, you're on your way to making a serious side hustle that the money just keeps coming. Every time you put something up there and your followers keep growing to say you can get people follow you that they don't get notice. Whenever you put a new thing up there, remember and remember, you only get paid when members are reading your articles and it just keeps building and building and building.

[00:14:32] So like I said, I'm not discouraged at 97 cents for four hours of work and and I haven't even been doing it for a week, say so. I think I have three articles up there and I, I put one in draft mode, which I'm submitting to better marketing, but I won't hear if it takes them at least three business days. So I haven't heard back and if they got gets accepted. But if it doesn't, so what. I submit another one to another. You know, there's thousands of also publications for you to pick from the submit to. And I think the etiquette is you you wait till you hear from one or you don't hear from one after three business days before you submit it to another place. You don't want to submit it to multiple places. That's that's kind of bad etiquette. And another thing about the length of these articles is that they actually put how many minutes it takes to read them next to the title of each article. So I think Jeff and Tim's in the in the webinar, which I really want you to watch, said that the sweet spot is somewhere five to seven minutes. So that's not a whole lot of words. In fact, I took, you know, I don't know, a chapter roughly out of one of my books and just copied and pasted it in there and made it into an article because you can't just paste this part of a book in case part of your book refers to another chapter.

[00:15:55] So you got to clean it up a little bit to make it like an article and throw in some pictures. But this is really, really easy, folks, and they've got millions and millions of visitors, so do it regularly. I think the most you can do is like three times that. I don't think there's any limit. But I mean, you know, I think on the webinar they were showing three times a day as opposed to once a month, you know, so anywhere in between is suits is fine. You could do it once a week if you felt like it. And it's just going to continue to grow and grow and grow. All right. Now, I plan on doing an update episode on this after I get a few months under my belt to tell you how it's going. But if I were you and I had content sitting around getting low numbers of views on my own website, I think I would jump on this, at least watched a webinar and see if medium is right for you. And joint. It's only five dollars a month. And you you'll get a lot of training for free out of there because they've got hundreds of thousands of brief articles on all kinds of stuff.

[00:16:58] So check that out and I will catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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