by cmoneyspinner » 08 Jun 2020, 18:26 My previous article about publishing newsletters is dated April 26, 2020.
Content Marketing: Publishing a Newsletter ~ My Newest Work-at-Home Adventure
It's only a month and a half later and within that time short space of time the Medium publishing platform has added a new feature. Yep! You guessed it! You can now add a “Newsletter” to your Medium publication.
BACKGROUND
The Medium platform and I have history. It's a good history too. It's the first publishing platform where I have never had my account deleted. LOL.
It's true. There are many sites where I am active now, but the accounts I have now are not the original accounts that I started with. The accounts exist now because I either went back to the site owners and BEGGED them to let come back. Or I created a new account using a different eMail address.
A funny thing actually happened to me with Medium. I accidentally created a second account. I didn't intend to. In fact I did not even know that you were allowed to have multiple accounts. My main Twitter account is linked to my first intentionally created Medium account. What happened was one day I had another one of my Twitter accounts open. This Twitter account was created when Tsū existed. Y'all remember the Tsū social network? They claimed they were not going to be like Facebook and actually let your earn money from you social activity. They came and went, said they were coming back, and I have yet to see them return.
Anyway! I needed to link a Twitter to my Tsū but I didn't want my main Twitter associated with it. At any rate, when Tsū shut down, I just kept the Twitter account going. Why not? It's a perfectly good account. So one day I had this account opened and went to sign in to the Medium platform. I signed in using Twitter, and without realizing it, I accidentally created a new Medium account linked to the secondary Twitter. Realizing my error, I quickly signed out of Medium.
The rest of the story is that the Medium account was created and it stayed inactive because … I didn't realize it existed. One day I was searching for something else and up pops this account. I thought to myself: “Hey! Can I use this account?” It turns out that I can. So now I actively publish at Medium under 2 different accounts. It's like authors who use different pen names to publish different genre books. I use my main Medium account for serious writing ~ opinion pieces, reviews, etc.; and use my other one for short articles like 1-minute reads or for food-related content.
So now I have 2 Medium accounts and neither account has been deleted. That's an historical record!
Oops! I'm rambling. What I want to say is that I have gone through the Medium evolution and the latest feature they have added is the Newsletter feature.
I don't know what the future plans are but since it was so easy to create a newsletter I clicked the buttons and followed the prompts.
So now, pretty much I am publishing newsletters using 3 different platforms: Medium, Paper.li, and Substack.
Is publishing newsletters a lot of extra work? No! Not at all.
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MEDIUM Newsletter
With the Medium Newsletter, it is linked to my Medium Publication. So basically their system converts each article in my publication and sends it out to the subscribers like a newsletter. It's no extra work for me. Also, at the bottom of each article, there is a Newsletter Subscriber Sign Up button. Once I clicked the buttons, the system went back to all of my articles and put the sign up button at the bottom of the page. My articles date back to 2014. That would have been a lot of work if I had to do that manually.
Why is the newsletter a good thing? Let me just quote the Medium folks.
“After setting up your newsletter, grow your audience by promoting it on your publication’s stories and sharing it anywhere with its signup link. Your readers can then both subscribe to your email newsletter and follow your publication to see your stories on Medium.”
Since I am in the Medium Partner Program, I am hoping that it will increase my earnings by increasing my readers. I just set this up a few days ago so I can not tell you if it's working yet.
PAPER.LI Newsletter
I have several Paper.li newsletters and to be honest, I think I am the only one who reads them. But that's OK. I'll tell you why. My Paper.li newsletters are sort of like a Digest. I choose up to 5 content sources on topics that I am interested in reading about and staying up to date on. My newsletters publish on a weekly basis. So each week I receive about 5 articles on topics of interest that I can quickly peruse. It's a handy little research tool. Another thing. If I don't like the content that was selected, I can actually “fetch new content” and republish a new newsletter. So what if others don't read my newsletters. It keeps me informed. Plus it's a free tool!
SUBSTACK Newsletter
I am going to continue using this tool. It's in the “experimental” stage right now. This one does take a little extra work. I do different things with this newsletter.
* Sometimes I publish original content and then suggest related links which are links to my blogs or articles.
* Sometimes I take one of my popular articles or blog posts, summarize and share the link to get traffic back to my blogs and articles.
At the bottom of each post, I also share my main social media links in case people want to connect with me or contact me.
I get statistics on my content. It tells me how many received the content, how many opened it, and how many clicked through to the other links that I provided.
Yeah. That's how I know my foodie newsletter SUCKS! Hardly anybody reads it! Eh! I'll keep working on it.
For right now my Substack newsletters are being published as a FREE newsletters.
The only reason I am sticking with publishing my Substack newsletters is because one day I might be able to offer a PAID subscription. There are other publishers who already doing this and they are successful. To borrow words of encouragement from my late husband used to always say to me: “If other people are doing it, you can probably do it too. Try it!”
So I'm trying!
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Fun Link of Interest:
Pen Names and The Famous Writers Who Use Them - The Writers For Hire
