Case Study: What Does It Take to Make $100 a Week On Medium? | Update #1
So how did I do the first week into my case study to make $500 in a single month?
The first week’s payday for October is in and accounted for.
So how did I do?
Did I hit my goal of $100 for the week on my way to $500 for the month?
Well I’m not going to bury the lede, my week one total was — drum roll please:
$53.83
Yeah.
Talk about disappointing.
More than 120 fans than my previous weekly high and almost 300 more fans than my second best week last month, yet I basically made the same amount of money?
How is that even possible.
Am I bad at the maths?
Does Medium use Voodoo to determine payouts?
Is it all so confusing that no one can figure it out?
Well, while it may feel that way at times, the truth is I just overlooked where the fans were coming from; it’s as simple that.
All fans aren’t created equally.
To have success on Medium, you don’t just need paying members to clap for your work; you need paying members who clap for your work and not too many other people’s work.
What I mean is the paying Medium member who only claps for a few people a month is gold. And you only (consistently) get that member by getting work distributed internally by Medium.
What counts as internal Medium traffic?
Well, they tell you:
This is the percentage of post views driven by Medium, including through the app, homepage, and emails, and through Medium’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
So any official Medium channel, including their email, is considered internal traffic.
And this access to their internal traffic is why curation was so important. I say was because getting curated doesn’t offer anywhere near the boost it used to offer since most of that promotion is used for Medium’s own publications and partner pubs.
It also explains why I was able to make $220 my first full month on Medium while only having one article cross 50 fans and not having another get even 20 fans until near the end of the month.
Per fan rates on internal traffic easily range from 20 cents to 70 cents, and some say they average as much $1 per fan for longer articles.
So what happens if most of your traffic comes from external sources?
And by most, I mean 40 percent or better.
Well, this happens:
Article A
53 fans | 47% external referrals | $3
And to put that in perspective, this is what a similar post looks like when most of the traffic comes from Medium’s ecosystem:
Article B
53 fans | 11% external referrals | $38
Ouch.
A big difference and it easily explains why I can have such a huge increase in traffic without the requisite increase in dollars.
Near the end of September, I started to promote my articles heavily via Facebook Medium groups. My traffic skyrocketed, but after the disappointing payout this week, I decided to take a look at what an FB fan is really worth.
I use the FB groups to promote a lot of old posts that were no longer getting any traffic, so it is easy to track the numbers of FB fans with these articles:
Article A
Fans Before: 19 Fans After: 35 Earnings: $0.58 RPF: 3.6 cents
Article B
Fans Before: 12 Fans After: 24 Earnings: $0.52 RPF: 4.3 cents
Article C
Fans Before: 12 Fans After: 30 Earnings: $1.54 RPF: 8.5 cents
Yeah.
None of that is really encouraging.
But it makes perfect sense because the FB groups are filled with other writers who read and clap for everyone. And that’s the rub with getting fans from external traffic; they tend to fall into one of two categories:
- Those who have Medium accounts but aren’t paid members
- Those who are paid members but clap a lot like writers who are members of FB groups or other groups geared towards Medium writers.
The funny thing is I’m on pace to smash my engagement goal of 1700 fans a month. If I keep up my current pace, I should end the month with somewhere between 2000 and 2500 fans easily, and yet I can’t tell you that I’m going to successfully hit my goal of $500 for the month.
Ain’t that about a bitch.
Medium is a cruel mistress, after all.
So Now What?
Well, after I crunched the numbers the new RPF for articles that had the bulk of their traffic from external sources worked out to be:
10 fans = $1 or 10 cents a fan
That means if I hit 2500 fans this month, I’d make $250.
If I use my RPF from last week of 13 cents that number jumps to $325
Which is still less than the $500 I’m trying to make.
I often say that if I wasn’t following 125 people a day, I wouldn’t have made $220 last month. And it’s true. I quickly grew to 1000+ followers which gave me a nice base of people for Medium to distribute my articles to whether I was curated or not. Also, it also gave me a base of people who weren’t all writers who clap on everyone’s work.
The only real advice I have for myself moving forward is to continue to follow people as well as make sure I spend more time highlighting, commenting, and clapping for the articles of those I follow to help increase my follow back rate.
Outside of ramping up my content production, which is what I was doing anyway, this seems like my best bet for getting more of that sweet internal traffic. I can’t control curation outside of making sure the work I produce meets their rather opaque guidelines.
My recently curated articles haven’t been juggernauts anyway, so following and clapping for people outside the FB groups is my best bet. Other than that, I can’t complain about being on pace to have over 10,000 views and 2000 fans for the month.
Whether it plays out in dollars and cents, I don’t know, but those numbers are still pretty damn good for someone in only their second full month on Medium. And at this point, I will take my wins where I can get them.
‘TIll next time.
This is How I Made $135 Dollars in My First 30 Days On Medium
Only seven to nine percent of writers make at least $100 each month on Medium. I did it in my first month. Here is what I did each week to achieve my goal, hopefully, you can use my journey to $100 a month to achieve yours.
