My Medium Journey

14 Days In: My Medium Stats and Earnings

So, it has officially been 14 days since I started writing on Medium.

I joined on the 21st December and I have been writing almost every single day, apart from a small break around Christmastime!

I am excited to show you how much I have grown on the platform and I thank you all for taking the time to read this article and thank you to those who have followed me.

For those who don’t know who I am, my name is Joel and I am a 16-year old based in the UK who writes about tech, photography, science and entrepreneurship.

Some of you may have already read my article covering my progress within my first week on Medium and if you have, I am so glad that you have returned to read this article.

If you haven’t done this yet I recommend you read that article before this one as it will help you to understand why I set certain aims and goals to achieve for the next 14 days:

I have also recently started a photography website, Photoaspire and I intend to closely link my Medium content with my photography website, too!

This article will cover:

• My stats, such as followers, views and fans
• My earnings through the MPP
• My aims for the next 14 days (totalling to the first month on Medium)
• How I will achieve these aims
• What I have learned and how I will use that to improve my writing on Medium

So, without further ado, let’s get straight into it:

My stats, earnings and followers

This week was a very pleasant surprise as I had absolutely smashed through my goals and then some!

I was expecting to get around 70 followers and maybe earn my first dollar, but these results shocked me and they have motivated me to push on further and write more content and to promote my content more.

To be exact, here is a screenshot of the goals I had set myself to try and achieve during my first 14 days on Medium:

Now, let’s see if I have beaten those goals or not:

I am now at 124 followers, which is a lot more than the 70 I had aimed to achieve

Yes, you heard that right. I am now at 124 followers. In just 14 days! I cannot believe that.

I am pretty sure I can attribute this surge of followers to publishing almost daily, commenting and clapping on other people’s articles and gaining more views on my articles.

I am very happy with this result and I am now growing at an average of around 10 followers/day, which is much, much better than the average of around 5–7 followers/day I was gaining in my first 7 days.

I will hopefully hit 200 followers soon at this rate and I may even hit 250 followers by the end of this month.

I hit 394 story views, which is almost quadruple the amount the 100 story views I aimed to reach originally

Yes, I am also shocked at these results. For the first 5 or 6 days, you can see that there is very little growth and I stayed at around 5–10 views.

But from around December 28, I submitted my first ever article to a publication. From here on, I have been consistently growing until I hit 75 views in a day, my best result so far.

I hope to soon have my first ever day where I reach over 100 views, which should be possible if I can consistently write a new article on a daily basis.

I also noticed that my reads have gone up a little and this is because I have been paying more attention to my headlines and introductions in my articles and I am trying to capture the attention of the reader so that they will read more of the article.

Here are the statistics for all of my articles so far, broken down into views, reads and fans for each story:

Out of all of these articles, one of these will no doubt stand out to you.

The article I wrote about kit lenses has a lot more views and reads than the rest.

This is because it got curated. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that it was ‘Chosen for further distribution’.

It has been the only curated article so far but because of the consistent traffic it has given me over a longer period of time, I am definitely going to spend more time trying to understand what to do in order to get curated.

I also set myself a goal to get 30 fans in total from all of my articles.

Again, I had almost doubled this goal and it is probably due to that curated article getting me more eyeballs on my profile and my other articles, which led to the sudden surge in claps on my stories.

Maybe I am setting goals that are too easy to achieve and because of this, I am going to adjust my goals for the next 14 days, 3 months, 6 months and year.

I earned over $8 in my first 14 days writing for the MPP

I know you are probably eager to see how much I have earned in my first 14 days as well. I set myself a target to earn $1 and I ended up earning a total of $8.32.

WOW! Just WOW!

I cannot believe that this is possible and I am so impressed with this result. I earned roughly $2 at the tail end of December 2020 and in the first 4 days in January I earned $6:

Again, this surprised me a lot and it proves that if you are willing to put the work in, you are definitely able to earn a good amount of money in your first fortnight on Medium.

Considering that I am based in the UK, $8.32 roughly converts to £6.13, which is enough for a celebratory fish and chips :)

If you are reading this and you are on the fence about writing on Medium, I would say go for it. The community on this platform is very welcoming and receptive towards beginners and if you are able to get into some smaller, niche publications in the first few days, you will start earning in no time!

It took me only a few days to get into my first publication, The Innovation, and all you have to do is comment your name on the submission guidelines post. This also applies to a lot of other publications and this is a good way to get yourself noticed as a new writer.

So, due to these outstanding results, I have decided to up the ante when it comes to my next progress review, which will be around the 21st January, which is exactly a month since I have joined Medium.

BONUS: I also gained Top Writer status in Photography

I couldn’t believe myself when I got this. I had heard of other people getting top writer status in a certain topic, but it took them weeks, if not months or even years to gain this special status.

I was so happy when I got this and I got this status in the photography topic, which is what I love writing about most:

All Medium told me is that a few of my photography-related articles helped me to gain this status and if I keep writing good content that is tagged photography, I will continue to remain a top writer in Photography.

This has definitely motivated me to write more and I am definitely going to continue writing photography articles from now on.

Goals for my first month on Medium

This month I am going to push myself, so I am going to set myself some tougher goals for the next 14 days, which will then total a month of writing on Medium:

• Publish at least one article/day on Medium (maybe 2 some days)
• Reach 300 followers on Medium
• Comment on 4 trending articles/day to help others, build connections and gain exposure
• Reach a total of 1,000 story views
• Earn $50 from the MPP
• Get a total of 15 articles published into publications
• Gain 5 email subscribers on Medium (need to promote my email list a little more)
• Gain 100 fans across all my articles (only 45 more to go)
• Reach 50 followers on my personal publication

I will hopefully achieve these goals and I definitely think that they are realistic for my first month.

I will also use these followers and articles to help try and drive traffic to my new website, Photoaspire. I write entirely about photography on this website and if you are new to photography and you want to get started with the basics, I have created a FREE 7-Day photography boot camp for you.

I have also created my own Medium publication, named Joel Oughton, where I showcase some of my articles.

I was initially sceptic about creating my own publication and I was unsure what the benefits are but now I have taken a look at the design and layout, I can definitely say it makes a big difference.

The design is far, far better and you can have your own navigation bar and tabs, just like a real website.

I also appreciate the option for an external link and I have used that to link to my newsletter.

I would also suggest to you that whenever you have the time, create your own publication under your name and use it as an opportunity to properly showcase your work and what you write about.

It looks far more professional than a standard profile page and as such, people are far more likely to trust you and follow you.

I also ask of you to quickly give my publication a follow, it is currently at 4 followers but hopefully, I can grow it to around 50 followers by the end of my first month on Medium.

I have also learnt a few extra tips and tricks for writing and formatting your content better on Medium and I am going to implement these from now on to better improve my content.

What I will do to up my writing game

I am also going to set myself some goals in terms of how I write my articles so that I can hopefully get curated more and get more reading time on my stories:

• Link each article to me and use it as a small lesson (articles which link to me or my story did better than generic listicles or advice)
• Explain in my intro exactly what the reader will learn and how it will help them
• Use ‘you’ and ‘I’ in my articles more often to help the reader relate to the story
• Include a positive takeaway in my articles to help boost positivity and help those who read my articles remain motivated and clear on their goals
• Ask people how I can help and reply to each and every response to create community and engagement on my work
• Writer shorter articles around the 500-word mark, but get straight to the point and present the info in a way that allows people to skim the story if they wish
• Link to my previous articles throughout my story to gain more traffic and to keep people hooked on my content

I take these pieces of advice and implement them in my articles and see how they work out. Maybe they will work, maybe they won’t. But I won’t know until I give it a try.

And finally, thank you!

Thank you to each and every one of you who has taken the time to read my articles and follow me and to those who have not read any of my articles before, thank you to for reading this article and taking some time out of your day to see how I have done.

I also thank you all for reading this long as I know that this article is far, far lengthier than most of my other articles.

I am very happy with my progress so far and it is not bad for a 16-year-old who has never earnt any money passively online before.

I will next update you in around 14 days on my progress and if you are new and you haven’t followed me yet, please consider doing so, particularly if you are into photography, science and tech.

I also encourage you to join my website newsletter if you are into photography and I have created a free email course that lasts 7 days teaching you the basics if you are unsure how to get started with your photography!

And one more thing before you go?

What do you want me to write about? I am looking to find out more about what my audience wants and how I can help you!

If you have any article suggestions relating in any way to photography, science, technology or entrepreneurship in any way, give me a shout in the responses section below!

But before I go, thank you for taking the time to read this article and my other content and I look forward to hearing from you soon!