From One Penny to 2K in Less than a Year
I wrote every day for a year, here is what happened.
After a month of writing, my first Medium payout was one penny. When that one cent hit my bank account after writing for two weeks on Medium, that penny cent was as if someone had put a million dollars into my bank account.
Why? Because it made it possible. It spoke to the possibility.
It didn’t matter if it was 33K, the amount of money someone made last month from one story, or one cent, because the potential was now there.
It opened my mind to the prospect of making money from my home, my bed, my porch, my nearest espresso bar, or a coffee shop in Thailand.
The only thing I need is a computer, an internet connection, some writing chops, and a tad of persistence.
I have all of that.
Those are the ingredients I used to go from making one cent to close to 2K in less than nine months.
Now, I realize there are easier ways to make money. If you average out how much time I’ve spent writing, editing, generating ideas, and formatting my stories, I probably make below minimum wage. Even in the smallest town in America, 2K does not a full-time income make, but here is the thing — I would be writing even if Medium wasn’t paying me.
Medium is providing me with a platform to share my work. Medium is providing me with an audience I would not otherwise have had access to.
But without Medium, I’d be writing anyway.
When I’m writing, I’m doing the one thing where time passes without me realizing it, I get into a zone, and all my troubles fall away in the hours spent pounding furiously at the keyboard, unable to keep up with my thoughts.
When you get into the flow of writing, magic happens.
I’m not saying that every word I write is amazing, it is not, most of them end up on the cutting room floor, but it is when I’m the most present, the closest to my real self, free of ego.
It is my happy place, once there I’m present. This is why I write every day.
If I can make one penny, if I can make nothing from writing to making one cent, I can go from one cent to making a lot more.
No experience needed
I didn’t have any professional writing experience a year ago.
Sure, I went to college, have two degrees, college requires a lot of writing. But writing content for the internet and blogging is a lot different from writing a term paper or a final exam.
You have to be more interesting. Or people won’t read you. You need to infuse some of your personality, along with writing for clarity, it all creates voice and style.
Persistence is key
Energy flows where intention goes.
The more time you spend writing, the better you will get at it. It is a skill that can be sharpened with practice. Actively working on your craft, learning how to write better by taking a class, reading about writing, or finding the right mentor are all ways to become a better writer.
“But I don’t have time”
‘I don’t have time,” can’t be an excuse. You have the time. Even if you have a full-time job and six kids, you have the time. You just have to make writing your priority, your one essential task you get done for the day.
I dedicated three hours a day, during my power hours, to write. First thing in the morning, after I dropped my daughter off at school, I would write.
Write, edit, and publish. Write edit and publish the next day, write, edit, and publish every day for 365 days.
I made it a priority.
Before I made it a priority, I made excuses. Once I started saying no to friends, to grabbing a drink, to grabbing coffee, to going above and beyond for my teen — it is good for her to be able to make one or two dishes she can eat — to errands, only then, did I found the time to write.
Successful people decide what is important to them, what dreams they want to actualize, and then spend the first 60% of their day moving the needle on their goals — doing the work.
“All great achievements are the result of sustained focus over time — all of them.” — Gary Keller
Stats
- The One Book That Will Change Your Life, has the most views, over 108K, and has earned over 3K.
- Follower count: increased to 3.8K followers. I think I started around 500. I came in with no audience outside of Medium.
- At any given time, I have at least ten top writer tags.
- How My Lawyer and My Husband Taught Me The Gift of Non-reaction — my first story accepted in P.S. I Love You, 20 days after I started regular publishing. I consider it my most successful story, not in terms of engagement, but it’s the one I’m most proud of. It is solid writing, and I wrote it in about 30 minutes. It poured out of me.
- I was accepted to one Medium in-house publications, OneZero with this post.
- I’m a frequent contributor to P.S. I Love You, The Startup, The Ascent, Publishous, and Mind Café.
- I’m the editor of two publications: The Write Path, a publication dedicated to writing and productivity.
- And The Happy Spot, dedicated to relationships, love, and life. Both are growing in followers.
The basics. The steps I took to go from one penny to 2K
- Consistency. Write and publish at least once a day or five times a week. I published once a day for three months and decreased posting to five times per week.
- Format your stories like top earners. Here is a post about how to format your stories to increase the chances of curation.
- Start a publication. Click here to read how to start a publication.
- While you submit to larger Medium in-house publications and smaller ones like The Startup and P.S. I Love You, publish to your publications. You are covering your bases here. Until you are a writer in other publications, publish to your own to grow your following. Niche down in the beginning, finding what your readers gravitate to.
- Image matters. Cite all photos properly to increase the chances of curation. If your photo is not appropriately cited, Medium won’t curate it.
- Run your story through Grammarly to make sure there are no grammatical or spelling errors.
- Read your article aloud for flow. Read it like you are the reader and hearing it for the first time. Try to be the observer of your piece. Ask yourself, is it interesting? Would I want to keep reading if I weren’t the writer?
- Respond to your reader’s comments, even if you only have one or two readers. They are reading when no one else is, they really like you and are your true fans. If you can get one, you can get more.
- Don’t give up. Those who don’t persist will not find success. If you keep at it, you will as well.
Imagine if you wrote every day for one year, where would you be a year from now?
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
