Shelby’s Church success on Medium has an explanation
That you might not expect
Lately, Shelby Church has been killing it on her content on YouTube, but even more, she has become a Medium writer and, apparently, also rocked it. A few months back she made a video on how she made over 6000$ on an article.
If you don’t know who she is, damn you really should. She does really good YouTube videos, mostly related to money, tech, and innovation. She’s one of a kind. As far as Medium, she hasn’t been here for long, but it’s surely worth the read.
This made me think, perhaps there was something crucial I was missing and that was the reason I couldn’t keep up. So far, I’ve come up with a few answers to understand the whys and hows of her rapid success on Medium.
This is not meant to discredit her, I think her work is good, and she deserves the success she’s had on medium, the point of this article is to shed light on advantages (most of them achieved through previous work) that another new writer on Medium might not have.
She already has an audience
Church has been doing YouTube for over 10 years, she started doing videos and exposing herself to the internet before YouTube was even a thing, and then transferred to the platform. Her followers know her and when they see her name on Medium, they will obviously subscribe to it.
Unlike most of us who are new at Medium, she already had a following. Her identity already was a brand well-liked by over a hundred thousand people (from the number of likes she usually gets on YouTube).
Most of us barely have some friends or family that we’ve reached out to. I desired to remain anonymous on Medium so I didn’t even have this. It was the literal expression of growing from nothing.
This is quite linked with the following point;
Every article was advertised to all of her YouTube followers. And vice versa.
I bet many of the early reads of her article come from YouTube followers that saw her talking about what she was doing and came here to check her out.
This is brilliant. This is like if you wouldn’t have to pay for an advertisement but you got paid for advertising your products. Her videos are obviously monetized, she gets ad money, so she can use Medium to make content for YouTube. Then she’s getting money from the reads on Medium and the views on YouTube. Also, in Medium, as she has made videos of her experience being a YouTuber, she gets to bring people to her YouTube channel. Damn…
Also, both platforms give her content to use on the other platform. Let me explain. People on Medium are sick and tired to talk about how much money you make here, but some YouTube consumers have never heard of it. In the same manner, something that might be not that popular on YouTube anymore -like “The 5 Worst Purchases I’ve Made In My 20’s (So Far)”- might be a hit on Medium.
She has exclusive information
Unlike most of us, she knows the ins and outs of YouTube and thus can be considered an expert on the topic. This is why her This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me for My 1,000,000 Viewed Video article blew out. Who else knows about it? And, as for now, not that many people are sharing their income based on YouTube and Instagram. It’s still quite a taboo which adds to the appeal for such a topic for an article.
Imagine if someone inside the police body told us how racism works in close doors. We would all want to hear about it because it’s a topic that generates a lot of interest but also it’s not public. Like at all.
She already knows what will work on Medium
This one is way more relevant than it may seem. Most of the articles she has published on Medium are the written version of a YouTube video. This means that she can pick the YouTube videos that have gone well, ignore the ones that haven’t, and place quite a safe bet.
Most of the writers here on Medium gamble on our articles. Will it go well? Will people read it? You never know. If you could pitch topics beforehand you wouldn’t have this issue.
Sure, she can mess up and get it wrong, but so far she hasn’t written more than 10 articles and she has been a massive hit. She certainly knows the game and it’s doing a hell of a move.
Aftermath
As stated previously, this is by no means an intent to undermine her work, here or on YouTube. She keeps improving her content and it’s one of the brightest Content Consumers out there. This is meant to shed light on how to use Medium in a smarter way and understand that if you are not growing as quickly as her it might be because she has been 10 years in the making and you just started.
