I’m Going to Give Vocal a Try
Maybe reverse psychology will work in my favour.
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Chances are, you saw this headline and went, “Don’t do it, it’s a trap! They won’t pay you”.
I’ve seen several posts on here about Vocal writers who had a viral article that earned hundreds or even thousands of dollars. However, Vocal refused to pay, claiming that they could not verify the traffic source.
Even Stripe, the payment platform that both Medium and Vocal use, has flagged these accounts as fraudulent or suspicious.
Weirdly enough, seeing all these posts warning about Vocal’s shady practices made me finally take the plunge and create my account there.
I don’t want to be all talk and no do anymore.
For the past year or so, I’ve been saying that I want to do more with my writing and post content in more places. I never actually got around to doing that.
Vocal is the obvious choice, as it’s a very similar platform to Medium, albeit there are key differences.
Most notably, there is no paywall or requirement to create an account to get full access to the articles on Vocal, meaning you get compensated for both internal and external reads.
This would be great for sharing my writing with family and friends, or other young musicians who may find my content insightful and educational. I don’t want to pressure people into buying a Medium membership and I also don’t want to spam people’s inboxes with friend links.
Essentially, it never hurts to increase visibility and discoverability online. If people like my content on Vocal, they might check out my Medium and vice versa.
I’m not worried about getting scammed.
Vocal has a minimum payout threshold. As a basic member, you must earn $35 to request a payout and you earn $3.80 for 1K reads. If you buy the Vocal+ membership, you can lower the threshold to $20 and make $6 for 1K reads.
If I had a prolific social media presence, I’d be more worried about making hundreds of dollars and potentially not receiving my money, but for the number of views I typically get, I might receive a payout in…
