🥳I made my first dollar (almost) online. Lessons learnt blogging and writing on Medium.
Hey all,
I started blogging three months ago. I write both on my website https://haseebkamal.com and on Medium https://medium.com/@haseebkamal98
Positives:
I am pleasantly surprised and happy to report that in about 3 months I have achieved:
- 100+ followers on Medium allowing me to enter the Partner program
- 9 email subscribers from Medium + own website
- 5k+ views on Medium posts
- 400+ views on my own blog
- 1 dollar (almost 😊) earned
I post technical topics related to Python and software engineering in general.
Negatives:
- I have not been able to grow my Twitter. Short form content I feel is not for me. Key lesson: Do what is easy. What comes naturally. Content creation is a long-term game. Make it easy for yourself in the beginning. I'm not focusing actively on Twitter ATM.
- My blog is not gaining enough traction compared to Medium. Daily active users, views and engagement are all relatively low.
Key lessons learnt:
- More technical does not always mean better. There are posts that I spent much less time on than others and they ended up getting more engagement.
- Personal touches are important especially for technical topics.
Next steps and what I am doing:
- Sent out an email to subscribers with a typeform questionnaire asking what type of content my subscribers would like.
- Created a list of assumptions that I am going to test. Taking action based on a false set of assumptions will never yield results.
What's next:
- Grow email subscribers.
- Grow engagement on website.
Any tips for what I should do moving forward?
I'm currently in a similar boat.
I find the short form on Twitter to come easier for me.
What I find to be working well is to look at your long-form articles and see if you can make short threads or tweets out of paragraphs etc.
Hope that helps!
I have not posted my articles on Medium yet. But from what I'm reading here, I probably should.
Thanks for sharing!
Good luck with everything!
That's a good idea. I have considered it before but never gotten around to actually doing it 🙂
Yes it's great for people in the blogging space. I am currently at 10$ in revenue. Not that it means too much and I obviously have bigger goals than just medium. But it's a nice to have and keeps motivation levels up 😉
Good luck with your endeavours!
I intend to share more here on IH as things evolve. Power to the creators!
I would have been surprised if you told me that you get more traffic on your own blog than on medium.
Medium is more established and might present your articles to people that got there for something else in the first place.
400 visits in a month after just three months blogging is good. From what I understand from your post, you are in a broad niche where there are many other blogs . You probably aren't ranking a high for many keywords on Google yet
Don't give up.
Try to keep some content for your blog only. Then on medium you can say: For additional and exclusive content, come to my site.
Label/tag your exclusive content as such on your site so readers can find it easily
Yes makes sense to have more traffic on Medium I guess.
That's a good idea with creating exclusive content, something I hadn't considered.
Not giving up atleast not till a year or two from now 😊 Unless growth stalls and I haven't managed to create a sizeable audience...
Thanks for the input!