Medium's Partner Program Expansion and Best Practices for Substack

When you're a writer, the only constant is change!

Hello Friends!

It has been an astonishingly busy few weeks. Last Wednesday I threw everything aside and went down the river with my children because sometimes it just needs to be done. I don’t regret the choice, but I’ve been scrambling ever since.

The school year is upon us and that means practices have already started. I love watching my kids play sports, but the return to organized activities signifies an end to summer’s unscheduled ocean of time.

Perhaps if summer went too long, we’d become too disconnected from our reality for our own good. However, I’m always reluctant to give up on the days when we’re free to do anything, even if we ultimately decide to do nothing.

Medium’s expansion

I received a couple of excellent questions this week and I wish to address them today in this newsletter. Medium has just expanded their Partner Program to an additional 77 countries. You can read all about it here.

Sandra Pawula

who writes Wild Arisings asked for my thoughts on the expansion. She expressed concern that a larger pool of writers might lead to lower payouts for Medium writers.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about Medium throughout the years is that the platform is constantly evolving. A lot of factors go into writer payouts. I’m no different than anyone else in that I worry when my earnings drop. However, in the time I’ve been writing on Medium, I find that things tend to stabilize. That’s why I resist checking my earnings more than once a month.

I always try to be mindful of the fact that Medium is a business, and it has to make money. Back in April 2024, Tony Stubblebine announced that Medium had reached one million members. My understanding is that with a million members, Medium has finally become profitable.

As writers, we always have to be mindful of our participation in sustainable business models. This is one of the reasons that I use platforms like Substack to recruit writers to Medium. Medium has carved out a unique corner of the internet, and I absolutely love it. I also want to do whatever I can to help ensure the platform remains available to us for years to come.

That’s why I think Medium’s expansion is going to be great for anyone who uses the platform. The way I see it, the larger the pool of writers and readers that Medium has to draw from, the greater the chance of sustainability. I’m also frankly curious to read the stories that are shared from other parts of the world.

It’s all speculation, but from where I’m sitting the news of Medium’s expansion has no downside.

Best practices for Substack

Another thing I’d like to mention is that a few of my favorite writers from Medium have migrated over to Substack:

• William Spivey
  who writes William F. Spivey’s History Channel.

• Allison Wiltz
  who writes For Black Women.

I’ve been following both Allison and William for years on Medium and their writing has provided me with an education that I didn’t know I needed. Please check them out. Once you get into the habit of reading everything they offer, you’ll find that a lot of things will start to make sense.

That’s a little bit of a teaser, I’ll leave it to you to find out what I mean.

I thought I’d provide a list of the practices I’ve used to grow my Substack. Feel free to use these or disregard them. All I can say is that they’ve been effective for me:

• I prefer to keep Medium and Substack as separate entities. I didn’t import my Medium email subscriber list to Substack because I didn’t want to overwhelm them with emails.

• Different styles of writing work on each platform, so experiment.

• You can post the same work on both Medium and Substack, but I recommend spacing it out a few months. Give your articles a chance to flourish before you try them on another platform.

• I’ve been posting 3-4 articles per week on Substack. I think it’s best to space them out rather than post them all at once. Use the schedule feature.

• There are no limitations on Substack against using optimized titles. When I repost from Medium to Substack I tend to update the title. Here’s the title analyzer I prefer (that’s a referral link).

• Use the voice over feature, it’s the icon that looks like a set of headphones. I really enjoy listening to my favorite writers read their work.

• Make sure to use appropriate tags on your Substack posts.

• I provide a subscription option for anyone who wants to support me, but I make all my work free. I also provide coupons so people can support me at a discount.

• I received a huge boost on Substack when I signed up for

  Kristina God
  ’s newsletter. She really knows what she’s doing.

• Use Substack’s Notes as a growth tool. Share your new and old articles there. Share your comments on other articles. Share quotes from your articles. Use it to try out new ideas. I find that when I post 10-20 Notes per day, I see regular subscriber growth. It’s also a good way to gauge what the Substack population is interested in reading about.

• You should follow every writer that interests you, but only subscribe to the ones that truly captivate you. Like with Medium, you see more engagement if you engage with other writers.

Boost appears to be stabilizing

July was an unusual month for me. I was traveling with the family so that might have interrupted my writing routine. One result was that I only had 5 articles Boosted for the month of July, that included a stretch were 10 straight articles weren’t selected.

Since I’ve returned home, I’ve had 5 of 7 articles Boosted.

I went through and created a list of all my Boosted stories. Feel free to use it for reference. The first four stories are from August, 2024, but then you have to scroll down to the bottom of the list to find other recent stories. To my knowledge, there’s not a way to arrange a list by publication date, but maybe some of you know how to do that.

I think you should place a greater emphasis on newer stories because they’re better examples of Medium’s current expectations.

That’s all for now! Thanks everyone! I expect to have some good stuff for you this week!

My CoSchedule referral link

Here’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).