How To Publish Less And Make Thousands More
By: Jun Wu
Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, Writing Tips, Content Creation, Writing

Ever since I started writing on Medium, people told me to publish twice a day to earn the most money. But, if you publish twice a day, you either run out of things to say or the quality of your writing suffers. I struggled with this dilemma at the end of last year. I couldn’t publish twice a day anymore because I had two other jobs writing elsewhere.

It’s impossible to keep the flood of creativity going. I’m a prolific writer. Now, sometimes, on my good days, I can write 3 to 5 articles a day. On bad days, I write at least 1 article a day.

I have to write that much to keep the flow of my income streams. But, I also take days off. Sometimes, I go a week without writing a line.

When I can’t write, I often work on marketing my writing. Consistency is key, but you can refill your creative juices by working on a completely unrelated subject that uses a different part of your brain.

Here’s my list of optimizations to fill content gaps and make sure that I attend to all my platforms and my clients.

Ever since I started to use this list, I’ve diversified my income streams and make thousands instead of hundreds from my writing.

Last year, my monthly income came from writing 60 articles on Medium and making just $2200 in my best month.

This year, my monthly income comes from 60 articles distributed across various streams of income:

Platform 1: 10 articles

Platform 2: 20 articles

Client 1: 10 articles

Client 2: 10 articles

Client 3: 10 articles

Now, my Medium income only pays my utilities, but I’m okay with that. My entire income can now pay all of my living expenses as I slowly pull myself out of my financial hole.

But, these 60 articles each month have to be all high quality now, posted on various platforms. In some months, I can even get away with writing about 30 articles a month.

Create Impactful Content

When you create high value, impactful, ever-green content, you can share them over and over again. People will read them when you reshare them. If someone tells you that their blogpost lasts only 6 weeks of traffic, you can tell them that they are wrong.

I’ve seen good content last for months if not the whole year. In the last few months, my number of tweets fell about 90% on my account, yet, my tweet impressions have kept rising.

Repost and Re-share Your Content

When I don’t have time to create content on Medium, where your frequency of posting matters, I simply repost content from another platform that I know is high quality.

On social media accounts, it’s especially easy to re-share your content consistently. You can schedule them to go out on these platforms for the entire month.

You don’t always have to promote the latest content. You can promote older content, too.

Create Content From Different Angles

Journalists are notorious for being busy. I’ve learned a few tricks working amongst them. One that’s especially useful is that I now create content based on “topics”. I will pick one topic and then write about it from different angles.

If you imagine a 3000-word blog post broken up into sections, you may have 6 to 7 sections. Instead of 6 to 7 sections, you can split these sections into 3 blog posts. Then, you write different intros for them. You also make sure that they are all taking on different angles. You put unique research into each of them.

Once you are done, you have different takes on the same subject ready to post on different platforms.

In this case, the thorough research that you’ve done yields, not one article, but 3 articles.

Cap Your Hours of Work Based on Potential Payment

In the beginning, when writing on a platform, I never conform to this rule. I will spend extra hours working on articles to gain a reputation. However, after some time once I establish my reputation, I spend the amount of hours base on the exact pay that I was getting.

It makes no sense to spend 10 hours writing something that will only pay you $30. Instead, you should spend 10 hours writing for a project that pays at least $200. Think about the hourly rate that you are getting.

Once you establish a reputation, don’t sell yourself short.

Do I still take jobs once in a while that are below the market rate? Yes. I do that because I support a family and my cost is high. No matter what, the bills have to be paid.

But, will I work with clients who can’t use my value or don’t see my writing as valuable? No. Because at the end of the day it’s a marketplace.

Do work on platforms that you get paid on, because then your work is valuable. Otherwise, your valuable time can be spent elsewhere doing a lot more valuable work.