Today I Wrote An Article on Medium.

And then I wrote this one here on Substack too.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash. Admittedly, I didn’t look very long for this sign as it was on the first page of results.

Today I wrote an article on Medium, titled “What are You Grateful For?”

I’m actually quite proud of it. It wasn’t a bad effort from someone who has had a long writing break and is just starting off a new profile from scratch.

I had a profile over there a long time ago. Mostly, I wrote about dogs and dog behaviour, and when I left the dog behaviour world, I took down my profile and all of the work that I had put into it.

I have the writing bug again, and can’t decide whether to go with Substack, Medium or both. Substack as a home for my Confidence-First English™️seems like a no-brainer, as eventually I want to create a community there for my students. However, for my personal stuff and just writing for the joy of it, there are some pros and cons to both platforms.

Do I really have to choose?

Or can I just ramble away on either to my heart’s content?

After arguing with myself yesterday about my dilemma, I had the wonderful idea of outsourcing my decision.

Ask Auntie ChatGPT

I then asked that bastion of truth, ChatGPT, what it thought, and it advised me to stick to writing my personal thoughts and feelings on Substack, probably so nobody will ever find them, and then I won’t be arrested for boring people to death or committed to the asylum. To make this my humble home and subject the readers here to my innermost workings.

It said I should write more useful, less emotional content on Medium to find victims… I mean an audience, then use it to send potential students to my Confidence-First™️ newsletter, while posting the occasional less opinionated opinion or thought piece over there on Medium to earn some money, too.

It then told me how I was in a strong position, with my background and experience, to enact some kind of master-plan marketing funnel to take over the world, while becoming a billionaire, one potential Google-translated article-reading student, with a dog in a Mazda Bongo obsession, at a time. What could possibly go wrong?

Naturally, I’ll probably do the exact opposite and then wonder where it all went wrong in many months’ time, when I’m earning the grand total of $0.26 a week on Medium and still have no subscribers or English students either here on Substack. Because that is just how we rebellious writers roll.

Plus, I have to wait three months before I can re-enrol in the partner program, which I wasn’t expecting. I could have earned at least £4 in that time. Granted, sometimes I get less than that an hour on Preply. But in some countries I’m told that is a good wage. If my Bongo were reliable, I could drive it to one of those countries and live a life of luxury.

Publish regularly

Nope. Another thing I won’t be doing, despite all the best advice out there, is publishing regularly. Because I know damn well that I will write three or four lovely articles one week, and then not even think about them again until at least a month later, and then have a case of writer’s block for another week after that, before I can think of something worth yapping on about.

Gumroad

How do real writers earn money?

I have a sneaking suspicion it is not from Substack newsletters or opinion pieces on Medium.

I’ve seen quite a few people earn money by selling “books” they wrote in an afternoon, on Gumroad, about how to earn money on Medium or Substack. That was pretty lucrative for a while. It must have been as so many people were doing it. Others were writing on Medium and Substack about how to make money on Gumroad. Not sure if it still is as much of a money churner, but if I get really desperate to suddenly make a fortune… or about a fiver here and there… I will probably think about doing that for 10 minutes and then change my mind and open up for an extra few hours on my Preply account instead.

Anything to avoid getting a real job.

Anyway, here is my subscribe button in case you want to hear more of my thoughts.

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