Business and Society Articles

Focusing Distractions with Complexity With all of the options writers and content creators have now, finding the right one for each system sometimes takes experimentation. Flops and failures often come with such brimming efforts of zeal, yet the glimmer of hope remains in pictures of automated simplicity. In the beginning, things were simple; then came the expansion, the maintenance, building, creating, researching, and other such effort and time into what can only be called a writing system. Organizing this complex miasma of disparate platforms, the writer (insert content creator as needed) has become a blogger, marketer, promotor, maintenance tech, and organizing master. The actual writing is pushed to the side. Finding Balance Each writer organizes their system differently according to their needs and abilities. I’ve always admired someone who focuses on one platform and doesn’t get stretched too thin. We can get distracted by constantly expanding and trying new things. What’s neede

Writing online entails considering how many impressions, views, visitors/reads, comments, shares, and reactions each article gets. These digital assets symbolize the money made from each article. How many views did that article get — that poem, story, blog post, picture, art piece? The number will determine how much money the article made. While most writers appreciate even one single read, this doesn’t pay much. On the high end, this might bring .02 cents. Usually, around half a cent, or $5 RMP. Different Writing Platforms and Efforts At Medium views don’t turn into a specific amount of money, rather they are merely an indication of possible money — reads are more important at Medium, as they correlate closely with any money made. Each read at Medium this month made me around that .02 cent mark! The reads at Medium might not be from members, so may not make us money. Still, on average, both views and reads equal a certain estimated amount for each Medium writer. At Vocal, they make it

Buzzing around and making honey.  I love honey. My teeth can’t handle sugar anymore, so honey is my sweet treat, mostly with a peanut butter sandwich.  The analogy of the bee buzzing around, working hard to make honey and the Medium writer staying active on the site to produce views and money is appropriate I think. Bees take time off in the winter in cold locations though.  Unless a person has a massive audience somewhere else they can successfully transfer over to Medium, building a regular audience on the site takes time and a consistent effort.  What I’ve noticed since writing on Medium regularly for the last three months is the time spent reading and interacting with other writers’ work directly correlates with how many views and money you make.   In the last few weeks, I’ve been posting as much as ever, yet have decreased my interaction by about 70%. I’ve noticed my views and interactions have decreased by about the same.  On the one hand, this can be discouraging because we may

Analyzing the holistic enterprise with stats and generalities. I started syndicating my blog content on Medium around 2017 with my first account, which has gone by the wayside since. The account I’m using now is my second account which I started around August 2018. I posted around 12 articles here from then until December 2022. Like a long-lost treasure realized, I started writing seriously on Medium around early December 2022. I’ve now been writing regularly here for around 5 weeks. The total article count I’ve amassed is 46 at this point in my Medium journey. When I came back to Medium after 4.5 years of neglect, I had 34 followers and wasn’t a member. I became a member and then soon enough reached the 100-follower threshold to apply for monetization. I really appreciate how quickly Medium approves this part of the journey. How I Got 48 Followers on Medium in 4.5 Years Some sarcasm mixed with sincerity. medium.com At this point, I have 242 followers and am up to 1,580 views in the pa

Maybe this is a perspective only older people can relate to.  When I was in high school in the mid-90s, I used a typewriter to accomplish my essay assignments that needed to be typed. This really wasn’t that long ago, yet how things have changed. Part of this change is people’s perspectives when it comes to being entitled to write online. Not only do they now expect to be published on sites like Medium, but also make money. And if the money isn’t enough for them to make a living they are critical of the entire platform, like it owes them something. I realize writers need to make money to live, so write a book or submit articles to magazines and other paying publications. Sign a book deal with a publishing house or self-publish, etc. There are so many different ways to make money writing now; the difficult part is everyone else is doing it too, which makes it hard to stand out and find an audience. Even on Medium, the competition is thick with so many different types of people trying to

I remember one distinct moment during a career development course at a community college I attended 21 years ago when the professor asked us to stand up and do an exercise.  She asked the class to separate themselves into two groups; those who thought of themselves as leaders on one side of the classroom and those who thought of themselves as followers on the other.  This question came without warning at the beginning of the class, so we didn’t have time to think it through. The result was probably more sincere because of this suddenness.  For some context, the class consisted of about 30 students, mostly young adults under 21 YOA; I was about 21 years old. An interesting thing happened.  An Important Life Lesson in Social Perception The vast majority of the class went to the leader side of the class and only two of us went to the follower side. I was one of the followers along with another young man. How awkward; then the professor focused on us followers and asked us why we though

It was an experiment I didn’t mean to happen. When I first published the article back in 2018, the Medium Partner Program was open to everyone despite their following status. All you had to do was sign up for it with Stripe, which I did, earning my pennies every month while not paying too much attention to it.  Only recently have I rediscovered Medium and noticed one of my articles actually did pretty well just sitting here without much love from me. Here it is: A Guide to Winter Fishing on the Oregon Coast And why wouldn’t it when it has such a fetching picture — that is a huge fish! And the pipe is a nice touch, very authentic.  Actually, this is a piece I wrote for a client that was rejected. In hindsight, I’m grateful to have this article/guide as my own. If you read it you’ll see I put a lot of work into it, especially considering I didn’t know a lot about fishing in the winter on the Oregon Coast (I can barely catch a fish in a stocked pond).  At this point you may be asking, how

First off, I want to congratulate everyone who has more than 48 followers on this quality writing site, and I want to encourage those with less to not worry, within only a few years of hard work, you too can achieve this milestone of success. Well, in reality, it wasn’t hard work, but the time that elapsed before I achieved the nearly 50 club is sort of a wonder. I hope it doesn’t take me until I turn 50 years old before I reach 100 (only 7 years away!). At the rate I’ve been going, earning 48 followers in 4.5 years, I’ll just make the 100 club before I turn 50 — that is, if I’m still alive, the world is still intact, and Medium is still a thing. Of course, I’m praying for all those things to be set in place for this to happen. Starting before many of the younger users here were still in high school (maybe junior high, wow), I began my journey on Medium (August 9, 2018) with an article about HubSpot — not a bad piece, yet I didn’t use the canonical link thing and it was originally on m

Thinking back to 2014 I remember this exciting website that hit the scene called Bubblews. The theme was atrocious and the type of writing was mostly inane, yet the video game atmosphere and hopes of making cash drew many people into its playful bubble. It didn’t take me long to catch on to the most exciting money-making endeavor for online writers, although it did seem like I was late to the party considering how rapidly everyone moved up in social status with every view, star (like), and comment being compensated for payment through PayPal. Bubblews originally hit the scene in beta mode in 2012, which is why I probably felt a bit late coming to the scene in late 2014. They didn’t officially launch until July 16, 2014, according to Business Wire . The founders were 26-year-olds Arvind Dixit and Jason Zuccari who moved to San Francisco to launch the grand idea. To be fair, this was during an early time with internet adoption, only a couple of years after smartphones became ubiquitous