How To Earn Extra Income From Your Creative Content

Like any writer who is wanting to progress, committed as I am to Medium, I am always open to any possibilities which can increase my visibility, present me with a wider audience and ultimately generate some extra money to help to pay a few bills. For the last year in particular my long suffering wife has bore the economic brunt of funding our lives, and although things are a lot lot better now than they were a year ago, there is still progress to be made.

Some time ago I got wind of Vocal Media and decided to give it a try, not to submit to Vocal instead of Medium, but to submit to Vocal as well as Medium. Any low hanging fruit is worth a stretch.

Now I have to admit the financial gains on Vocal media didn't at first glance appear to be anything to write home about. Six dollars for every thousand views didn't seem that enticing. Having said that I went ahead with it anyway for various reasons. First off they do publish some great reads. Second off, if you forget the reward per thousand reads for a moment, there is the potential increase in visibility and audience reach. Then came a significant surprise in the financial aspect.

I received a five dollar bonus for publishing my first five stories.That was followed by a ten dollar bonus for ten stories. This in turn was followed by a fifty dollar bonus for my first fifty stories. Then this morning I got an email informing me that I have been awarded a five dollar bonus for one of my stories being selected as a top story, which goes on the Top Stories page. Added to this Vocal Media set up writing challenges with thousands of dollars of prize money to be won. And there's even more still yet.

You can become an Ambassador for Vocal Media and put in an affiliate link at the end of your stories. If anybody follows that link and becomes a subscriber there is a little financial tickle in it for you. With all of these incentives on offer, already I am feeling a lot more confident about having decided to become a subscriber on Vocal Media in the first place.

As the old saying goes, you have to be in it to win it, or, as they say in professional football, if you don't shoot you can't score. So I took a shot or two and lo and behold I scored a few goals. Of course, there is still a long way to go before I can sit back and relax about incoming bills, but it is definitely getting better.

One of my responsibilities as an editor on Medium is to dispense good advice about writing. And I do believe that it is incumbent upon me to also do what I can to advise about all aspects of writing, including marketing and publishing. It's all very well helping writers to write well, to edit and correct, but what then? Am I to just abandon you, to leave you floundering in an ocean of writers without the slightest clue about what to do next? No, if I find myself onto a good thing, a new opportunity to make progress on my own writer's journey, it would be remiss of me to not pass that good information on to each and every one of you.

Of course I am not suggesting for one minute that you should jump ship here. Medium is still my biggest writing earner and I would be a fool to walk away from it. Indeed, I am still very ambitious to make yet more great progress on Medium and I believe the same holds true for you as much as it does for me.

A few tips about the Vocal Media editor.

The Vocal Media Editor is simplicity itself, it really is a piece of cake. For a start they provide a direct link to Unsplash to upload from. This saves a lot of time going to Unsplash to copy and paste and type in a caption. You can also easily upload an image from your own files. In addition you can upload a video say from Youtube, providing of course that you have made sure you are allowed to without infringing copyright laws.

All this being said, once you have hit publish you cannot go back and correct or edit. To do that you would have to withdraw the piece from publication, correct and edit off-line, then resubmit. I have learned the hard way to be sure to get it right from the get go.

If you choose to copy and paste your content from Medium, or anywhere else for that matter, you may get asked to authenticate that the work is yours as it will come up on a plagiarism check, especially if you use a different name like I do. I use a pen name on Medium and my birth name on Vocal Media.

So with the present state of play on Vocal Media, plus lots of exciting new things to come, now is the time to make this exciting platform your top of the list go to publisher.