What I Have Learned From My First Ten Stories on Medium.

Or “Why Medium is a waste of time, but I’m going to keep writing anyway.”

My editor is hard at work. Photo by the author, on his phone in his living room.

So, that's a little harsh, but let me explain why after over three decades of participating in the online experience I find value in writing here on Medium.

Let me start at the beginning of this whole thing.

A few months ago while I was surfing YouTube looking for ways to improve my channel, I ran across the following video:

I spend a lot of time online marketing myself and creating content for my students worldwide. I’ve been doing it long enough (as you will see below) that I’ll occasionally get burnt out, or a particular platform will get oversaturated with my kind of content, or a platform might even just go out of vogue over time, so I’m always looking for new things to do. The idea of writing about guitar and earning money was intriguing.

I’ve been active online long before there was social media as we know it.

As a kid in the mid-1980s, a middle school friend of mine got me involved in the world of online bulletin boards or dial-up BBS’s. He lent me a simple terminal that wasn’t even a computer and a 300 baud modem to plug my phone into, and I discovered that I could get on bulletin boards anywhere in the world. I didn’t know much about what people were talking about on these boards, but it was so much cooler than our other friend's shortwave radio (in my head). We also played games like Megawars on CompuServe using bootleg accounts that I’m pretty sure my friend (who will remain nameless) boosted from open CompuServe starter kits at the local Radio Shack. My parents were not as excited about all of this in the pre-call waiting era, and after the first month, I was loudly invited to keep to bulletin boards with local phone numbers after the first phone bill came in.

I lost touch with the online world through my high school and college years, but once I was out of school, I realized that it might be important to have a website for the various bands that I was playing in. I got back online and learned how to build simple websites using HTML and some of the primitive website editors available at the time. I was also on America Online and tried whatever other services and sites that pop up online. I remember being on MySpace for a while until the Facebook and YouTube revolution started. Once I discovered the world of online guitar forums, I started my own in 2008, a great online community and a hugely supportive resource for all of my ventures.

Being a working musician my entire life, I’ve had to market and self-promote myself on some level for more than three decades. For twelve years, my wife and I owned a brick-and-mortar music school here in Southern California, which also needed marketing. Teaching guitar through Skype to students that I’ve met through guitar forums, Facebook and Youtube essentially carried us through the recessionary times of 2007 and the years following.

When we decided that owning a physical business was not what we wanted anymore, being online allowed us to transition my teaching to a format that erased the massive monthly overhead that we had to come up with each month. I earn much less money, but I got to keep more of it and the hours and stress levels were much more manageable. I’ve needed to stay current and look for new ways of getting my name out there to earn a living. The videos that I watched about this “Medium.com” site seemed like it was something different from my other social media efforts and might expose me to a new audience. It would also allow me to build a bit of a reading resource library for my students. I could write about my experiences, make non-video lessons, and the occasional tutorial on subjects like shopping for instruments or how to survive as a working musician in the “social media/streaming music/independent artist” era.

I had to get all that out there because I wanted to set the stage for where I currently am on Medium after a couple of months worth of writing.

I watched a bunch of videos that made it sound like it was going to be a very profitable endeavor, so I got myself set up to start writing and “got after it.” I figured that I could write about what I know best (being a musician) so that it would dovetail nicely with the rest of my online efforts, and I had a topic to write about that I honestly felt like I have something unique to say.

One thing that I quickly noticed after spending some time reading on Medium.com was that much of what I was seeing were articles about how to be successful on Medium.com. Or how to make money with multiple side-hustles. I did see quite a bit about relationships, gender, and sex. People have
“Thirty Day Writing Challenges” to build up enough content to generate more revenue, and there are formulas geared towards getting more eyes on your work and engaged for more time. I’m not really interested in working that hard to be like everyone else.

The music writing that I found on the site was mostly album reviews or how the various writers related to music but very little about being a musician, so I thought that I might possibly have a niche of my own. I have learned that my writing might be a little too niche for the average Medium reader. I also get the feeling that most of my new readers on Medium are other writers. Do “normal readers” exist on this site? Is this actually a closed circuit of people all trying to do the same thing and supporting each other in order to support themselves?

I don’t know.

I know that my external readers from my other online venues outnumber the internal paying readers quite a bit. I have been fortunate enough to be accepted as a writer into a publication on Medium called The Riff, which, as far as I can see, is the only publication that supports writing such as mine. Of the ten articles that I have published, nine of them have been through The Riff, and all nine have been picked up for distribution by Medium (I think the term is “curated”). I made a mistake when I published my first article and did not submit it to a publication, so that is the only non-curated article that I’ve had so far. It happened to get a great response on Facebook, LinkedIn and my forum.

To date, my earnings for the ten weeks that I have been active on Medium are $15.39.

I have gotten 1,314 views, 606 reads, and 89 “fans.”

Once I started writing, I started watching more videos about Medium on YouTube. I realized that, like YouTube, Medium had gotten flooded with people looking for income during the pandemic and that most people didn’t make the (potential) hundreds of dollars per article. Still, by that point, I had really started to enjoy writing.

My students, friends, and the rest of my online world also seemed to enjoy my writing, and it was becoming a great conversation starter and content generator on the other platforms. I’ve come to realize that while I probably won’t be very successful here on Medium purely as a writer on this platform, my writing has become an important part of my online marketing.

I could probably do this just as easily as a blog on my website, but I am getting some benefit from being on Medium. The folks at The Riff have been super supportive and have even interviewed me for an upcoming episode of their weekly podcast. I felt comfortable writing about topics such as cultural appropriation and white privilege in music here on Medium when I would refrain from topics like that on my other platforms (especially on Facebook) because I was afraid of the potential for mayhem among my extended community. The questions and comments on that article, in particular, were incredibly helpful for my own struggles with the subject.

It feels constructive to talk to people here on Medium.

The trolling, verbal poo-slinging, and knee-jerk mayhem that seem to be the coin of the realm for discourse on the other platforms have not been in evidence in my experiences here. Even when someone doesn't agree with me (or vice-versa) I feel like there can be a respectful conversation in a way that I don’t see in places like FaceBook.. This might be because of how few articles I’ve written or even my chosen subject manner, but I feel like I can be honest here without fear that the comments will become mired with acrimony and nonsense.

My attitude will probably change over time, but I do like it here. I also like that my writing here also makes up a sort of virtual resource library for my students, much like my YouTube channel does.

I find that my efforts here on Medium actually are an effective use of time, but I don’t think I’ll ever make much profit on the site. Having to create content in a completely different form factor from my video lessons, backing tracks, and gear reviews has it’s own value in my online “portfolio,” though. Besides the obvious benefits that I’ve already explored here, examining each topic further and figuring out how to communicate my ideas in a way that makes sense to the reader has already made me a better musician and teacher.

I guess I’ll keep writing, then.

If you are interested in more content (video guitar lessons, blogs, backing tracks, free music stuff), check me out at JacksGuitarTrax.com!