How to Make Money on Vocal.Media

I promise. We’ll get to the cat and the piano eventually. But first: how do you make money on Vocal.Media?

The short answer: write.

I know, I know. That’s painfully obvious. So let’s dive into that a little more. You need to make a great, great sacrifice by traveling to a volcano. Underneath the lava, you’ll find an alabaster shrine. Offer a priest a gargoyle wing. He’ll open a door for you. Step inside and whistle the alphabet backwards.

I mean, if you can do that I would be impressed, and I would pay you. Maybe in crushed up crackers and chopped chocolate pieces, but hey, maybe in some universe that IS how you get paid.

Alright, I’ll get to the chase. My recommendation for making money on Vocal.Media is to also write on other platforms. (Be patient with me for just a moment.)

A writer should never write in one spot. You should apply your writing skills in multiple places. What works for one website doesn’t for another. It’s important to not limit yourself before you get knee deep in writing. Be open to different avenues.

For Vocal.Media I would focus more on trying out different content and seeing what works for you. You’re more likely to get a top story bonus than win a challenge. A top story bonus=$5.

What’s nice about this website is that even if you lose a challenge you could still make money off your story from reads. Keep in mind the challenges are competitive. The odds are against you. You’re vying for a lottery. You could win, but don’t get too hopeful. Never get too hopeful as a writer. If you’re doing things right, “rejection” is your middle name.

Hi, I’m Andrea Rejection Lawrence. Nice to meet you!

Vocal.Media has added bonuses to its program, which is helpful. I don’t get a lot of reads and traffic. What I should be doing is checking out some of the social media channels. You should post your stories on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit.

I would focus on Vocal.Media as a hobby first. If you are lucky enough to make some income, or even a decent passive income stream, awesome! But don’t count your chickens before they hatch, if you catch my drift. Don’t expect money to be automatic. Most writing websites that pay you take time to develop. You need a body of work. You need a following. You need magic AND miracles. (Or just lots of time and organization to dedicate to this.)

I wouldn’t quit my day job or full time job. Be smart about your expectations. Even if you write the greatest story in the world—that doesn’t guarantee it will get more than two views. You may have to promote yourself a little.

You can hope for backlinks to catch up to you but, again, that will take time.

If you pay for Vocal.Media+, don’t expect that what you write will automatically bring in more money than the subscription costs. I don’t recommend for writers that you contribute your work in a way that brings you negative income.

Be smart if you pay for your writing to be online or if you pay to enter a contest. If you are making decent money from writing on the side, you can do something smart: keep track of your expenses for your tax records.

You can add an office space in your home that you put on your taxes as for business only. When should you do that? I’d say when you’re making enough money to have operating costs and business expenses, and you know what these things mean, and you’re not winging it.

If a home office is something you’re interested in having know that a lot of tax software can walk you through how to document it.

I would speak to a tax official rather than accept my word for it. I’m a writer, and I don’t want to lead you astray when it comes to finances. My suggestion is that you be smart about your money and remember what you spend it on. If you get smart about that then you won’t mind experimenting with Vocal.Media+ to see if it will be lucrative for you.

My next suggestion is to look through their niche sites. There are a lot! Try writing for different ones. Read some top stories to see what does make it to the top. Notice which of your stories flop and don’t repeat those mistakes.

Read the community guidelines. Sure, you may have been freelance writing for several years and know the inside and outside of the business. But Vocal.Media might not have the same rules as those other places that were blessed with your prose.

Always read submission guidelines. And if you get rejected? Don’t fret about it! Pick yourself up off the floor and write something else. Write 20 flops and then one mega hit.

With a rejected story, maybe it needs a little bit of editing. (Think of editing as TLC.) Maybe your story belongs somewhere else and not necessarily a public space.

This could be a lifesaver for some of you, so I’m going to mention it: Grammarly has a free version. I don’t care what was your ACT score, your editorial background, how well you can spot a comma splice, or if you can identify a cloyingly long run-on sentence, Grammarly will spot stuff you’re not catching. It will make your copy clean. It’ll catch all kinds of errors, so you should install it. Think of Grammarly as your guardian angel.

Sure, people make mistakes and their work goes viral all the time. No one knows every single rule of writing because we’re constantly reinventing and reinstalling and rearranging language. Not everyone agrees on the rules, I mean, people get in knots over the Oxford comma. Cue that one Vampire Weekend song! (Also, the answer to that song is me… I care.)

Grammarly is one trick to making money. It’ll guarantee that you’re taking your writing up a notch. I’m writing this post right now on my phone instead of my computer, and to me, that’s risky business. I don’t have Grammarly on my phone, so I have to quadruple check this.

I don’t recommend spamming all your friends and family with Vocal.Media stories that you painstakingly wrote. You might annoy them. I suggest finding groups on social media that you can join that are dedicated to Vocal.Media. These people have similar goals as you, they want to succeed, they like writing, they like reading. Your success in a way is their success. So don’t post your stories for everyone and their dog to read. Don’t bother your grandma by texting her a link. Just… don’t.

Do look for ways to correctly add or embed affiliate links and other items that Vocal.Media gives the okay. What’s nice about Vocal.Media is that it isn’t covered in ads, making it hard for readers to read. Ads can be a big turnoff. Google doesn’t like superfluous ads either and has been known to lower a site’s ranking for this reason. Bad news: this does mean you have to work a little harder for people to read your stuff, interact with it, and give it some love. Vocal.Media is open and honest about your exact rate. So keep that in mind.

Write something with some fire to it. Do you want a tip? You need to do something that grips people. You got to reach them in the gut. People are not going to tip you if you give them the same cut and dry run-of-the-mill experience. Think outside of the box, rather think outside of the time traveling microwave box.

It’s easier to rack up tips than the cents you’ll get from reads, so make sure what you write has fire, zest, a bang and boom to it. Write something personal, like a rollercoaster of a confessional about your ex-boyfriend and why you trust your psychic for helping you cosmically disconnect from him. Write something lovely about your 15 year-old-cat, and how you can’t stand the idea that time is running out, and you’re starting to think cat heaven has to be real… but maybe humans don’t have the same luxury. Give us something wild: like a grandma turned cowboy busting up people with her strong right hook. She kicks others down with foldable chairs. She is a majesty of power in an Old Western tavern.

To be honest, I’m a little stuck on the cat example. I love my cats more than I do most people. My profile picture is a cat for a reason. I think they’re often better people than us. My days are better when I get a morning snuggle with my gray and white cat. (He almost died last year, and I think a part of me would have died too.)

Want to make money on Vocal.Media? Set goals. See if you can write 100 posts in three months. See if you can write a post every Monday. See how often you can get up early just to write for 30 minutes. Goals will help you manifest your dreams. So make some goals.

Also, have watered down expectations. Maybe you’ll get enough money to pay for groceries. Down the road it could be enough money to pay for rent. Heck, I’ll settle for having enough money to defeat ALL of my student loans.

I wish there was a website where you just wrote content, and it chipped away at your student loans. I’m not talented enough to create this. But seriously… it would make my life easier.

I hope this gives you some ideas. I want you to have a good day. Pet your pets if you have them. Stretch your hips and keep them strong: once you’re old and you break your hips… everything goes downhill from there. Love your hips!

Seriously, love your hips,

Andrea

P.S. I’m not afraid to say there is a tip jar. It cannot float because it’s a metaphorical tip jar made of digital dots and digital zags. It also can’t make a nice sound when change goes into it. The best I can do is run over to my piano and hit a high C. Imagine my profile cat picture coming to life. It runs to a piano and hits a high C for you.

Feel free to think about cats playing pianos for the rest of the day.