Hi everyone, it’s been a long time since I last wrote here on Medium — more than three weeks, in fact.
This hiatus mainly came from working on a YouTube channel with my brother.
We started the channel to align our income-generating work with our goals to play badminton.
One of the biggest problems plaguing us was that it was challenging to switch our minds and completely focus on other tasks immediately.
For example, if I just played badminton for three hours, it would be nearly impossible to come home and immediately start writing about investments.
I had just finished training, and all I was thinking about was badminton.
This is why creating the YouTube channel was a fantastic decision. Since all I was thinking about was badminton, it was super easy to generate video ideas while watching badminton.
Additionally, making these videos also helped us get better at badminton. Watching pro badminton players play helps us identify problems with our own gameplay and generate ideas for how to play better, which we implement and test in future training sessions.
The instantaneous positive feedback and success we received also helped. We started working on the channel in the middle of July and were able to monetize it by the end of the month.
Right now, the channel earns about the same as Medium, and it is rapidly growing.
Image From Author | YouTube Stats
Despite all this success with YouTube, however, I still want to write and grow on Medium.
First, I’d rather not put all my eggs in one basket. After trying to upload two Olympic badminton analysis videos and getting copyright claims on both, I realized our channel is not bulletproof.
While it’s unlikely that we will get copyright strikes or legal action taken against us due to the nature of our videos involving heavy editing and our own commentary via analysis, people can still lay copyright claims that could render our videos unavailable or ineligible to be monetized.
Everything with the channel seems excellent right now, but it’s been less than a month.
Second, Medium has done exceptionally well for me, and I feel like I’ve been on the verge of a breakthrough in the last few months by leveraging Medium’s power outside of its Partner Program.
I will discuss this more at length in another section of this article.
Fraud Alert: Please Be Careful Of Those Attempting To Impersonate Me!
Before we discuss my plans on Medium, however, I need to alert everyone that there are people/bots attempting to impersonate me and scam readers.
It’s not just me, either. These bots are also impersonating countless other writers and come back just as quickly as they’re shut down.
So before you click any link or call any number in the comment section, make sure you check the profile for any suspicious activity.
Follower count and the posts that they make (or lack thereof) are both great indicators of a profile’s credibility.
The KS Directory — A New Home For Non-Members
Okay, with the PSA out of the way, it’s time to dig into what I’ve been working on this past week.
First, a little bit of context.
Ever since I started writing more about investing, I noticed a considerable spike in non-member viewership.
This is due to the power of Medium in search engines. My articles frequently appeared in searches as well as Google News, which often brought a significant number of viewers to my articles from outside of Medium.
However, while getting this boost in viewership was lovely, as you all may know, non-member views do not count toward Medium Partner earnings.
Thus, I began putting affiliate links in my articles with the idea of monetizing my non-member views.
Doing this paid off, but not in the way I expected.
I learned a few months ago that Medium had removed its three free article limit, meaning that those affiliate sales were actually coming from Medium members.
Essentially, I was still missing out on all the non-member views.
As such, I decided to try a strategy of letting non-members view my whole story in exchange for their email addresses.
The idea was good, and my email list has rapidly grown after implementing this, but there is a bit of user experience friction.
To read my article for free, non-members had to click a link to a landing page, enter their email, receive an email with a list of Friend Links, find the one for the article they wanted to read, and email me if they couldn’t find it.
Going through that process just to read one article didn’t make much sense.
After brainstorming various ideas for possible solutions, I decided that building an external site would be a good option.
Instead of going through all the steps above, non-members can now go straight from a Medium article I published to an external site where entering their email gives immediate access to the article.
Coming Back To Medium
With the initial setup complete, the focus is now on producing content.
I have changed my schedule to be like the one I used to have when I was most productive. My days now start with a workout between 7 and 9 AM and blogging work between 10 AM and 12 PM.
After lunch, I will then do my badminton training, followed by YouTube work in the evening.
Since I won’t be mass-producing articles as I tried in June, I have also decided to send out weekly digest emails summarizing and sharing the articles I have published throughout the week.
More to come soon!
Originally published on Medium.com. Get a Medium membership and read articles like this one ad-free.
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