6 Reasons I Found Success on Medium
Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
The last two months have taught us the importance of having an online side hustle, or five. I want making money online to be my main hustle. While I grow my Medium audience and email list, I’m monetizing two websites.
Whether you make money from selling a course, a product, monetizing a monthly subscription (the most lucrative and passive income stream for online creators), or writing for Medium, there are many avenues to pursue to make money online.
Medium is just one.
I attended a conference with social media influencers, when one of the speakers said, “If you don’t have a product you sell online that makes you $100,000 annually while you sleep, what are you doing with your time?”
Point taken.
While you won’t find that kind of passive income from writing on Medium, using the platform to grow your email list, become a better writer and get name recognition, then sell a product to your audience and make $100,000 while you sleep is possible.
Part of the reason I’ve had relatively quick success on Medium is that I came in with the right attitude, plus a little ignorance.
I’ve been reading Medium for years, but I had no experience with curation, stats, views, and claps. I’ve been publishing on Medium for under a year and make over $1,500 in most months. Not Telsa money but a nice amount to add to other revenue streams.
Some months dip, but the trajectory is going in the right direction, up.
While my income is increasing, it isn’t growing as quickly as I would like, however, I prefer to publish quality over quantity. I’m not willing to post three times a day, a strategy many of the big names used when starting on Medium.
I just don’t feel like I can write more than once a day, I would burnout, and I don’t want to stop writing from burnout. I also have other online businesses to work on, so writing three times a day for one platform is not my goal or ideal.
Other writers have had a lot of success writing with that kind of frequency, if you want to have more success, try writing more often. It works on a platform like Medium. Publishing 5–7 times per week is a good number for me, it is achievable, I’ve been doing in for nearly a year, and I can write quality articles following this content schedule.
Now, I feel like I’m an expert in all things Medium.
As I’ve written in another post, the best way to learn Medium is to write on Medium. You’ll become familiar with the editor tool and how to format your stories properly. You will also get to know the names of other writers, what stories do well and which don’t, what Medium curators are looking for, and what won’t get curated.
The most valuable thing you will learn when you start regular publishing on Medium is if you really want this writing gig. It isn’t easy. But if you stick it out for a year as a writer, you will make money. Posting one or two stories and expecting them to go viral most likely won’t happen. If you want to get noticed, you have to stick around.
Here are six reasons I found success (mostly because I had no idea what I was doing at the time).
#1. Attitude
I had the right approach. Another way to say it is I didn’t expect anything.
I read the work of successful writers who are making gobs of monthly income, and thought, I can do that. I can write like that.
My attitude is, let’s see where this writing thing takes me.
If I commit to writing once a day and publishing every day for one year, this is for me. I told myself, no matter how few people read my posts, I will continue to write and publish every day for one year.
Now that it has been almost a year, I’m dreaming bigger and looking at more lucrative ways to make money. I have more confidence as a writer and as an online entrepreneur, which is priceless. Had I not had the right attitude, and instead obsessed over my stats, I would have quit a while ago, probably after the fifth story didn’t take off.
It was not until this story,
that I saw traction, that was 20 stories in.
This leads to my next tip, do not obsess over stats in the beginning.
#2. Don’t’ look at stats
Do not obsess over stats for six months.
This is what I did. I still don’t obsess over stats. This works for me, I can’t write for stats.
Maybe this will change someday, but for right now, I want to write what I want to write.
I glance at my stats occasionally to see how many of my stories are curated, just to make sure I’m still getting curated. I don’t want to go to ‘curation jail.’ Apparently, you can get stuck there, this hasn’t happened to me, but several writers have written about ‘curation jail.’
I peek at my stats, see if I’m still getting curated, and then I keep writing.
#3. Be realistic
Unless you are coming to Medium with an audience from a blog or another platform, be patient.
You won’t see instant success.
Your goal: To see where you are one year from now. Start with this in mind. That is how long it takes to establish a posting schedule, content rhythm, and, more importantly, see if you can keep up with daily or weekly publishing.
There are easier ways to make money. This isn’t exactly easy. But if you love to write, regular publishing does get easier once your writing muscle develops.
#4. Don’t worry about curation
My ignorance was bliss on this one.
When I published my first article, I had no idea what curation was, and looking back, I’m glad I didn’t.
My third story was curated.
From the beginning, larger publications reached out to me to publish my stories in their publications, before I even knew about publication guidelines.
I just wrote the highest quality articles I could at the time.
Not only did I not know what curation was, but I also would not have known if I was curated because I didn’t know about stats yet. The email I used to set up my account on Medium was not an email account I checked often. I didn’t know when I got a top writer’s status in topics, which I received quickly, and I didn’t know when I got curated.
Now, I do check that email account every day because I get more comments on my work. Still, I have yet to see that message people talk about, “Hold tight, we are processing” or “Not selected in topics.”
My goal is simple, to write daily and publish. I didn’t have the goal of writing a masterpiece, I know I’m not Hemingway, but I wanted to put out quality work.
So I did.
This strategy may not work for you, but for me, it forced me to write every day, and not concentrate on numbers, leaving more time for writing.
I don’t try for curation, I try to write well.
I wrote the best I had to offer at the time, read it out loud several times, edited it more than once, and took time formatting it correctly.
You always want to publish quality work, but this is especially true when you are a beginner on Medium, so curation happens quickly. You don’t want Medium curators to give up on your work and stop reading your stories when they see your name.
Make sure your stories are up to par, free of typos and grammatical errors, images appropriately cited, and formatted to Medium’s standards. Once you’re in ‘curation jail,’ it is hard to break out of.
You want curation because it gives your stories a long shelf life and a better chance to earn income through distribution among topics.
But rather than obsess over it, write the best piece you can and then publish it.
#5. Don’t write for money
I didn’t think about the money first.
While I want to make money, I like money, a lot, I thought about the writing part first, to make sure writing daily is something I would enjoy and stick to with consistency.
I don’t believe in spending large amounts of time on something I don’t enjoy doing.
It can be draining to write content daily, and I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. I decided the one-year mark would be a good indicator. I only chose this demarcation along my Medium journey.
After I saw success in the first three months, I wanted to keep going. However, if I hadn’t had success in the first couple of months, I would have kept going anyway.
You have to keep going if you want to be a writer, hone your voice and figure out where you can improve. Take classes or work with an editor to sharpen your voice and tone, work with a peer writer so you can get critical feedback, it will make you a better writer.
#6. Just write
‘Just write’ is the running theme for this post. I wrote nearly every single day. That is it. You have to write every day to become a better writer.
Your cumulative output matters more than any single thing you write. The secret to becoming a better writer is to become a prolific one.
Write on.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering perfectionist. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
