6.2% of Medium Writers Earn More Than $100: How You Can Get There

Focusing on one and only one thing

When you’re a full-time writer for 8 months, you don’t know anything. Worst than that, you know less than nothing.

Even so, as you think you’re an expert, you decide to write about how to succeed as a writer. Isn’t it ironic?

Actually, no it isn’t.

Everybody wants to help everybody on this platform. Top writers share knowledge with average writers and those with newbies. An extraordinary network of share-ity that makes it unique.

With all the frustration newbies have on succeeding as writers, they cannot complain about: lack of tips, information, and free lessons.

Yet, if you have the wrong mindset, you’ll be reading negative stuff from the ones who are always complaining about life itself.

Life sucks, I know. But so do you and me.

Let me give you some salt and pepper by saying that there are 600 million blogs on the web in 2020. 29 million articles every day. 850 million drafts every month. 10.2 billion pieces a year.

Do you want me to keep going? Do you want to know about Medium?

In late 2018, Medium had 90 million unique visitors a month, with 20,000 articles each day. Who about now? Are you prepared? You should sit down. In 2020, it jumped to 47,000 articles a day. In two years, Medium grew from 7,092,000 articles per year to 16,614,000.

Not everything is bad news, people. Medium had 417 million visitors last year, as Ev Williams shared in a stats chart.

The best performing article made $9,958.82, and the top writer received $49,581.31 in August 2020.

I know the world is about to collapse, but please, give yourself a break and seize the day.

We’re roughly 175,000 writers on Medium. 116,200 of those writers made at least $0,01. I started with that amount too. But an excellent 10,850 (6.2%) writers earned over $100. (Data from J.J. Pryor)

Now you have the numbers. They can mean a lot but also mean nothing. If you are on the platform in less than one year, numbers don’t give a damn. Like me, you’re yet in the surviving mode. You’re learning, working your ass off like every other dude did to make a living on writing.

You and I must keep doing some simple tasks to reach $1,000, then $2,000, then $4,000. On Medium, the sky is the limit.

A Writer Is Someone Who Pays Attention to the World

If you have trouble thinking of what to write, pick up a book, listen to a song, or go for a walk. You will come across something that interests you.- Jessica Lynn

If you are that kind of person who frequently doesn’t know what to write about, just quit. Don’t waste your time with this stuff anymore.

You probably didn’t find the only thing that separates writers from the rest of the world. Contemplation. You only need to observe the world, sit down, and write about it. If you don’t, the door is open for you to leave.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard, and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. — Neil Gaiman

I’m not saying it’s easy. But it’s simple.

A quote from someone famous says it’s easy to do, but it’s also easy not to do, right? Well, if you don’t do it, if you don’t sit down and write, that’s because you are not a writer. And that’s ok. Not everybody has to be a writer.

I’m a countryman from Cristiano Ronaldo, and I’m not a professional soccer player. Every kid in Portugal wants to be like CR, and also every American wanted to be like Michael Jordan in the 1990s. We follow by example.

We all have dreams, and that’s the beauty of life. As a newbie, I look at Tim Denning, Ayodeji Awosika, Sinem Günel, Michael Thompson, Shannon Ashley, and so many other fabulous writers, and I dream. I follow them, study them, analyze everything they write because I follow by examples.

Writing is a skill that can be nurtured, and to nurture it, you have to get as many words on the page as you can, and they reshape what you have written. This can take many drafts. Sometimes up to ten.- Jessica Lynn

There are those kinds of people that don’t like to do the easy stuff. I’m one of them. Easy, get you lazy. Simple things practice every day make hard work seem effortless. And make you stronger, too.

We Don’t Recognize the Power of Compounding

If you don’t plant the seeds, don’t expect to harvest them later.

If you don’t write articles, don’t expect to earn money later. It will not happen.

The compound return of writing a lot of content is probably the only reason some writers thrive; others don’t. If you read what all the top writers say about how to succeed on Medium, one and probably the most frequent tip is: write every day.

Earnings add up and compound over time.

Many top writers only got traction 6 months later. Some had to wait one entire year. So, you have to be patient. Everybody has to be patient. Or it will not work.

I’m a full-time writer for one month. I write 2 articles a day. And as you can imagine, my earnings have increased exponentially. Some pieces I wrote 4 months ago are getting traction right now. Why? Because I write every day, twice a day. I get more followers. And new readers came and want to read more stuff I wrote in the recent past.

Compounding interests is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it…he who doesn’t, pays it.- Albert Einstein

Mathematics It’s Not About Numbers, It’s About Understanding

Last month I earned €99.18. Ok, not $100, but I feel I belong already to the 6.2% of writers who made more than $100 on Medium.

Medium paid me in 44 articles, from a total of 67 I already wrote on the platform. Last month I earned $56.77 from 3 of them. That means 6.81% of my total paid articles gave me 57.23% of my income.

It means that only 3 articles made the most of my earnings.

That’s a good indicator of my readers’ interests. But also made me analyze the quality of my work. What differentiates those 3 articles from the rest in terms of the quality of my writing?

I was accepted for the first time on publications like The Startup and The Ascent. Which made me think that my draft is bettering every day. That’s good news.

Linda Caroll made a brilliant analysis of the top 5 stories of the year, with exciting data: only 2 of the top 5 stories of the year were published in Medium publications. When people say you have to be in Medium pubs if you want to get exposure, they’re wrong. I find that really encouraging.

It means that you don’t have to be accepted in Medium publications to be a top writer of the year.

And better than that, you don’t have to publish your articles in the top publications like The Ascent, The Startup, P.S. I Love You, The Writing Cooperative, The Post-Grad Survival Guide, and so many others.

It may help if your piece has quality. Or not. The top #1 story of the year, written by Tomas Pueyo, was not published in a publication. The topic was about the pandemic, and it was posted on March 10. And as Linda Caroll said: Timing, topic, read time — and probably a dash of luck, helped in the process.

Of course, from the top 5 stories of the year, 4 of them were about the coronavirus, and the one left was about racism and racial justice. So, writing about a hot topic may be an excellent opportunity to boost your readers’ rate.

Remember, even if you write about a hot topic, your piece must be well written. A strong headline, a perfect intro, and an excellent structural article complement the comprehensive written report with quotes and argumentative links.

On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.- David Ogilvy

Final Thoughts

Let me conclude by saying that there is no How to Succeed on Medium. At least, I don’t spend time reading that stuff anymore.

Medium is always changing things. The reason? I think it’s because they want to reward good writing. Simple as that. They try to avoid the data and algorithm trap. Medium doesn’t want writers to be focused on stats and trends. They want good writing, simple stuff that brings more readers to the platform.

If you have most articles written just for earning money, you’ll lose quality, imagination, inspiration, and originality for the money itself.

And Medium doesn’t want that to happen.

That’s what I think, anyway.

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