I stumbled upon a little trick to help myself earn a tiny bit more income on the side: Medium. Medium.com is a blog publishing site where anyone who has an account (which is free) can write content and get paid.
The way you get paid is to write good content and then readers will “clap” for you to bump up your ranking. Each time someone “claps” for your post, you get paid a little bit of money (like a few pennies).
According to my taxes this year, I was paid about $500 last year for my articles and I wasn’t even posting anything at all. That was from the articles I had uploaded in 2018!
So I had a thought: what about all those blog posts I wrote on that old WordPress site (this one) all those years ago? I wondered if Medium would import those old blog posts and keep the actual date they were written in place.
Well… it does.
I experimented with my original blog post “Tolkien’s 10 Tips for Writers”, a blog post that has been ripped off on many other websites including EssayMama who published it in 2014 (even though it was written by YOURS TRULY in 2012). They credit this blog, but it is ripped completely from my original post without permission. What do you expect from a website that writes original essays for paying clients who don’t want to do their own work?
Rant over.
First, I logged on to Medium and set up an account to be monetized. Just go on over to Medium.com and click “Get Started”. Once you do, sign in with Twitter or Facebook, whichever social media has the most followers. Medium will import all of your followers to your posts on Medium. Next, when setting up your account, you have an option to join the “partner program”. This is where you give them your account information so you can get paid.
Next, go to your blog and find the URL for those blog posts that somehow gained a huge following, perhaps you had one blog post (like my Tolkien post) that bounced around the internet a while.
Click on your picture (profile) and then click “stories”. You may have to write a story on Medium first before you get a “stories” option. I don’t know. I’m doing this after I have already written a few for them.
Then click “Import a Story” and paste in the URL for your original blog post.
After this, you will see the original post date at the bottom of your newly published article. Usually all the images and the text look the same as they do on your original blog post, but you can move them around before you publish your post. Notice that my original post for “Tolkien’s 10 Tips for Writers” was published in 2012, when the EssayMama post was 2014! Take THAT cheaters!
Writing Is Hard Work 