How I Finally Made Over $500 in a Month on Medium

All it took was a few clicks!

Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this thing!

About a year ago, I had a goal of making at least five bucks by writing on Medium, enough to cover my subscription cost for the month.

Yes, I know that you can save a few bucks by signing up for a year, but I still go month-to-month, canceling it every now and then.

Because several subscribers have signed up under my own profile, I collect a small percentage of their membership fees. Since Ben Le Fort is one of my favorite writers on this platform and someone who publishes many of my stories, even some that are not so great, I signed up under his profile so he could collect $2 or so per month from me.

I consider the stories about “how much I made on Medium” and “how to make big money on Medium” fairly tasteless and an obvious grab for making even more, thus I have never before written one of those.

Even though I have read quite a few stories like this one about making it into the “$100 club” which claims that it puts you in the top ten percent of earners on Medium, I consider it not only a low bar but an extremely low bar to set.

It’s not as if I’m Tim Denning, but I do feel as if my writing skills and unique perspective should merit at least $500 per month for my efforts.

Therefore, I figured that even after cracking the $100 in a month mark and then the $300 mark this past May, I would continue grinding away at it until I could share what is at least a somewhat more impressive number and one that was actually one of my New Year’s Resolutions a few years back — to make at least $500 via “side hustles” in one month.

My wife and kids frequently advise me to write shorter, more concise, and more interesting stories. You know, those down-and-dirty “7 Ways to” or “The Easy Way to” stories that provide readers with actionable steps to improve their own lives.

Even though I often spend far more time writing heartfelt personal stories like the one about my beloved late father, it is my stories about how the DRIP protocol is a scheme or how to build up one’s wealth that resonates far more with Medium readership, thus earning more of that green stuff that we all seek.

So my new goal is not so much financial in nature, but I would like to have some stories that I am working on accepted into publications that I am not yet a writer for. I have a few specific ones in mind but, truth be told, the stories that currently sit in my draft folder on Medium and the draft folder in my mind do not yet meet the standards for those.

When I do get them in — and I will — I will write another story for this particular publication pointing them out. My way of looking at it is that a good three- to five-minute read in a publication with tens of thousands of readers will do better than a mediocre story in a smaller publication.

After all, now that I have “hit” the $500 mark, I am not even close to being satisfied and will not stop until I top the $1K mark, which would be enough to cover my new mortgage payment.

I suppose that now is as good a time as any to come clean.

I did NOT make over $500 on Medium last month. Not even close.

I WILL get to that number at some point, but it will not come until I improve dramatically at writing about topics that attract thousands more eyeballs and hours read.

The rest of the numbers posted are accurate and I did feel as if I was on my way to the $500 club when I came close to $400 in May, but then both my motivation and earnings took a major dip as family issues took precedent over writing more popular stories.

Ironically, I would likely earn that amount if I were inclined to share more details about those problems, but some things I would not share even if someone would pay me a million bucks.

What I did was fake the $539 number, typing the number 5 instead of 1 via a method that I learned about an hour ago by reading this story by a kid with less than one hundred followers. Further clicks led me to the original story that he referenced on Simple Research, a publication that I both discovered and followed that hour ago. I must be following at least 200 publications by now, maybe 300.

So what I did was went to my real earnings number, clicked on it to inspect elements, and then typed the number 5 where the number 1 was. I then did some screenshots and, viola! I “attained” the number that I aspire to earn through the Medium partner program.

I suppose that I could have written a more reasonable number like $439 and then written a story about how I am getting closer to my goal, but one of the aspects of my writing under a pen name comprised of a combination of three names of dearly departed predecessors is that I am able to write honestly without anyone judging me too harshly including my extremely conservative employer.

Well, this story is too long and boring by now so here are two things that I wish to close with. First is that when the colder winter months come and I am done with walking my seven miles for the day, I will try a bit harder to write snappier stories on interesting topics.

Second is that I will share the true results at that time here on this publication, which before reading about this little “hack” today, would have and should have been my first story about “how much I made on Medium.”