This is my 200th post on Medium
In 2018 I decided to start blogging again. When I was at university I found it to be a really useful means to record what I was learning and my thoughts and opinions on those subjects but for whatever reason when I entered ‘industry’ I stopped writing.
Since then I have managed to almost consistently publish a post once a week and this post (according to Medium) is my 200th!
I thought to celebrate this milestone I’d talk about building up my blogging habit and ways I found to maintain it, share some of the statistics around my posts, explain some of the benefits and opportunities that blogging has given me and reflect on if it was worth the investment to write 200 posts in first place.
Building & maintaining my blogging habit
When I picked up blogging again four years ago I knew that holding myself to producing a steady stream of content was going to be key to me keeping at it, as in the past I had a blog which I infrequently updated and I never felt inclined to post there because of the lack of content it had on it.
In those early days I decided to build up a three month content plan which would allow me to churn out blogs with relative ease in order to build up the habit.
The content plan worked well but after the first month or so I found myself rewriting the plan as newer, more interesting topics popped up via my day job or experimenting with tech in my spare time.
Eventually I stopped writing a content plan because I felt confident that I had enough happening in my job & spare time to write posts at the end of the week to document and share what I’d done and what I’d learned.
After a year or so of doing this ‘off-the-cuff’ style of blogging my day job changed and I found myself a little overwhelmed, putting out a detailed blog every week, so I looked at ways to give myself some slack.
I decided to focus on publishing a monthly round up post at the end of the month which would allow me to have one week where I could take a little break but keep publishing.
This week off allowed me to spend an extra week on preparing one of the more detailed posts and I would often re-order my blogging ideas to account for this time when I felt I needed it.
Additionally I found a structure to my posts that worked well for the kind of content I was writing — Situation, Action, Result. This worked well because the majority of posts were how I solved a problem with technology so stating what I was looking to fix, what and how I used a tool and then what the outcome was.
Some stats
I’ve pulled together some value from Medium’s stats panel on my posts and how they have done since I started as well as a monthly overall read count. These figures won’t include the posts that have been published elsewhere or if the post was shared on social media and that’s contributed to the numbers being higher.
Top 5 most-read posts
- Visualising MIDI files with Python — This post has been read 9,700 times since it was published in May 2017 (that was before I started blogging weekly). This post highlights how badly content is hidden on Medium with an internal view count of just 317 compared to 14,200 from those coming from external sources.
- The frustrations of dealing with the LinkedIn API — This post has been read 9,500 times since it was published in September 2019. It’s earned me almost $70 via the Medium Partner Program which I think is due to the fact it’s related to working with a large platform’s API.
- Downloading and Saving binary files with React Native and Expo — This post has been read 5,800 times since it was published in September 2020. I get a lot of comments on this post from people who were looking to solve this particular problem.
- Writing a Jest Test Reporter — This post has been read 5,200 times since it was published in March 2019. This post has the largest number of people finding my content from Github which given I had a link to Github in the post I hope means people used the example code.
- Using Allure and Jest to improve test reporting — This post has been read 4,600 times since it was published in January 2020. This post was my first experience with my content being shared elsewhere without my consent. Someone pasted the body of the post into some developer focused site but forgot to remove the links to the original article (as of the time of writing they still haven’t removed that post).
Read count since began posting
Overall since May 2017 my posts have been read 107,822 times and viewed 237,280 times (45% read ratio).
The most reads I’ve had on my posts in one month is 4,418 which was in October 2020, since then I average around 2,700. I think this change is mostly down to the topics that I’m writing about as apposed to any form of algorithm change on Medium’s part.
Around that time I was building JiffyCV and after January 2021 I moved from working with React Native to building a canvas based web app that used a specific framework so the audience was more niche.
Trends I saw in my stats
- Nobody on Medium finds your posts via Medium — Averaged out across my top 10 posts the internal traffic was at 5%
- Publications have a limited impact in driving internal traffic for your content — At most I saw double the amount of internal traffic but it was still very low and my highest internal traffic post wasn’t part of a publication
- Google is your main traffic source — at least 85% of all views on my posts have come from Google so keep SEO in mind if you’re looking to get more reads
- Don’t expect a high read ratio — My top ranking posts average out with a 52% read ratio. This makes sense considering Medium’s paywall but if you’re looking to earn from your posts then you’ll need to find a means to convince people to sign up or target internal traffic (see above points)
- People want to read about testing — The majority of my top 20 posts are about software testing which is interesting to me as I have more posts about implementing features with different frameworks than testing those implementations.
Earnings
I signed up for the Medium Partner Program in September 2019 and over the last 37 months I’ve managed to collectively earn $837.49 (at the time of writing that’s £750 but the pound has been decimated recently so it’s likely higher). This is a nice little bonus for me considering that my primary reason for blogging is to document and share my experiences but I won’t be quitting the day job to blog full-time anytime soon.
The Medium Partner Program costs £5 a month and it took me around five months to ‘break even’ for this cost but that only happened when I went back to my most read posts at the time and turned on the membership wall. Since then I’ve put my more technical posts behind the membership wall as I think these are the ones that will actually earn money.
The amount of money I receive has gone up with the number of posts I’ve published however around July 2021 there was a bit of a reset in the amount earned where it dropped from around $30 to $20 a month which I can only assume was due to the way that Medium calculates the payments (it seems to be more about referrals than reads).
Opportunities I’ve received from blogging
While I’ve been blogging I’ve been given some opportunities that I don’t think I’d have had if I wasn’t blogging. These are of course very dependent on the content and context of my blog topics and aren’t an indicator of any opportunities available to others.
- Got a paid blogging gig from a start-up consultancy — Someone I used to work with asked me to provide some content for their consultancy’s blog and they paid more pers post than I’d get from Medium to do so. I did this for a year but ultimately had to stop because I ran out of good topics for them
- Got asked to write content for a software testing company endorsing their product — I didn’t take them up on the offer because I don’t like endorsing products I’m not passionate about
- An analytics company picked up one of my posts — I did a blog about using their product as part of building Reciprocal.dev and they picked that post up and ran it on their site. They even made a nice header image with the Reciprocal.dev logo which was really nice of them.
- A market research company paid for my opinions on a product — I got a non-insignificant Amazon voucher for taking a 20 minute phone call to discuss my views on how a product I blogged about worked and could be improved
Similar to the money from Medium, these opportunities are a nice little bonus to me just writing for my own needs.
Has it been worth writing 200 posts on Medium?
I’ve achieved my goal of building up an archive of my thoughts and learnings as I’ve worked through numerous projects and Medium has made it really easy to build up that body of work thanks to how easy it makes it to write content.
If I was to be more analytical on what Medium proposes to offer and the end result I would say they’ve fallen a little short. If my posts are receiving a small amount of internal traffic then the ‘Powerful Network’ isn’t working as they advertise it, if anything the network effect has come from the weight Google puts towards Medium as a website in it’s results more than anything internal.
Additionally the wall that Medium presents to those without an account most likely deters people from reading content if they aren’t on Medium, however given my goal is to write for myself I’m not too concerned about this.
One issue that did concern me was the fact that my 200 posts are locked into a service which ultimately could decide to shutdown but I’ve mitigated this by backing up the posts I care about to Gatsby.
I think overall I’d say it’s been worth writing on Medium, there’s certainly some complications that their business model adds to getting your content out there but as that’s never been my goal and I get enough money a month to pay for a membership and to keep me in coffee I’m happy with the trade off.
