How to Improve Your Medium Read Ratio and Earn More

1. Introduction: I'm Thomas Smith and today we're talking about the read ratio on medium, and in particular, how you as a medium writer can improve your read ratio. This is a really big deal because the read ratio determines how engaged your readers are with your content. And it also is one of the major metrics that determines how much you get paid if you are a member of the medium partner program. It's a really important metric to understand. It's really important metric to track. And it's a really important metric to improve over time if you're serious about your writing on Medium, and we'll talk about all kinds of different ways to do that, as well as some details about what exactly the ratio is measuring. And I've been a medium writer for over two years now, my content on the platform has received over 15 million views. And as you can see here, I can tend to average around 70 thousand to over a 120 thousand views per month on my content. I've also written over 400 articles on Medium. I've got a large dataset to pull from. I've got a lot of experience on the platform and I've done a lot of research to figure out exactly what metrics are the best ones to track. And that gives me some insights I can share with you hear about your read ratio and ways to improve it. So come along, join me and we'll look at some strategies to improve your medium read ratio. 2. What is a Good Medium Read Ratio?: Now the first step to improving our medium read ratio is understanding exactly what the read ratio is in the first place and also what factors might change your rate ratio. If you go into your stats view on medium, you can see stats for your recent stories and you'll see you again, views, reads and then the red ratio here. And it's expressed as a percentage. And what it's telling you is the percentage of the story that your readers are actually reading. Views are how many people have come to the story and looked at it, reads or how many people made it all the way through. And the read ratio is measuring that per bet proportion. So how many people that come to read your story actually end up reading through your story. So the more of your story that gets read, the higher your read ratio is going to be. And it's a really good metric in order to determine how well your stories are doing on medium and in particular how engaging they are for your readers. So if you have a higher read ratio on your story, it means that people are reading a larger proportion of it, and that usually means that they are pretty engaged with it. It's something that they're finding to be interesting. On the contrary, if you have a low read ratio, then it means people are coming to the story. You can see a story here, for example, where I got 1.3 thousand views, but only 6% of people actually read through that story. Getting the read ratio right is really important because it's going to determine not just how many people are looking at your work, but how many people are actually engaging with it? It's also really important because when you start to go into a story and look at your earnings if you're part of the partner program, the amount of member reading time that your stories are getting is going to be one of the things that determines how much you make from the story. Again, if people are coming to your story and they're just leaving immediately because it's not engaging to them. And you have a low rate ratio, you're probably not going to have that many minutes of reading time on that story. Versus if you have a very compelling story, then people are going to stick around. They're gonna read more of it and you're going to end up with more member reading minutes on average. And that means that you will potentially get paid more from the partner program. It's really important again for engagement purposes, but it's also really important for earnings purposes to have a high read ratio. What makes a good read ratio? Because actually it's not necessarily the highest, which is kind of surprising to people. I tend to say that a good read ratio is anything between 20, 50%. Most of my stories, if you look through recent stories I published here, most of them are falling into that range. There's some that are perhaps a little bit below, but everything for the most part is in that 20, 50% range, and that's considered a good ratio. Lot of people think a 100% ratio would actually be the ideal. The, everybody should read everything in your stories should be so compelling that everybody just loves to stick around and read the whole thing. And that's not necessarily true, which again is surprising to people. The reason for that is that it's great to have a higher rate ratio because your story is engaging. But sometimes you might have a high rate ratio because your story is too short. The length of a story can sometimes impact the rate ratio. Usually a longer story, you're going to have fewer people reading it because it's a lot of time commitment. And it might take them too long to get through that whole story. So it's normal to have a slight drop in your read ratio. It for longer stories again, it shouldn't be below that 20%, but you're going to see longer stories that are gonna be on the lower side. The stories that are gonna get a one-hundred percent read ratio are almost always stories that have a very short length. So you can see these read ratio stories from mine that are 88% up to a 100%. These are a one or two minutes stories. So it makes sense. People find it easier to read the whole thing if it's only a one-minute story. But the difficulty and the reason why a high rate ratio is not necessarily good is that maybe those people wanted more. Maybe they only read the whole thing and they only read one minute of your story. And really they would've read five minutes or seven minutes, ten minutes of your story because it was so compelling and you could have potentially had a lot more member engagement and potentially a lot more reading time. Remember reading time and earn more from that story. It's important to look at your read ratio in that range and say, okay, is it over 20%, especially on longer stories, if it's over 20%, great, you're golden. But if it's a 100% or even if it's over 50%, ask yourself, could this story have been longer? Could I have told a longer story that I've taken this and gone in depth more with it. And could I haven't kept my audience engaged for a lot longer than I did. Perhaps they would have been enjoyed that experience more. Maybe you would've earned more because you would have had more member reading. This. One strategy actually is to take stories that have a read ratio of over 50%, especially some of these ones that are 80% or above and rewrite them as longer stories do a follow-up story that goes into more depth about the same topic that expands on what you did before. And we'll talk a little bit more about how to do that in one of the later lessons. But in general, you want to have a high rate ratio. You don't want to have too high of a ratio. But if you are getting into that 20 to 50%, then you are in great shape with your read ratio on medium. 3. Write Compelling, Honest Headlines: One of the best ways to improve your read ratio is to write compelling but honest headlines. And that's it. It can be a little bit more challenging than it initially sounds. So your headlines should be compelling to be something that when people see it in their feed on Medium or see it in an email digest. They want to click on it and they want to know what that article is going to be about. So that's the first step. You can't have a good read ratio if no one reads your articles to begin with. So make sure to write headlines that are compelling, that use words that have a high emotional content to them. So you can see a lot of these headlines on my recent stories. Things are amazing. They, it has a large number of tons of something. The best items, these kinds of words get people interested. They get people excited. Sometimes a headline that kind of offers up a question or something that's a little bit compelling to people, makes them wonder what the story is going to be about. Can get a lot of views and can get people interested in the story. So for example, this one, high-end perfumes often contain well vomit. That's definitely going to get people's attention and they're going to wonder what, what, what, what is that a bad at that true? That's the kind of thing that gets people going to the story in the first place. Questions can work well as well. Do production values matter on YouTube? Your story should then obviously answer that question. And that gets us to the second part because it's not enough to just bring people in with these compelling headlines in order to have a good read ratio, you want to have your article honestly answer the question or resolve the tension that you introduced in the headlines. So if I had a story entitled high-end perfumes often contain well vomit and then it was about something totally different like fashion. Then people probably would click on it because it's compelling. But once they got there, they wouldn't really stick around and read it because it didn't really resolve that question of wealth on it what, or didn't give them the information that they were looking for. And that's what clickbait usually it's, it has a compelling headline. There's no substance, it's not compelling to keep people there and people tend to leave it and it's not good. You don't want to be writing clickbait. So make sure you have a headline that draws people in. But then once they're there, if you want them to keep reading, you want to have that good read ratio. You want your story to honestly provide the information that the headline says it will answer the question that headline is posing, resolve the tension that the headline is introducing. And when your stories do that, you'll get a good number of views. Again, because something is compelling to people like this amazing word here. In 2100 views on the story. 47% read ratio means once they got there, the story, which happens to be about a really awesome thing at the Oakland Zoo. Kept them engaged, kept them interested. They hung around, they read a good portion of it, almost half of the story there. One thing you can do is look through your stories and look for ones where you had a good number of views and a high rate ratio. And you know there that you wrote a good headline and you delivered on the promise of that headline. Now, if you have a high number of clicks, but you don't necessarily use and you don't necessarily have a high rate ratio. There could be other reasons. It could be a lot of non-member views are people that just aren't engaged. But also you have to ask yourself, did my story deliver on the headline that people were reading there? For example, this one texts, great resignation hides and ugly truth. That got 3500 views. So definitely compelling. Got people engaged only in 19% rate ratio on it. It's a story about diversity and inclusion. People might have had ideas about what uglier truth could be involved here. When they got there, they may have decided that the story wasn't something that was as interesting to them and clicked away. And I don't necessarily think that that means it's a bad story or that your headline was an honest. It just means that the alignment between what people clicked on and what they ultimately got may not have been exactly what they were looking for. So that's something to keep in mind if you read ratio seems low. Ask yourself, did my story deliver on the promise of the headlines that it resolve the tension introduced in the headline and in the future? Can I tweak that or can I even change that headline so that it more accurately reflects what the reader is getting out of that story. When you do that, you'll find that your read ratio will often jump dramatically. And especially when you write something that's compelling, that's emotionally engaging, and then ends up delivering on that promise. You'll see a high number of views, a high, high read ratio, and you'll end up with a lot of great member reading time out of that story. So pay attention to your headlines and make sure that your story then delivers on the promise that the headline introduces. 4. Optimize Your Intro: Once you've gotten people to your article, one of the best ways to improve your read ratio and medium is to ensure that your intro is something that really grabs reader's attention. This is so important because the average reader who clicks on a headline for an article, we'll spend about 15 seconds reading the article when they first land on the page. And that's really not very much time. It's about enough time to read one to two sentences. And in that 15 seconds, they'll determine whether it's an article that they wanted to stick with or an article that they want to bail. And they want to go find some other piece of content from another writer. Or maybe they want to go look at something on tiktok or whatever. You have about 15 seconds once you've convinced somebody to click on your article to get their attention, to keep them on the page. And if you fail to do that in the first 15 seconds, then they'll probably click away. And ultimately that's gonna reduce your read ratio because they didn't finish reading the story. They probably spend almost no time at all reading the story. And that means that you're not gonna get a lot of member reading time out of them. They are a member and you just lost an opportunity to get somebody engaged in your story. One of the most important things is looking at your intro and in particular trying to figure out in the first one to two sentences, do I get people's attention? Do I keep them interested? There's a couple of strategies for doing this. One is to write a really compelling intro. First sentence that just knock people's socks off and gets them really excited about staying with that story. And that's a great, it's called a hook in many cases, it's a great way to approach it if you can do that consistently. So there's some stories where that's a great fit. Your first-line just grabs people and they say, Oh my gosh, this is so interesting. I'm gonna stick with the story. But you don't always have to write something that's so compelling to keep people engaged. Oftentimes I find that an easier and more consistent strategy is to write a headline or first an intro that, that takes the headline and kind of tells people exactly what they're going to get out of the story. A good example of that is, let's take a look at a story here that I wrote about the coin cryptocurrency. Going to go ahead and find that this has a pretty good read ratio, but 53%, it's a three-minute read, so it's on the shorter side, but still that's a pretty good ratio there. And you can see it's the headline is coined, lets you mine crypto by driving around compelling and interesting people love things about crypto. Let's go ahead and take a look at the story. The first two sentences in here tell you exactly what the story is about the last few weeks and testing the coin app, Leslie to geo mine cryptocurrency just by driving around tracks your location, Let's see, monetize your location data by allowing coined to sell it on their behalf. So that pretty much tells you what the rest of his story is going to be about. You can decide from that first one to two sentences whether this is something you care about or not. And about half of people, more than half of people essentially read this and said, Yeah, I want to know how I do that. I want a mind this coin crypto and they continue to read. Again, I could have written something really compelling. Like I, I drove to the store and made $4, which I didn't. But that might get people's attention. Or here's this incredible way to make money as you drive probably would get people's attention and keep them engaged. You can try to do that. But again, I think one of the easiest, most consistent ways is just take that first sentence or two and very clearly tell people what the story is going to be. If they care, which hopefully they do, they'll stick around and they'll probably read a lot of it. If they don't care, then they'll click away and that's fine. They probably would've clicked away almost immediately anyway, once they realized that the story wasn't for them, write up a snappy citing hook if you're able to do that. But if not, just summarize in a sentence or two what they're going to get out of the store, what the value proposition is that you're bringing to them. And I find that's again more consistent, easier to do. And it works just as well to keep people engaged. Now here's the good news for read ratios. If you've made it past that 15 seconds. If somebody who reads that first part of your story and decides that they're going to stick around and read more of it. Then usually you have them for about six minutes. On average. That's pretty good. People are reluctant to make that investment. Once they're invested, once they read a paragraph or two, they're probably going to stick around and a lot of them are going to finish reading the story. So really if you can sell them on the value of the story in that first 15 seconds, then your job is a lot easier because you're just keeping them engaged by nature. They've invested some time in it. There's some inertia there. They're probably going to continue to read the story and they may even finish it, which is going to bump up your ratio. So if you want to improve your rate ratio again, look at those first two sentences, that first 15 seconds of your story and make sure that it's really keeping your reader engaged and making them want to continue with that story. 5. Break Up Your Stories: Once you've gotten people interested in the story past the intro, they will generally stick around for a GAN up to six minutes. But you still want to keep them moving through the story and keep them engaged. And there's some ways that you can do that, which again will increase your read ratio, especially if it's a longer story. Let's take a look at my most recent story. We'll pick on this one. It has a 40% ratio, which is great, and it's on the higher end of my, my normal range there. Let's take a look. The intro introduces a concept about printing that's compelling enough obviously to keep people reading if there's certain sort of person. But once people are in the story and the reading the story, you do want to try to find ways to continue to keep them going through the flow of it. And one way to do that is to break up long chunks of texts with headings and images. The reason to do that is that you really want people to feel like they can skim the article. They can know what's coming up. They know that you're not just there, not just confronted with this wall of text. So headlines get them engaged in the beginning and the subtitles as medium calls them, gives you the opportunity to frame what's coming next in the story. You can see here this is going into what this printer is. Here we're gonna talk about print quality and paper options so people can scan, they can look through here, but they also know what the next chunk of text is going to be about. You generally want to put headings in at times that are appropriate, but usually two or three paragraphs of text is a good kind of spacing amount before putting your next heading in there. Again, this just keeps them moving through the piece, keeps them informed about what's coming up. That will keep them reading, keep your read ratio high. The other thing that's nice to do is to throw in media that again, kind of ties into and enhances the story. What you want to avoid here is just putting in random Unsplash images or stock photos that sort of relate but don't actually add anything to the story that just noise people. It doesn't actually help you re ratio might drive them away. But if you can throw in a relevant YouTube video that builds on whatever you're talking about in the story. That's a great way to keep people engaged. You can just use the embed function and put a video directly in to your story that will keep people on the page watching the video engaged with the story. And it breaks up this one medium of just looking through texts, just reading. They can stop. I can watch a little video. They can see some things hopefully demonstrated from your story and that will keep them engaged and keep them reading. And again, keep your ratio high. The other thing is include photos or images that help to tell the story. So not just a random stock photo that happens to somehow relate. I didn't just throw in a picture of a smiling photographer here, for example, this is an actual close-up of a print produced on the printer that I'm reviewing in this particular story. Again, it breaks up the tax. It gives people something of a different medium. No pun intended, visual instead of written to look at here. And it adds to the story because it helps them to evaluate what I'm talking about. Remember, I'm talking about print quality. The heading tells them that when they get to the end of this section, Here's a great actual example of the print quality from that printer. Again, that helps to bridge this big chunk of texts. It helps to keep them moving through the story towards the end. And that helps to improve your read ratio. So think about headings, think about media that you can throw in, and that again, helps people move through, helps keep them engaged, and that will keep your ratio high and your member reading time high as well. Especially do this on stories that are longer. So anything over about a five-minute reading time should definitely be broken up in this way to keep people engaged. 6. Attract the Right People: For some stories you're gonna write it. You're going to love the story. And then you're going to end up with a really bad read ratio. That's necessarily a bad thing. It's not necessarily your fault that that happens. So take a look at your stories that have the worst read ratios or one that you feel like it should've had a better regression. You can sort by rate ratio in your stats panel here and medium. If you want to just click on Read ratio there, get the little downward arrow and you're going to start with your lowest read stories to begin with here. So some of these might just not have been that interesting to people. But in some cases there's other reasons why your read ratio might be really low. Let's take a look at one, for example, here this is a story that I wrote for the bold italic. It's a five-minute read. It got 2300 views. So not bad in terms of the number of views, but the ratio is dismal. It's like 13% way under that 20% threshold. So I can look at this and say, Gosh, that story didn't do well. I shouldn't have written stories like that. This is bad and I should feel bad. But actually if I click into the story and look at the stats and a bit more detail, I can see that when I go down here, my type of traffic is only 8% internal views and the vast majority are coming from aggregators here. That means that the traffic that came to the story DID results in a good number of views. But it's a very, very small percent of it was internal member traffic on medium. Most of it was people who were coming in from sort of random apps. They might not be the most engaged viewers. There might be more bots that you're getting on there. Generally Medium members, especially people who follow you, are going to be really engaged, are going to know about reading on medium. They're going to probably enjoy reading that story and also they're gonna be Medium members. So some people might click through from an external site. Yeah, get a view on your story and they might hit the paywall and see that they can't read more and have to head out even if they found it interesting. If you're fine that you have a super low rate ratio. Obviously look at the story and see if there's some structural issue that you can improve upon. Headline that wasn't, didn't match with the content of the story. Maybe a really boring intro where you lost a lot of people. Maybe it's just too long and we need to break it up with headings. If that's not the case, take a look at your external and internal traffic ratios. If it's mostly external traffic, then you might have been a fine story and it might've been something that this 8% of engaged readers found really compelling. But you happen to get a lot of this external viewership that might not have been engaged, might not have been able to read more of the story. And that might be why you got a low rate ratio. Always look at the ratio. Always be ready to make improvements where it's possible to do that. But also recognize that some things like that are beyond your control. And sometimes it's fine to have a story that gets a lot of external readership. You don't necessarily get the most engaged readers, but at least it reached a certain number of people that probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise. So don't stress out, especially if you see a large number of external readers over a low rate ratio make improvements. But recognize that some stories are just gonna be artificially low because of the kind of people who are coming to it. There are also ways to improve this. Share your stories with your followers both on medium and on other social platforms. Share them with people, with groups, for example, that you know, are going to find the story compelling. If I wrote a local news story, I'll often go to a local news site like next door, and I'll post the story and ask for people's feedback. That tends to get a really engaged local viewership versus somebody is in Kalamazoo. And I read a story about the Bay Area, and they click through on it. They're probably not going to find that story of very interesting. They're probably going to leave so you can tweak this a bit. But if you're getting a lot of external views, not a very great read ratio. It's probably not your fault, it's probably not your story. It's probably just the people that story happens to be bringing it. 7. Rewrite Your High Ratio Stories: The final strategy I want to share here is what do you do with those stories where you have a very high rate ratio? As I talked about before, most people think, Oh higher is better, higher ratio of I got a 100%. I want one medium. I did the best I possibly could. And it is great to get a higher rate ratio. But sometimes it actually indicates more of a missed opportunity or bringing me looking more positively at a new opportunity that you can realize in the future. So let's take a look at some of my stories that had the highest rate ratio. Now you want to exclude ones that are so short that by definition the person has read them just by opening them. If there's a one-minute read and it's a story where if you click through on this, it's going to be something that's so short that they just basically read the first paragraph and they've read the whole thing, then by definition, you're going to end up with a good read ratio. And that's what this is, is just a kind of a funny image. But if that's not the case, if it's a two-minute read or three-minute breed and it has this really high read ratio, then that probably indicates that it's something people wanted to know more about. And if we look through some of these, we can see, for example, this story about using Philips Hue bulbs on my Android home automation tablet. This is a two-minute read and got an 82% read ratio. And if we click through on that story, you can see that it's a short story with a video at the end. People, for the most part, 80% looked at this and they read through all this text and then he got to the end. Maybe some of them watch the video and maybe some of them just clicked away at that point. But because I see that it's such a high rate ratio and it's a pretty short story. Maybe I could have expanded this. And maybe people want to read a longer story about how to, to control Philips Hue bulbs on my Android home automation tablet. Maybe they would read a seven-minute story about that topic. Those high rate ratio stories can tell you what content your audience is finding to be compelling. And if it's a short read, two or three minutes. So the high rate ratio that tells you your audience really cares about that topic. And that's a cue to take that story and build on it. Write a new story, for example, that takes the same topic and explore it in more detail. You could take a story and get a new source to an interview that ties into it. You could explore some new aspects. So for this one, I could talk about how to control your Philips Hue bulbs on a variety of devices on your iPhone, on your Android phone, on your tablet. Maybe people want to hear more about other things you can control with your automation tablet. There's a lot of different ways you can take that story that you're seeing is compelling and expand on it. If you can do that successfully, you have some information from your audience here about what they find interesting in the form of this highway ratio. And you can probably write a longer story that will probably also have a high rate ratio, although perhaps not as high, but that will have more member reading time associated with it. And we'll help you to tell that story and a lot more detail. So look at your stories that have a high rate ratio. Pat yourself on the back for a second, but then ask yourself, how do I take this and expand on it? Can I turn this into an even more compelling, long-form article that's gonna bring in a lot more viewership and a lot more of those reading minutes that if you're in the partner program can determine your overall earnings. 8. Next Steps: So thank you for following along in my course. As we talked about here. Look at the read ratio, monitor the rate ratio, and try to figure out ways from writing a compelling headline that's honest to tweak in your intro to get people's attention. Breaking your stories up in a way that keeps them reading and even looking at stories that seem to have done well. Maybe you've done a little bit too well and expand on those to create more compelling content that you already know your viewership is interested in. There's a lot of different ways to approach this. Thank you for following along with my course. Hopefully this was helpful and improving your own and medium t-ratio. And I'd love to see your stories that you've improved or if you have questions about how to have a higher rate ratio on them, take a look at the assignment, complete the assignment, and I'm happy to provide feedback if you do go ahead and post those. So thank you for following along and can see more of my stories on medium if you go to medium.com slash Tom Smith, 585. Thank you.