How I made $1,516.65 as a freelance writer because of Medium

I built confidence and a portfolio on Medium

I have been writing on Medium for a few months on Medium, and I can’t say that the direct revenue I received from the platform justifies the effort.

Nonetheless, you can still indirectly monetize your writing here.

You can use it as a portfolio on various freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiver, and others.

Gaining confidence

Even if you have a passion for writing, you don’t really know whether your writing can be valuable to other people.

When I started writing here, seeing that people liked my writing, engaged with it, and even helped them brought me a lot of joy.

I didn’t have the success other writers proudly boast about. Nevertheless, given the fact that before writing here, no one read what I was writing (I didn’t publish it anywhere) it was incredible to be able to build an audience and community around my writing.

It helped me gain confidence as writer

I realized that writing for me was a passion and I might be able to follow it as a career.

Even though I was becoming more confident that my writing had some sort of value, it didn’t bring me enough revenue to justify the idea that I could live off my wiring.

I decided to go beyond Medium and try my luck as a freelance writer, thinking that having something to prove that I could write along with my education will help me manage to find clients to work for.

You never know until you try

I had my doubts about Upwork. I heard a lot of negative things about it. Despite all of that, I had a friend who was making money using the platform and I decided to also give it a try.

In my first week of using Medium as my portfolio and leveraging my education (BSc Psychology), I managed to land a client.

Writing for a client hardly resembles writing for yourself. You have a set topic, a way to write, and keywords to use. It might be unpleasant for some, but for me, it was still an interesting journey.

I could make money, writing words and listening to music. There was something surreal about that.

What you write about makes a difference in how you feel. I worked in customer service, and I didn’t find it particularly pleasant to write greeting messages and answer questions.

Working for that client, meant using my psychological knowledge, my creativity, and putting to test my writing abilities. It was a challenge, but one that I enjoyed.

Several months after joining Upwork, I worked with several clients and made enough revenue to almost support myself exclusively from my writing. For me that was unbelievable.

Nonetheless, it was my reality, I can’t say that it was all fun because it is hard work, but if writing is what you want to do, I believe is worthwhile dealing with the challenges that might arise.

Final thoughts

There are a lot of writers here complaining about not making money on Medium. I think we need to see the bigger picture.

Even though you might not make money directly on Medium, you can still use it to build your confidence, improve your writing skills and create a portfolio.

Increasing your revenue here is a slow race, but it is possible if you stick with Medium for long enough.

I believe it is more important to enjoy your writing journey, stop caring so much about how much you make, build your business with passion and patience, and don’t make it another job you hate.

Have some laughs along the way and be sure that if you will put in the work, the results inevitable will come.

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