Here’s Your All-in-One Plan to Rock It on Medium

Save this in your lists…you’re going to need it!

You’ve started a social blog. Check.

You’ve written your first few articles. Check.

You’ve finally gotten past your first stomach butterflies and aren’t freaking out anymore about your words being out there on the internet.

Good job! You’re on your way!

Now, let’s take it to the next step.

So, the easiest (or, some may argue, the hardest) part is to actually start the blog. Now you need a plan.

What do I do now?

What articles do I read first?

What articles are a waste of time?

Do I need to worry about social media?

What about curation and publications?

I know that you’re thinking all these questions because they’re exactly what I was thinking a few months ago.

Here’s a rough outline of what I did the first few months, plus a kind-of-plan that I’ve set up. It doesn’t take everything into account, but it covers the big topics.

Month 1 — “I Am Such A Newbie”

Publish at least four articles, either on your own page or in the New Writer’s Welcome publication. They will be terrible and no one will read them, but it’s okay!

Topics to study: Curation, publication submission guidelines and general medium rules.

Month 2 — “I Got This Now”

Try to engage with someone in the Medium community every day. Focus on building your knowledge about the platform and writing in general.

Topics to study: Medium Partner Program, Stripe (or how to make an income if you can’t do Stripe), and Chrome Extensions for Medium.

Month 3 — “Let’s Experiment…”

Practice submitting stories of different writing styles, niches, and formats to various publications to see which version gets the best response.

Example: I published two articles about almost the same thing, with different titles and formats. One is an evergreen earner (makes money year-round like an evergreen tree) and the other went flat after 1 week.

Topics to study: How to become a top writer, how to go viral without being curated, community engagement.

Month 4 — “I Think They Would Like This…”

Focus on improving your writing. Start to define your audience (or multiple audiences) and learn to write headlines, storytelling, humor, etc.

You should be starting to make a very small amount of consistent income (like…$10-$50/mo) if you publish regularly.

Topics to study: How to write headlines, Storytelling techniques, How to format your writing for a specific audience.

Month 5 — “Wow, My Profile is Awful!”

Focus on your profile. Make your About Page better, rewrite your profile blurb, make sure you’re putting referral links everywhere, and build your email list.

Topics to study: How to create and pin an index page, how to use lists in your index page (and at the bottom of your articles to showcase your work), how to use spreadsheets to track MPP data.

Month 6 — “Hmm, People Read These More…”

Start to niche down now that you know which articles are most popular. Write about the popular stuff over and over, but in different creative ways.

Topics to study: Study your favorite top authors and incorporate parts of their writing styles or formats into yours (if it fits); Research the top-performing articles and publications in your niche.

Month 7 — “Email is Gold, Baby!”

Focus on your email list.

• Learn about ConvertKit
• Start a newsletter
• Start your own publication and send out newsletters that way
• Substack

Topics to study: Email marketing, How to send out newsletters, “Should I start a publication?”

Month 8 — “Let’s Go Social…Wait, Which One?!”

Learn all about social media! Now that you’ve gotten your writing habit down, it doesn’t take as much time to hammer out new stuff.

Start some social media profiles and link your articles.

Topics to study: Tom Kuegler’s Linked In Strategies, How to market for medium on different social media platforms (I don’t have a specific article for this. You’ll have to look up which platform you want. There are so many!).

Month 9 — “I Am So Bored with This…”

Start diversifying. You don’t want all your eggs in one basket. Consider starting…

• An author blog
• Writing ebooks
• Affiliate posts
• Digital products on Gumroad
• Offering coaching services.

Topics to study: Sales funnels, diversifying online income, How to create a blog, digital products to sell.

Month 10 — “Get Down to Business”

Write a business plan (if you haven’t yet). Check out my infographic: Business or Hobby?

Ok, so you may be thinking,

“Really? Three books from people working for the same company?”

Hear me out. When I first developed an interest in business, someone gave me the book Business Boutique. Seriously, if you don’t have a business degree or any background in business, it walks you through every single step for making a business plan.

It is so easy and it’s written specifically for women (but men can use it, too), so it has lots of practical advice in it for how to manage life and work.

The Proximity Principle is the best book I have ever read on how to find your dream job — something that matches your talents and your passions.

Lastly, I actually just listened to Entreleadership on audio (because I thought it sounded boring but it was really, really, really good). It’s all about how the Ramsey corporation started and grew their business.

Topics to study: Christy Wright’s Business Boutique, Ken Coleman’s The Proximity Principle and Dave Ramsey’s Entreleadership.

Month 11 — “This Will Make My Life Easier”

Think about hiring out some of your tasks (if you're consistently making money).

Are you bad at making ebook covers? Hire a freelancer to do it.

Tired of writing the boring filler in articles? Invest in Jarvis AI to write articles faster.

Topics to study: Cory Who Writes — Jarvis AI

Month 12 — “I’m Going to Learn to Be An Expert”

Invest in yourself. If you’ve made enough money through Medium to cover it, I would purchase a medium writing course from one or two of the top authors.

Make sure those authors have a track record of consistent success over a period of time and get a course that includes coaching services and a writing community.

Topics to study: Well, that new course you just invested in, obviously!

Hope this helps.

Now go rock it on Medium. You have absolutely no excuse now.

Are you tired of only getting to read three articles per month?

Join the Medium community today! For the price of a small latte, you can have unlimited access to all your favorite authors (including myself)!

And while you’re at it…check out my profile on Gumroad! It has a bunch of stuff to help new writers.

(And most of them are free.)