A year in review
How I Accidentally Made Money on Medium. And You Can Too
My 67 months of 2020 on Medium
You were not asking for it, but here it is. The next how to make money on Medium article, which I really didn’t want to do in the first place.
Neither the article nor making money on medium.
But it really happened — both the article and making money on medium.
Let me tell you how and read my insights at the bottom of the article if you want to skip the story and jump directly to the conclusion that tastes sweet like Christmas cookies fresh dough.
A Bit of Background to the Story
I am a boy from the 80s/90s — the great time before social media and the internet existed. Well, most likely, it wasn’t that great, but in the rearview mirror, everything looks better and brighter than the blurry view through the windshield.
The rise of the internet and social media brought forth many novel possibilities to make a living. And the great thing is, many of these online activities can be fun too.
Since 1994 I got myself into doing research and development in digital business models, which is also partially my business in the pandemic world of 2020.
How I Got Into the Medium
My core business is supporting life science entrepreneurs in funding their corporate ideas. Nothing more, nothing less. It sounds much more relaxed than it actually is.
I love my job, but the reality is it is hard work, and working with the pros in the industry is performing at a peak level every day.
There was one particular gap I observed in the European life science industry:
A lack of private funding for early stage life science companies
After 15 years in the industry, I can speak with confidence that we have seasoned entrepreneurs in Europe and one of the world's best tech habitats when it comes to life science. Yet, capital is scarce; thus, many people head west to the US and recently eastward towards China.
My idea to solve the problem: Create a conference to raise awareness for the cause that we need more money in the industry in Europe.
Running up the conference, I needed a simple blogging platform to post one or the other promotional articles. I started writing articles on Linkedin, but I don’t enjoy writing long-form content there for no reason. I wanted something fresh to collect my articles from the life science newsletter.
And so I discovered the possibility not only to read on medium but also to write articles.
No wonder that my first article covered:
I liked the medium’s intuitive UI reduced to the bare minimum needed to write articles. Not 200,029 overwhelming editing possibilities like WordPress. Just write, add a few headlines and publish.
Medium Is for Money — January 2020
December went by with 9 articles for my Life Science Investment community Life-Science-Get2gether.
Soon I discovered that Medium was much more than a pure blogging platform like I used to know since blogs became famous more than two decades ago.
In January, I read and wrote on Medium; I discovered long lost shades of my personality while reading on Medium, leading to a diversification of topics I started writing about. Besides life science entrepreneurship, I started writing about my other passions — financial literacy, health, and active lifestyle.
Suddenly, something interesting happened. To tackle the scarcity of money in the early-stage life science industry, I had the idea to start a podcast. By interviewing investors and entrepreneurs, I wanted to raise further awareness for the cause.
I used Medium initially to publish the script for the episodes. The first 6 episodes were testing speaking and gaining experience with the production of Podcasts.
At the end of January 2020, medium informed me that I had made a tremendous amount of
2 euro cent
What? How? Why? I didn’t intentionally sign up for any affiliate marketing, dropshipping, or other business.
A bit of research later, I realized that somehow I got my medium activities into the partner program. Whenever a paying member reads an article, I make money.
“Interesting, so it is really possible to make money online.”, was one of my first thoughts. And I just let it be, as I didn’t take making money online very seriously. I come from a time when making money meant working hard, selling time, and saving money. Eventually, after years of saving, someone could start buying stock, and that was basically all the options average people were aware of making money in Austria 40 years ago.
Online business? Yes, of course, by creating companies like Amazon, Facebook, or Google. But Austria and Europe haven’t been a great place for that. I tried to create digital companies in the 90s, and none of it worked due to a lack of growth capital in Central Europe.
Making money as an influencer? I didn’t believe any of those stories about Youtube, TikTok, Dropshipping, Affiliate Marketing millionaires.
In my eyes, they were all big hoaxes.
My Perception Changed During the Pandemic in Spring 2020
Everything changed in Spring 2020. The pandemic is worse for some industry — definitely, Life Science and the entire Pharma Industry isn’t amongst them.
Money in the industry is not an issue anymore — thanks to the pandemic, a load of money is poured into the field of life science to business. I lost a bit of my mission since 2015 and had time to elaborate on new models.
I wrote some articles more in February and March, and unexpectedly they made some cents.
3 in February and 7 in March.
The insights I got mainly were revelations of my soul, as I started enjoying the process of thinking, forming sentences, and writing. I got aware that my English skills went southwards since I received my CPE degree in June 2007.
To fix this problem, I started reading and wrote more. Interestingly the cents started more and more accumulating.
I overlooked this beautiful new business flower that started growing in my corporate backyard. This little plant has managed to push through the hard concrete of the life science business world, and I didn’t see it.
The pandemic got me engaged in some due diligence work with investors, which meant I cut back on time on Medium. The number of articles plummeted, and so did the young plant perish as well.
I made 2 cents in the 2nd quarter of 2020, not worth speaking about.
A Summer of Finding a Long Lost Love Again
After completing some thrilling life science projects, I took almost the entire summer off to proceed with other tasks like my podcast, reading, and writing on Medium.
Reading and writing were my first loves, and this time I am here and not let them go.
So I started writing again on Medium after a lazy Q2/2020, and in July, three incredible things happened.
My earnings
went up to
41 cent
which made me feel incredibly rich.
Not for the reason of the 41 cents; I enjoyed the process of writing so much that it doesn’t feel like work. I am here for the pleasure, even though I believe as a non-native speaker, my English lacks proper grammar structure. It is low on the beautiful flourishing metaphors I like when reading books or magazines like Time or Newsweek by proficient native speakers.
Anyhow 41 cents is 41 cents. It felt like a gift as I didn’t consider Medium anything close to being a job.
I couldn’t neglect the young flower anymore. Almost half a dollar is something that can buy real things in the real world. It is still not much, but worth giving it some attention and investigate this new opportunity.
My business mind
was intrigued and curious.
- What is this about making money online?
- Can it be possible to make a living just with writing on the medium?
- Can medium be a legit income stream?
I mean, 41 cents are a nice thing when they come in, surprisingly. My grandma always said, “He who doesn’t honor the cent isn’t worth the euro.” It is a German proverb, bluntly translated to English by me.
So I started doing my research. On this journey in summer, I came across Sinem Günel’s story about Here’s How Much Money You Can Really Make on Medium from June 2020.
In the article, she wrote about making 5–10k. She pointed out “writing on Medium is not a getting rich quick scheme” After 20 years of working in M&A, I learned to be supercautious. I work with investors in the life science industry, and many people try to sell a lot of “hot air.”
So I investigated further.
In August, Sinem published 3 Surprising Lessons I Learned From Making $10,000 in a Single Month on Medium.
10,000 Dollars — in one Month.
It seemed legit, but having heard many “look here get rich” storytelling narratives, I investigated further and came across the article How Much Money Can You Make Writing for Medium? Written by Casey Botticello.
In his article, he showed a graphic that the top writer on Medium in 2020 makes almost 50,000 dollars in one month?
What? 50k in one month?
I read more and more articles about how real people can make real money when writing is their passion.
But I needed something more to really believe that these stories are legit. And it came to me in the form of an interview of Sinem Günel made by our mutual acquaintance Dejan Stojanovic in which he talked with her about her medium journey.
It was the final piece of trust in the mediums business model for writers I needed to complete the puzzle.
Gaining credibility
And I was not considering this opportunity for my business. I have a well-running networking platform with a podcast, and my main passion is building and growing life science companies.
Like those who develop vaccines against Sars-Cov-2, I served on the executive board of Themis Bioscience GmbH, meanwhile acquired by MSD.
But I just loved using Medium in my spare time in the COVID-Year to hone my newly found writing passion. And a few cents on my bank account wouldn’t hurt my main business at all.
July 20, Medium informed me that I got a private note on one of my articles.
I didn’t even know that private notes exist back then.
The note was from Esat Artug, editor of the publication “The Innovation.”
He asked whether I would be interested in publishing one or the other Article in his publication. I learned that it is a new one, and he wants to leave a larger footprint in the mediums community of writers and readers.
I always love helping people with big visions, and I had no clue what a medium's publication is. But who cares when it is help that you are providing. Right?
So I just did what he asked for and handed in my writings. I never considered my stories to be of value to anybody outside my small niche of the life science community and circle of close friends and family.
Further pieces of my medium puzzle
Another piece to my puzzle, “Is Medium's business model for writers legit,” are Michelle Loucadoux, MBA’s articles. She is a great writer, and I like her way of laying out the details, like in her latest pieces.
Wrapping up the Year
In the last sections are my learnings from one year of writing at Medium.
My key learnings
I am a firm believer in that, really.
great things happen to those who are active
Medium seems to be proof of this narrative. When I look at articles of top writers, I come to the following conclusion:
Show up daily
If you want to make money on medium, make it your daily business. The Article
states that Medium's Top Writers post 1.42 Articles per day on average. Also, here, there is no one-hit-wonder.
Get into publications
Showing up on Medium and posting 1–2 posts per day on average is one thing that leads to success. The other one is getting noticed. If you have a million followers already on Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, or Youtube — that’s great as you can re-direct traffic to your articles, and the payment algorithm will start working in your favor.
When you start fresh on social media with only 1 to 2k followers from niche activities, as I had in 2020, work on getting into publications like The Innovation. They help you doing marketing for your articles, and it pays off to get more reads.
Learn writing on medium…
Writing in real-life magazines is one thing; another thing is scientific articles; the next one is writing fiction books, and writing on the medium is also a category on its own.
Dig into articles of mediums stars in which they clearly explain what makes articles on medium stand out. They share their know-how freely and help you evolve as a writer on Medium. My personal favorites are Sinem Günel, Tim Denning, and Michelle Loucadoux, MBA.
… and it makes you money
I have fact-checked the many stories about making money on medium. My conclusion is that I believe it is a real opportunity to make up to a medium-range five-figure-income — every month when someone is willing to put in the work.
My year on Medium in figures
It was a long year — Spotify thanked me today to spend all the 67 months of 2020 with them. Hahaha. It is exactly how it living in the dystopian pandemic world felt to me.
I used the year to get back into writing, and here are my accomplishments so far by December 2, 2020:
- 117 Articles published
- 5,17 k views
- 1,8 k reads
- $ 50 earned
I love it, as everything here came unexpectedly in the first place. The 2020 journey made me really curious to find out whether the hypothesis I have
Making a monthly 5 figure income with publishing 1–2 articles daily
is really possible.
So far, I have read about it, which made me believe in the possibility. Yet, I have not experienced it.
So my goal for 2021 on Medium is to put in the grind for a little while and see what happens.
Since 1999 I am an executive, advisor, and coach for companies in various industries. I am specialized in Corporate Development and Finance, from seed rounds to IPO level, and focused on life science since 2006.
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