7 Days to an Extra $100 on Medium

How to write yourself to a new side-hustle

If you’re a Medium writer who earn pennies per story, it can get de-motivating quick. Many of us come here to earn a little side income, but there’s a difference between pennies-per-hour, and a nice paycheck.

You’ve got to start with quality work.

We serve our readers first. If you’re writing to serve only yourself, you’ll have a tough time earning anything from your Medium stories.

But once you get the quality portion figured out, there are a handful of steps you can follow to make a hundred bucks this week.

You’ll want to keep this story for later (this would be a good time to tap the little ‘bookmark’ button).

Medium now shows us daily income reports.

We’ll use this to track our progress towards your hundred-dollar goal.

While I can’t guarantee anything, if you follow these steps, seven days from today you should be closer to a healthy side-income from your writing.

Below, I’ll give you the same process I use to generate a healthy income from my Medium stories. There’s no magic here, but there is a lot of writing and perseverance required.

Not every story you write will be a hit.

This is a bit of a numbers game. You might earn your first $100 across five stories. You might earn pennies on 10 stories and all $100 on one.

7 Days to $100 on Medium

Day 1 —

Study the hottest, trending topics in your niche. Look at the best-performing topics in your stats. Write two stories in your niche (4–6 minutes long), both with captivating titles that pose a question in the reader’s mind. The story will answer the question.

If you already have access to a publication, publish to that. If you don’t, go ahead and publish it without a publication.

Use popular tags in your niche. Avoid inventing tags, they won’t get you much visibility. Include a call to action to join your email list at the bottom of each story.

Publish one story in the morning and schedule one to publish in the afternoon. You can schedule your story for later under the ‘publish’ button.

Follow 50 new readers who have clapped or commented on a recent, top story in your niche, all with colored circles around their avatars (this means they are paying readers).

Apply to be a writer for a publication in your niche (if you haven’t already). Publication stories get more visibility.

Day 2 —

Check the stats from your prior day’s stories. If one of the stories was a hit, write two more under that similar theme. If neither was a hit, look for additional popular topics in your niche.

Write two stories that serve your niche, using the same technique as day one.

Follow 50 new readers who have clapped or commented on a recent, top story in your niche, all with colored circles around their avatars.

Comment on at least ten different stories in your niche, with a thoughtful comment related to the content in the story, not a copy/pasted comment with emojis, or some empty “great work” comment.

Tag your comment with all available tags in your niche.

Day 3 —

Check your stats. Look at the best stories in your niche. Research the news in your niche. Write two more stories using the best reader data you can muster.

Write more of the stories that work for you and fewer of the ones that don’t.

Spend a lot of time writing and re-writing your titles. These matter — a lot. If a reader doesn’t click your title, you don’t get paid.

Follow 50 more qualified readers. Un-follow ten people who have showed no interest in your work. Followers matter — a lot. Without a steady, growing stream of followers it’s hard to get your stories read.

Comment on at least ten more stories. Twenty is better.

Day 4 —

Write two more stories. Stay inside the niche you serve. Link to your best performing stories of the week. Schedule one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Publish every story to a publication if you can.

If there’s no publication in your niche, create your own publication. It’s free and they allow you to double-dip your readership. Some people will follow your publication, but they won’t follow you as a writer.

Follow 50 more people. Un-follow 10–20 inactive, or people whose content you don’t read or appreciate.

Comment on 10–20 stories and apply relevant tags to every comment (these tags will show up underneath your niche categories.

Day 5 —

Evaluate your progress. Hopefully, we’ve grown your writing income to at least $50–60 by this point. If not, work on your titles harder. Study the most-compelling titles on the homepage.

This might be a good time to study a bit of copywriting.

Compelling titles do 89% of the work of your entire Medium story.

Write two more stories and schedule accordingly.

Follow 50 people and cull your list a little.

Comment your face-off. Tag per usual.

Day 6 —

Crunch time. Write three stories today if you can. Now you’ve got a little momentum and a bigger following.

Schedule those 2–3 studies over the course of the day to hit a wide band of readers.

Write more of the stories that have worked for you in the past and fewer of the ones that didn’t.

We should be close to that $100 threshold by the end of the day. If you’re nowhere near this mark, re-evaluate the quality of your work, compared to the top writers in your niche. Grow your following. And tweak your titles.

Follow, u-follow, and comment.

Day 7 —

The final push.

Publish two stories in the morning. This will give you all day on your final day to earn as much as you can. Once we check your stats tomorrow morning, hopefully, you’ll have earned an extra hundred bucks.

Keep writing to a single niche.

Always include a email call-to-action at the bottom of every story (I’ll show you why in a second).

If you’re nowhere close to your hundred bucks, re-evaluate your niche. Perhaps you serve a group that isn’t large enough. Fiction and poetry, for example, have a hard time earning money on Medium. It’s more of a non-fiction platform.

Follow, cull, comment.

If you didn’t hit your goal this week, you probably will next week. Keep up the daily writing habit. Your followers and writing income will grow from the sheer force of all your content.

There’s even more side-income available with this

Once you’ve got your writing routine in place, you can use Medium to earn even more money off the platform.

Every story you write has the potential to generate email leads for you. By providing a valuable call to action at the bottom of every story, you can use Medium to grow your tribe.

Your email list is the way you’ll build a legacy-level writing business.

When we write for Medium, we trade keyboard time for money. Articles die-off quickly. But with email, we can earn automatic income while we spend time doing other things.

Using an automated welcome sequence, you can sell your work while you spend your time doing bigger and better things — like writing your next book.

If you’re ready to build your own tribe, I’ve created a free, 7-day email masterclass for you.

I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 readers (or your next 1,000) without spending a dime on ads. It’s called the Tribe 1K. Past enrollees include New York Times bestselling authors. See, everyone needs help with their marketing — even the ‘big time’ writers.

Tap the link. Enroll today. Get your first lesson before your boss realizes you’ve been on the internet all morning.

Guarantee your seat before I change my mind.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my 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.