Remember Vocal.media*? I have almost forgotten about them.
Last year and the year before, stories about Vocal were all the rage on Medium. In 2023, nothing.
Until now.
Here’s how your newsletter can help you earn money on Vocal.
Before we begin
What’s Vocal.media*, some of you might ask.
Good question.
Vocal is a writing platform not unlike Medium, but with some key differences. The major one being size. Vocal is not nearly as humongous, nor as prestigious as Medium. It has a smaller user base and considerably little reach.
Vocal does offer a nice website, reading experience, story selection, and a mobile app.
What sets Vocal apart from Medium is its earning model. Unlike Medium, Vocal doesn’t rely exclusively on paying members to pay writers.
Instead, Vocal pays for any reads, member or not.
That has been the selling point of Vocal from the beginning. You could theoretically write kick-ass, SEO-perfect articles, get a ton of search engine views, and earn for them. Some do.
To be precise, you get $3.80 for 1000 views. Vocal+ members (Vocal’s membership program) get $6 per 1000 views. It’s not much, but a start.
The problem with the strategy has always been reach. Vocal isn’t too high on search engine rankings. Meaning, search engine traffic is somewhat rare.
There are other ways to make use of Vocal’s payment system, though.
Indirect redirects
What the hell is that?
Let me explain. In the past, I used Vocal as my redirect source of choice for my Medium articles.
Here’s how.
Whenever I wrote a new Medium story that would fit Vocal as well, I republished the story on Vocal. Within the Medium story, right at the top beneath the featured image, I’d add a short paragraph, saying something like:
“Not a Medium member? Read this story for free here.”
The “here” would feature a link to my Vocal story.
That way, traffic from non-Medium members (i.e. people who don’t pay the membership and therefore can’t read Medium stories) would be redirected to Vocal, where those views count toward earnings.
So far, so good.
It did work, although in limited capacity for two main reasons:
- Not everyone wants to be redirected. Therefore, only a percentage of people click
- Medium does offer 3 free stories per month to every non-member. That removed some potential redirections.
Nevertheless, I made a few hundred dollars during my Vocal days.
However, when Medium started to take off for me, I neglected Vocal. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I’m starting to get into it again*.
For another reason.
Newsletters & Vocal
The redirect option isn’t only a good one for Medium.
First, blogs
You can use the same tactic on multiple platforms, like your blog. You could redirect visitors to your Vocal stories as well, especially when you run a blog with ads. Just say something like:
“Hate ads? Read this story ad-free here.”
And point to your Vocal link*.
Now, to the main topic of this story.
Newsletters
Whether you write on Substack, ConvertKit, MailChimp, EmailOctopus, Flodesk, or any other of the gazillion email platforms (yes, I have used a ton of them, you’ll find a handy ranking here), you can use the redirect tactic for all.
This is particularly helpful for newsletter creators who run a what I call “curated” newsletter.
Curated means you publish excerpts of stories and links to stories, rather than a full story in your newsletter.
In each curated issue, you can link to Vocal stories and therefore make money for the reads from people who click through. Depending on the size of your email list and the click rate, this can be a good number of readers.
In turn, this will help your Vocal profile grow and potentially increase your search engine rankings, increasing your external viewership, and therefore your earnings.
A nice cycle.
The bottom line
Vocal won’t make you rich. That’s pretty safe to say. But the platform can become a good side income source.
With the redirect tactic, you’ll benefit from the earning model on Vocal, without relying on Vocal’s internal growth and distribution.
Vocal does have those two, mainly through top story selections, recommendations, subscriptions, and challenges.
However, I wouldn’t use Vocal as the main part of my writing business. It can aid in growing your businesses.
And you’re not going to lose much time. You’re only re-posting existing content after all.
Join Vocal*. Try the redirect tactic. Tell me about the results!
P.S.: You’ll find my latest Vocal story here*.
