Four Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started on Medium
How to make money on Medium.
For those of you starting, you can make money on this platform if you are willing to put in the time, work, and energy to do so.
It is worth it.
We all have a lot more time on our hands. If you want to be a paid writer, what better way to spend your time than practicing your writing skills in a public forum. And, as a writer who has been here nearly a year, there isn’t a nicer group of writers than the writers in this community.
Medium is big, but kind of small too. You get to know the writers who show up every day after a short time.
4 things I wish I knew when I was a beginner
1. When you fail, don’t quit
Not everything you write will be a winner. Not every story will speak to the specific tastes of the readers on Medium. Eventually, if you stick with it, some stories will land, and you will be ecstatic when that happens — if you don’t give up.
When a story you write goes viral, it will make you want to write more. But until then, you have to keep posting, even after you pour your heart and soul into a story only to get five claps or no claps, no highlights, no reads, no love.
Keep going anyway.
You have to write many drafts to get to the gold. Once in a blue moon, you’ll write an article in five minutes, and it takes off on Medium for reasons you’ll never know.
My first story that took off on Medium,
I wrote in 30 minutes and edited very little. It poured out of me.
You just never know. There is no magic formula.
The key is consistent publishing and finding what works. Write more of the stories in a similar vein to those that work. One constant on Medium is you have to proof-read for grammatical and spelling errors and include a lot of white space in your writing.
All writers write a shitty first draft, good writers write the second draft and the third. Great writers keep at it every day to improve their craft.
Being a writer is a life-long endeavor.
If you are serious about getting paid as a writer, you can’t leave writing to only when you feel like it, it means writing every day even on the days you do not feel like it. If I only wrote when I felt inspired, I’d write maybe once a month. I write every day, and nine times out of ten, after the first 20 minutes of writing, I want to continue.
Your cumulative output matters more than any single thing you write. The secret to becoming a better writer is to become a prolific one.
2. No one is reading
It took me a long time, years, to hit publish on Medium because I was scared that the millions of people who would flock to read my work would hate it.
After all, I suck.
AHHHH…no need to worry about that, because no one was paying attention to me.
Unless you are coming in with an established audience, hardly anyone will read your work in the beginning. So, what an excellent opportunity to practice your writing chops in public with minimal risk.
Write like there is no one watching because in the beginning there won’t be, use this knowledge to your advantage.
- Write anything you desire in the beginning, be creative.
- Write an erotic story in the third person, write fiction.
- Be experimental when no one is reading, you will grow as a writer.
- Write poetry.
- Write humor.
If you want to be a writer, you have to get the practice in first, and Medium is the perfect place to get in the practice.
There are no other writers’ websites like Medium, which serves as your blog with such little effort from you.
Medium allows new writers to publish and quickly find an audience for almost free — there is a small annual fee to sign up for the Medium Partner Program, but with that comes the potential to make money and not just a tiny amount.
Be brave, hit publish.
What do you have to lose? Don’t allow perfectionism to stop you from sharing. Write something, and even when it isn’t perfect, publish it anyway. It is the only way to become a better writer.
If you only write for yourself and keep it in a journal, you won’t get feedback. And feedback, even critical feedback, will make you write better.
3. Start a publication
Start a publication from the word “go.” This is fun.
Starting your own publication on Medium is like having your own blog without having to hire someone to do all the web development work, or spending hours figuring it out yourself.
You get to pick a photo and a quote to represent you as a writer.
Your publication is like an umbrella that houses your work and is organized by the categories you set up. Your stories are designated into those categories by the tags you give each post. The categories you set up in your publication appear at the top of your publication, under the photo. Here is mine below.
For The Write Path my categories are Medium, Writing, Life Hacking, Systems, Blogging, and Money.
Choose the categories you write in.
For example, writing, blogging, productivity.
For each tag you give a story (always use the maximum number of tags allowed — five) that story will appear under the category the tag represents. I have two publications, one on writing, The Write Path,
and, The Happy Spot,
The Happy Spot focuses on everything about life, the good and the bad.
They both represent me as a writer and the topics in which I mainly write.
You may have read that to gain an audience from blogging, you need to “niche down,” I don’t agree with this standard advice, it may be true of traditional blogging, but on Medium, writing in varied topics is a faster way to gain an audience.
Start with what you know, but once you find your footing branch out to other popular topics where you may not have a lot of experience, but you’re willing to research and investigate while you’re writing.
I wrote an article I knew nothing about, but the piece was inspired by a talk I went to at my daughter’s school given by an expert in child safety on the internet.
I did more research on the topic in addition to what I learned at the meeting, and the story was accepted by one of Medium’s more significant in-house publications, OneZero.
You never know where a topic will lead you.
When you start a publication, you won’t have many followers in the beginning, but with enough publishing, you will gain followers. One way to gain followers to your publication is to publish and get accepted to larger publications like P.S. I love you and The Startup.
These publications have an audience of thousands of readers.
If a reader enjoys a story you got published, they may check out what you are writing in your pub. Simultaneously post in your publication and larger publications.
Don’t just concentrate one or the other, do both.
4. Curation matters
Curators read nearly every story that’s published.
When a story is curated, it is curated into a topic that fits the story. Some topics are more popular than other topics. The topic “life lessons” is more popular than the topic “loss.”
The Medium story algorithm is driven by topics, so when your story is curated in “productivity,” it is shown to all the readers on Medium who follow that specific topic. This is huge, your story will get more eyeballs on it, more readers. The readers following productivity will have a chance to see your story.
Medium curation means your story will be shown to the people following the topic in which it was curated.
Curation is the most important way to get followers and engagement.
To understand which stories are curated, go to the topic you are most interested in writing, and read the stories curated in that topic to get a better understanding of what works, try to write something similar in your voice and personality.
You will get the hang of it, once you are curated, it gets more obvious which stories you write work, and which do not.
Curation is like slow-burn, your stories will last longer and be found a lot easier than stories that do not get curated.
Write on.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
