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5 Platforms for Writers

Just a few of the choices

By Matthew WoodallPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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5 Platforms for Writers
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

In the interest of getting my writing out to a wider audience, I’ve been exploring some of the other options out there for writers. There are lots of places where we can put our writing, and there are benefits to all of them.

For those of you who don’t want to go all the way through the article, here’s the tl;dr version: I’m sticking with Medium as my primary destination, but sharing to other platforms when the stories are right.

Medium

Let’s start with the place where I spend a lot of time: Medium.com. This is one of the best places for writers to get started and to make a name for themselves. It is simultaneously the easiest and hardest place to get started.

Anyone can publish on Medium, and many people do. Making money on Medium is harder, especially with a pool of authors that is growing faster than subscribers. When you consider that Medium has 1.25 Billion monthly page views and only a few hundred thousand subscribers, either those of us who subscribe are viewing a LOT of pages, or a lot of those page views are from people who aren’t subscribers.

I would imagine that many of these authors will slowly drop off the platform as people return to work during the pandemic. I’m hoping that the number of subscribers will increase as people have more disposable income as well.

For those of you who take earnings from the Medium Partner Program without paying the monthly fee (it’s only $5 USD), you may not be breaking any rules, but you need to consider whether you are playing the game fairly.

With the recent changes to Medium’s Curation and Distribution system, it is more important than ever to publish high-quality articles regularly and to get as many eyes on them as possible. You can do this in two ways: get into publications as often as possible, and build your network by engaging regularly with other authors.

Ultimately, Medium offers the best opportunity for writers to get noticed and to make money off their stories, but you have to work at it. It’s not enough to post something and leave it expecting others to find it.

Vocal

Vocal is one of the new players in this arena, it hasn’t been around as long as Medium and works somewhat differently. Where anyone can publish on Medium, Vocal’s “editors” review every article to make sure it meets their standards before publishing it. They have a selection of 34 different “communities” into which your writing has to fall. This isn’t a major challenge unless you write about some lesser-known topics.

The text editor is a little bit clunky, especially when compared with the Medium text editor. It doesn’t have quite as many options and doesn’t have the same easy style that Medium’s does.

My biggest complaint about Vocal is that it doesn’t have the same level of options as Medium for getting eyes on your writing. If you’re lucky, you might get 6–12 hours on the front page of your primary topic. Then, you’re gone into the abyss of the archives unless someone is deliberately looking for you or your story. Self-promotion is key here, and Vocal is best if you have a strong following already.

Like Medium, they pay their writers based on views, however, I’m not totally sure how they measure the engagement or how they distribute the money. They offer both a free and a “Vocal Plus” subscription offer, with the “Vocal Plus” offering writers more money in return for a $10 monthly fee.

To give you a comparison, my first three stories on Vocal (I’ve only been on there a couple of weeks) have netted me a grand total of $0.08 — while my first two stories on Medium (about the same time frame) netted me $0.27. I’m going to stick it out in both places (actually three — more about that in a minute) for a while, so I’ll keep you updated.

Personal Website

I used to maintain a personal website where I would post all my writing before importing it over here. I was running WordPress with monetization through ads, and while I didn’t really find any problems with it, I also wasn’t making much from it.

When I looked at the return on investment when you counted the time that I was taking to write, update links, maintain the backend, and deal with all the spam that accumulated in the comments sections it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It also meant that I was responsible for the personal information of anybody who visited my website, left a comment, sent me an email, etc…

If you have your heart set on being a professional writer, then a personal website isn’t a bad way to go. You control your audience there, and that’s where you are going to find the people who really care about your work.

I never set out to be a professional writer, and any paid writing gigs that I’ve picked up have been as a result of being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. While I may go back to having a personal website in the future, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for me unless I become the kind of writer who can afford a marketing budget.

Blogger

The grand-daddy of them all is still around, and still being used by writers of all types. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and gives you lots of opportunities to write about whatever you want. Also known as Blogspot, this continues to rank in the top 100 websites by traffic according to Alexa — the internet rankings company.

It’s easy to maintain, simple to use, but your monetization options are almost non-existent unless you have a huge following. Really, this is where you go to write about your family and to share experiences, not to make money as a writer.

Again, you will need to work very hard and to have lots of people who are deliberately looking for you in order for you to find success on Blogger. Very few people are just going to stumble upon you like they can do here on Medium.

Grinfer

Now, before I get too far into this, I’m going to be fully honest and transparent with you. I was invited to join Grinfer by a member of their team who reached out to me after reading some of my work on Medium. I am not paid by them, nor am I going to sit here and feed you feel-good stories about them. But, I didn’t find Grinfer by accident, and I wanted to be clear about that before we got into this.

Grinfer is a new site that is focused on online courses, though they have also added one-on-one consultations with the experts on their site as an added feature. They’ve only been around since the early part of 2020, and have some growing to do. I was asked if I would be interested in blogging over there after one of their employees saw my work on Medium.

They were really good about answering my questions, and seeing as I don’t have anything to lose by having another outlet in which I can share my work, I jumped in over there as well. They’re preparing to launch blogs and stories as part of their next phase, so I thought it was awesome that they wanted me to be in on the ground floor. I’m also preparing to launch an online course, so being able to have one “home base” where people can go for my content is also a big appeal.

I have shared my experience so far with the team over at Grinfer, so there should be no surprises here. It’s been a rocky start.

Their writing editor is clunky and difficult to use. I’m having an issue where when I highlight text, the formatting bar shows up with giant quotation marks for block quotes, but everything else is tiny. They also have no auto-save function, and clicking “Save as Draft” takes me out of my story and back to the listing of my stories — not what I want when I’m trying to write while in the flow. I’ve also had some issues where the writing editor has glitched and sent me back a page instead of just backspacing. As a result, I’ve lost a few hours of work over there.

As I said, I’ve shared my feedback with them and offered to work with them on their User Experience from a writer’s perspective to help improve their offering.

Their monetization system is very similar to the Patreon Model where I can choose to put my stories behind a paywall that is only accessible by my subscribers. But, this also allows people to have a subscription to any of my courses as well, so this has some possibilities. I’m going to stick around over there and will let you know how it goes as the company and website both mature.

Finding the right platform can be challenging, and there are lots of other options available than just the five I’ve talked about. Every writer is going to need something different, and it’s important to find what is going to work best for you.

If you want to read more of my work, sign up for my mailing list where I'll share the latest and greatest from my brain to your screen!

This was originally published over at Medium.

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About the Creator

Matthew Woodall

I'm a writer, father, husband, and insatiably curious about the world around us and the people who inhabit it. The ideas included in my stories are mine and do not represent any of the organizations I am associated with.

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