5 Steps to Earn Your Rent Money by Writing Part-Time on Medium

A couple hours a day on Medium can keep you sheltered and fed

Medium will pay you actual dollars for the reads and claps on your stories. Maybe it won’t pay your rent in NYC, Seattle, Miami, or LA, but in most parts of the US you can feed and shelter yourself for $1,000/month.

Whether you’d like to earn some rent money, or fun-money, Medium is a great place to display your writing talent, while keeping that pesky roof over your melon.

We all start with zero attention.

Medium is kind of hard, but not impossible. Digging holes is really hard. Brain surgery is really hard. Learning to love vegetables is really hard (I’m still working on that one). But Medium is medium-hard.

The secret to Medium is your pre-determined daily practice.

You decide in-advance how often you’ll write.

You decide in-advance how often you’ll interact with others.

You decide in-advance which niche you’ll serve.

Then you execute on those daily decisions.

43% of Medium writers earn nothing per month. That’s not a dollar, or ten dollars, but zero dollars.

92.7% of Medium writers earn less than $100/month. I don’t know about you, but to me, this means there’s plenty of room for the folks who are willing to treat Medium like a business.

I don’t think these stats are bleak.

I look at them through the lens of opportunity, because it means that 92.7% of Medium writers are willing to work as hard as me.

They won’t work as hard as you, either.

Five steps to paying your rent writing Medium stories:

1. You need followers. Without a readership you don’t have a way to earn claps and reads. The best way to earn readers is to get active on Medium, comment and clap for other writers, and write content people want to read. While a lot of followers won’t always mean you’ve got a lot of reader every time, without followers you’ll have zero readers. Grow your following ASAP. Tom Kuegler has a great little course for getting this done.
2. You need eyeballs. Want to pay your rent with Medium? You have to write a lot. Multiple stories a day, to get started. The homepage is only so big. The stories change frequently. If you want to catch your fans with the new from your network section, you need stories to land in one of those four slots. A great resource for eyeball-gathering content, is the personal development work of Darius Foroux. There’s a reason he’s doing so well. He understands how to serve his readers and maintain their eyeballs.
3. You need a niche. Many successful Medium writers don’t choose a specific niche and still do very well, like Shannon Ashley. But the issue with avoiding a niche is what happens when you want to build an off-Medium tribe around that patchwork-quilt of followers. Medium won’t be around forever. They change the rules frequently. There may be a day when they stop clap-paying altogether, and go to a pay-per-story model, where everyone submits stories and waits for approval (or not). When that D-Day comes, we’ll need a list of readers we own. We build said list by serving one niche really well. Inch-wide, mile-deep.
4. You need stories that don’t suck. This is tricky. You can create a well-written story that still sucks in your reader’s mind. If you want to earn money from your Medium writing, you’ve got to answer the questions in your reader’s mind. What’s bothering her? What current situation does she wish to escape from? What do you know that no one else does, which can help your tribe better than anyone? Want examples of stories that don’t suck, follow Aytekin Tank. His stories are legendary.
5. You need to publish a lot of stories. Publish more of those that work, and fewer of those that don’t. Breathe new life into old stories by linking to them often. Self-promote like crazy, because no one else will do it for you. In the early days of your Medium-ing, you should publish 2–3 stories per day. Remember, there are hundreds of thousands of writers. If you want a piece of the attention, you’ve got to earn it. A great example of relentless publishing is Shaunta Grimes. Her work is everywhere, and she’s got the email list to prove it too.

Bonus step: Get curated like a pro

If you want sustained income from Medium, you’ve got to get a lot of your stories curated. While curation isn’t everything. It’s a lotta-thing.

When you’re curated your story appears under a certain keyword, on the homepage and Medium will also promote the story. Curation doesn’t always bring eyeballs, especially if you have little to no audience yet. But it will keep your stories alive longer.

Follow the rules.

Don’t write about making money on Medium.

Don’t write an advertisement for your product and pass it off like a story. Although Medium does this for major publishers, us little folks don’t get the privilege

Use title-case and pay attention to your grammar. Medium curators are crazy-busy. They don’t have time for nonsense, or train-of-thought writing. If you want to get curated, your story needs to look (and read) like the other curated stories.

Write something new, not a half-arsed/thrice-baked copy of a previously-published story, by a popular author. Curators (like their readers) want novelty not also-ran.

Be funny.

Even if you write about a serious topic, we all love a good chuckle.

End on the up-swing.

I don’t know about you, but if I spend my valuable time reading something it better end on a positive note. Even the sad stuff needs a light in the fridge. Medium is a great place to discuss social injustice, deep, personal stories, and wrongs which need righting — but we’d all appreciate if you give us a little hope at the end.

Hope gets you claps.

Prepare for doomsday

Maybe it’ll never come. Maybe Medium will maintain their Partner Program for decades to come. But, like most tech companies, the landscape changes overnight.

There are new competitors lurking around every corner, trying to earn the battle for customer attention. One day we might earn five-figures a month on Medium, then poof! It’s all gone overnight.

This is the game.

We are all guests here.

So, it’s important we prepare ourselves for Medium Doomsday, then cross our fingers and hope the day never comes.

We prepare for doomsday by building a tribe we own. Not renting our tribes’ attention, as we do on Medium and social. When we own our list, we own a real publishing business.

Keep a repository of your work off of Medium, as well. You can save these to your own website, or same them to a hard drive in your sock drawer. But don’t let thousands of writing hours disappear when Medium finally yanks the cord.

The best time to start a list of your tribe is now.

Even if you’re just starting. In fact, this is the best time, because your tribe will help you create your best work.

If you build your tribe now, you’ll have a pre-built, rabid audience ready when you launch your next book (or re-launch your last books). This should be a list you own (instead of relying on social media or some other big-business platform). Tap the link below. Enroll in my Tribe 1K indie email masterclass. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (and your next 1,000) without spending one hot nickel on ads.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.