A Review of My First Year on Medium as a Beginner Writing Tech Articles

Reflections on a year of 100 Medium articles, my learnings, and milestones.

This is the 100th article that I publish on Medium.

Hi there, I‘m Tobias, a scientist, start-up entrepreneur, and tech enthusiast from Germany. It‘s been a little over a year now since I joined Medium as a reader but shortly after decided to become a writer. This article is a little different from the ones I publish usually.

Anyway, here, I want to share my personal story of how I started on Medium and what I learned in one year as an absolute beginner in writing blog articles around tech.

Why I joined Medium

During the lockdown period, I developed the desire for some kind of creative outlet that would give me some contrast to my everyday life. I‘ve tried different things and have even been toying with the idea of starting a YouTube channel. I even finished an animation video which I created in PowerPoint. However, I realized that a YouTube channel would be too much. After that, I strongly came into blogging. But I had no idea how to do it and which topic I should deal with. Until like 15 months ago, when I first heard of Medium on YouTube. I‘m very much into tech review videos and I‘ve been following the channel of Mark Ellis for quite some time. He established his own brand around tech review with a focus on Apple tech. In one of his videos (I don‘t remember which one), he mentioned that he is an active writer on Medium and generates some significant income from his activities on this platform.

So I checked Medium out and quickly decided to join Medium. I paid my 50 bugs to get full excess to all articles and I simply wanted to explore and learn.

For which topics is there an audience? Which of these topics am I passionate about? And how is a good blog article written?

These were the questions that initially motivated me to join Medium.

How I became a writer

It actually did not take long to answer these questions for me.

• For which topics is there an audience? Literally for everything. I‘ve come across a plethora of topics people write about that resonate with an audience.
• Which of these topics am I passionate about? There were (and still are) a few. My shortlist consisted of Apple tech, productivity, and entrepreneurship.
• How is a good blog article written? Well, I‘ve seen different styles and there may not be the one formula. However, putting in personal experience might be an important factor on Medium.

From my shortlist, I am most passionate about the topic that also dominated my YouTube feed — tech, especially tech all around the Apple ecosystem of products.

Why? In mid of 2022, I completed my transition from Android/Windows to Apple, and this had a huge impact on me and the way I work.

So I decided to give it a try and wrote my first article about my desire to have Stage Manager on the iPad mini, which I published on Nov 28, 2022. From that day on, I collected ideas and wrote, and published more articles.

My expectations

…were basically zero. Being new to a platform as huge as Medium, I was fully aware that I would not be able to generate any significant resonance with my articles. It would need time, work, consistency, and patience. In November and December of 2022, I published in total of 7 articles and got 105 views and 54 reads.

However, reaching a lot of people was not my initial goal. I just wanted to try and test whether writing was the creative outlet that I was looking for. So I continued to write and very quickly found a lot of joy in what I did.

First signs of resonance

In January 2023, I was more active. A month before, I got the new M2 iPad Pro and was impressed with the versatility of that device. So I spontaneously decided to work an entire week from the iPad and share my experiences in a series of seven articles on Medium. And obviously, I addressed an audience with this. In January, I achieved 1.6k views and 1k reads. However, this was a temporary phenomenon because I had an intensive time in my side hustle company that forced me to reduce my blogging activities.

I published a few articles here and there but never got more than around 300 views per month. Until Medium decided to implement significant changes…

Joining the Medium partner program

In August this year, Medium changed the conditions for joining the partner program. At that time, I was still far below the 100 followers and would have not been able to join the partner program. However, this threshold was repealed and I joined the partner program on August 2nd. This changed a lot and gave me a lot of motivation.

Getting all in

I decided to intensify my activities and applied as a writer for some publications. I tried to place my articles in publications that had a large audience. And it helped with some articles. I got reasonably more interactions with my articles, but my earnings from the partner program were not noteworthy. To give a relation, it was less than $10/month. Anyway, I was motivated and passionate to go on and decided to put as much of my daily experiences and ideas into content. The way I look at things changed — I now look at my environment with the eyes of a content creator. I set myself a basic principle:

Don‘t overthink, just write.

I put a system to my writing and ideation. I transformed everything into content and started to reuse ideas from previous articles. A lot of the aspects my articles dealt with could also be rewritten from another perspective — and this is what I did. I sometimes even combined ideas and aspects from different articles to create a new article from a different perspective.

And this peaked in October when I got myself together and published at least one article a day. I published a total of 33 articles that covered all three points on my shortlist of topics. However, the Apple articles resonated the most. In October, these two articles skyrocketed by my previous standards.

The resonance was evidence enough for me, that I decided to narrow my article topics down to my experiences with my Apple products and everything around that.

70X-ing my earnings

Consistency pays off. From 549 views and 285 reads in September, I went to 12.7k views and 7.8k reads in October. My earnings grew by a factor of 70 to just below $300. The same was true for my audience stats. In the second half of October, I gained more followers than I had in September.

In November, I doubled the October stats to reach 23k monthly views and 13.1k reads.

And also my audience was steadily growing until I reached the threshold for…

Reaching my ultimate milestone for 2023

I‘m passionate about Apple tech, so my ultimate goal was to become a writer for the largest publication on this topic here on Medium: Mac O‘Clock.

This requires at least 500 followers which I surpassed shortly. Right after, I applied and was accepted as a writer. I published this article as my first article with Mac O‘Clock on December 6th, and it was my first article that got boosted by Medium two days later.

This story is my best-ranking story so far with a low three-digit daily earning on the day of boost.

My conclusion

I certainly found the perfect creative outlet for me — writing. I have a lot of joy while writing my articles and I’m very grateful that this hobby even earns me a small side income.

Writing gives me time to focus on me and get away from the everyday tasks around me. It’s the perfect leisure activity for me that I often do in the evenings.

Although you might never read this article, thank you Mark Ellis for dropping Medium in your video and making me aware of this great platform.

But let me finish this article with…

What I value about Medium

I think Medium is one of the last platforms where appreciation and respect are tangible. I enjoy engaging with people in the comments of my or their articles and discussing some things. It is always respectful and friendly. So thank you Medium team for installing the rules and thank you to the Medium community for holding them up to create a welcoming platform!

What are your experiences on Medium? Feel free to share them in the comments!

Thank you for reading!

Tobias