Building Income Exponentially on Medium

Principles for how slow and steady will help you win the race

One of the most popular genres of Medium articles seems to be about how to make money writing Medium articles. While I strongly believe Medium is an essential tool for both new and experienced authors, this article is frankly more of a reality check.

But it is also a strategy guide to explain how to move away from thinking of success in terms of a lottery that you might or might not hit, and instead think of it as a reliable field that you’ll plant, and then patiently harvest gains which are exponentially increasing. Don’t be content with trying to hit a certain dollar figure, no matter how high. Instead focus on consistent growth, no matter what your starting point is.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the advice about how to make $2,000 off of a single article might work for you, but a lot of the variables for relying on a strategy of virality and curation just come down to a lot of luck.

More important for what I want to convey in this article, the numbers some people catch your eye with are often unrealistic in precisely the same way that all the parents of Lake Wobegon can’t be correct that their kids are “above average”.

Maybe that’s confusing. Let me back up.

What I mean to say is that by charging only $5 per month for subscriptions, the math is obvious that Medium simply doesn’t take in enough revenue for every aspiring author to make a decent living off of their Partner Program earnings alone. For every 1 person that makes $5,000 a month, there would need to be 1000 subscribers who pay their $5 yet earn absolutely nothing, and that’s if Medium paid out 100% of the subscription amount, which it can’t.

This is why less than 6% of active Medium authors even break $100, and although it is counterintuitive, that number is declining for good and exciting reasons.

Extremely few will earn enough money solely on Medium to live on as a career.

Still, as I said from the outset, Medium is an incredibly powerful tool and you are absolutely in the right place. You just have to understand what this tool is for and how to gain the most benefit from it no matter strong of a writer you are today. I’ll begin by talking about how it has helped me.

“Focus on consistent growth, no matter what your starting point is.”

#1 Realize That Medium is Your Healthier Addiction

I spent 20 years of my life addicted to computer games, and for the past several years I’ve also been addicted to social media. I did manage to kick computer games about a year and a half ago. Facebook has proven harder, especially this year.

Although wasting time on Facebook is largely a dead-end, at one point my debates there did improve my writing and thinking and I’ve met some bright folks that have challenged me to grow.

But after a while, the ads got deadly precise in their targeting and I’ve wasted so much money on purchases that I’m embarrassed to say the number. Also, the only friendships I’ve ever lost have been over text arguments on Facebook. On the phone or face to face, even contentious topics are much safer to discuss.

But the biggest cost with Facebook, as with gaming, is in time. It costs countless hours of your life and leaves you with nothing to show for it.

Medium is completely different because I am building a repository of blog entries that I can quickly find and share. No matter what topic comes up, I can write an article, and then I have it forever. When I’m talking with my math students that have anxiety, I can share this. When conversations with friends go to artificial intelligence, I can share this piece, my first one to get curated. Climate change? I’ve written this piece. I’m even now a poet, thanks to Medium!

Not only do I still get to clarify and organize my thoughts, which for a long time is what I’ve tried to use Facebook to help me do, but now I get paid every time someone finds what I say interesting enough to read. And as I build a larger and larger repository, each digital asset only gains in value because I can link it to all the others.

In any case, it may not be much, but the validation of earning any money at all is a hell of a lot more meaningful than a mere “like”!

#2 Grow Your Network

At the time of this writing, I follow about 3,000 people and am followed by 1,000. Compared to my tiny YouTube channel or Facebook Page, this number is enormous. I’ve been able to achieve this because of the power of reciprocation.

Every day, I follow the maximum number of people, and about 1/3 of them follow me back.

To make the most of the limited number of follows you get each day, make sure they have a green circle around their profile picture. This means they’re subscribers, and you’re only paid when subscribers read your work. I wasted several weeks following nonsubscribers too, before I found that out.

I will still occasionally follow someone who isn’t a paying Medium subscriber if they write something exceptional or if I know them in real life, but for the most part, I’m only interested in connecting with contributors who have paid the price of admission for this ride just like I have.

As I pointed out in the previous section, I still treat Medium very much like I treated Facebook. I read a lot of what other people have to say and I make sure to interact with them, but the quality of people I interact with on Medium is far higher and they are far more grateful when I share my comments about their articles, as I did here. On Medium, people are generally very positive, and I no longer get sidetracked by people who I don’t want to spend my precious time with. Instead, I have easy access to experts in any field, and they answer my posts with a much higher likelihood than they would have on Facebook. I’ve even had podcasts with Medium authors who are also fellow beginners in this space, but industry experts and consultants I would never have access to otherwise.

#3 Reachable Objectives

When you first go to the gym, you’ll quickly get discouraged and you’ll probably even be injured if you try to lift the massive weight that the biggest guy there just finished bench-pressing. You have to work up to it.

In the beginning, just getting yourself to the gym on schedule, without exceptions or excuses, is the victory. That’s it. Results don’t even matter yet. The habit is just dragging yourself into the space where you’re supposed to be and doing one lousy rep. Make the bar so low it is impossible to fail.

There’s a caveat. If you have a powerful enough, life-or-death reason, then you can do virtually anything in an extremely short amount of time. One of my mentees named Nelson Gonzalez that I’ve been working with for years is a huge fan of David Goggins and Jocko Willink, and he’s been watching their videos and reading their books religiously for a very long time. He’s been changing his psychology and learning to process suffering in a way that’s going to make him tougher rather than wallowing in self-pity. In one month of starting his diet and workout regimen, he’s lost 18 lbs.

But this isn’t his first month. This isn’t his first diet. This isn’t his first workout regimen. It’s taken a lot of failures and a lot of grinding away his weakness to become the kind of person who has the discipline to (healthfully) lose 18 lbs in one month.

Similarly, when goal setting as a writer, I strongly recommend the approach of dreaming big only in the distant long run. I recently read an article by Jon Brosio titled How to Jumpstart Your $2000-a-Month Side Hussle In Under 30 Days and it’s a good article as his articles always are. I totally agree with his theme of mining Quora for ideas and using it to build credibility in your niche.

But the thing is, if you’re not already a professional writer, if you don’t already know your niche, if you’re not already in a habit of writing 5,000 words daily, if you don’t reliably get into the flow, then while it is surely possible for someone to earn $2,000 in a month, it isn’t realistic for you to do so.

No more so than you could push the Hulk impersonator aside at the gym and benchpress the 300 lbs he’s got set up.

You just haven’t earned it yet.

You’re in for a serious disappointment if that’s how you’re doing goalsetting, with big numbers and expectations of perfection on your first try.

The reason why I’m writing more than ever 4 months later is because I gave myself goals that I knew I could hit.

In one of my first stories (and still my highest paying), I laid out exponential growth on the way to $1,000 as my objective with the understanding and acceptance that in June I earned only $0.01. You literally cannot start more humbly than I did. But I knew I would improve and progress. Here’s what that looks like so far.

In other words, I’m hitting my targets, I’m constructing a mountain of articles that can interlink and snowball, and it feels awesome all along the way.

If I had quit my day job and put all that pressure on myself to make $2,000 in the first month, then not only would this process not have been very fun, I’d probably be homeless right about now.

You have to give yourself time to adapt. You have to build up to things.

I still have zero doubt that within 1 year, I’ll be passively making $1,000 every month off of the work I’m writing now, and my certainty and effort both grow with every achievable but increasingly challenging target that I meet.

#4 Find Those Ahead of You, Learn From Them, and Share Them

In addition to an incubator for aspiring authors, Medium genuinely is a source of valuable news and information, on par with The Economist or Foreign Policy. There are fantastic authors on this site, and you should take full advantage of the high-quality information made available here.

Every great writer reads a whole lot more than they write. If you listen to legendary authors like C.S. Lewis, you should never worry about being original, just worry about saying what’s true and useful.

Part of why I know so certainly that I’ll continue to have increasing success on this platform is because I continually read and apply the lessons of authors like Tim Denning. I’m only focused on the first year for now, but Denning shows how to scale that out and retire within 5 years.

Notice that I’m not shy about introducing you to better, more experienced, and more credible how-to-succeed authors than myself. Why?

For exactly the same reason that Google, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, and Bing aren’t intimidated to show you the best possible answer to the question you asked. You won’t think less of those search engines for taking you to the information that’s going to help you. Similarly, you won’t think less of me for pointing you in the direction of the people who I know you’ll find value in.

One thing I’ve learned from being a tutor is that you should never be so insecure about giving your audience so much value that you make yourself obsolete. Your entire goal as a mentor and tutor is to create independent learners.

The more successful your audience is, the more money they’ll have available to spend on the books you’re going to write, the courses you’re going to be creating in the future, and other products and services. So never be stingy, just get in the habit of over-delivering value, including by connecting people with the same resources that you use.

People won’t forget you or look down on you for not being the equal of authors who have years more experience. Instead, when they think of you they’ll say “Oh yeah, I really like Jesse, he’s the one who turned me on to Tim Denning’s work. Let me check out what Jesse’s writing about today.”

When it comes to branding perceptions, the people you recommend are the people whose company you are put in. Use that.

#5 Build an Email List

What I’ve learned from August Birch, whose free course I strongly recommend, is that collecting email addresses and getting control of your own subscriber list is where the real long-game is.

Yes, it takes time to build that list, but it is the holy grail for consistent income as well as real impact. That carefully maintained, well-nurtured list is your ultimate key to having a profitable and enduring relationship with your tribe of die-hard raving fans.

Speaking of which, if you join mine, you’ll get more stories just like this sent to your email so that we don’t have to rely on the algorithms to maybe show you content that you’ll find interesting.

Join my tribe at the link below.