Monthly Round-Up July'24: Consistency in Everything: Writing, Reading, Earning
July was a bumpy road, but I managed to keep consistency in writing, reading and earning.
It’s here! The July’24 Round-up!
My second monthly round-up. If you missed the first one, read it here.
This is what I have for you today:
Content: strategies I implemented last month and their outcome
Distribution: platforms I used and how they performed
Monetization: how much I earned in total and a breakdown by platform
Outlook: what I plan to start, stop, change, or continue, and why
From now on I’ll share these round-ups monthly, exclusively with you: the people on my list, who trusted me and found my writing valuable.
Let’s begin!
Content
Right now I’m still focusing on the writing. I plan to add books and videos in the future, but for now I keep it with writing:
short form
long form
atomic
I do have some freebies on Gumroad and few books on Amazon, but it’s not an “all in” game. My focus now is on the writing and will stay so for a while.
Distribution
I have chosen Medium as my primary platform, but lately with so many changes I don’t feel good being there anymore. So I’ll rethink my distribution strategy - more in the outlook part.
I also use Substack, with more focus on Notes. This is because I discovered Notes is a real growth driver.
I now gain much more subscribers on Substack, than followers on Medium. Crazy!
I also started using X regularly and Quora occasionally. I still don’t answer questions so often on Quora, but I plan to. I also don’t engage on X, not sure if it’s worth investing the time. I’ll assess this at a later stage.
New last month: I started another newsletter. This one is atomic - a super short form, just a few bullets daily.
It’s called CREATIVE BiTES. I share everything I find interesting and particularly valuable from my daily reads.
In a nutshell, this is how my distribution looks like now:
short form - Quora, X and Substack Notes. I repurpose my long form into short form for these platforms, using my custom GPT. Sometimes I write exclusive things on all three platforms, just what comes to my mind.
long form - I write on Medium and on Substack. I used to duplicate Medium stories on Substack and interlink them, adding a Substack link for non-Members on Medium. This brought me some free subscribers and one paid. But now I stopped. I figured this doesn’t work in the interest of Medium, and the added value to me is not so high. I occasionally do that only for stories that start getting a lot of external traffic and non-member views.
atomic - I create and send daily newsletters using ConvertKit. I use my freebies on Gumroad and a landing page on ConvertKit to grow that newsletter.
Medium has changed a lot lately.
I don’t feel good writing there anymore. They now:
keep convincing me that automated bot accounts are genuine,
keep banning and revoking real great writers for no reason calling them inauthentic.
I’m sick of that just by writing about it. I don’t want to anymore.
There will be changes - more on that in the outlook.
Up to now, I used to import ConvertKit subscribers to Substack. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t want to irritate my subscribers with extra “spam”, no matter how valuable it might be. The daily bites are enough now.
I never imported Substack subscribers to ConvertKit. I want to run Substack exclusively.