How I Made $3,000 From One Medium Article as an Affiliate

A new way to earn from your writing

Writing is a powerful skill these days. The more you write, the better version of yourself you become! Moreover, writing unlocks tremendous business opportunities if you are curious enough to discover them.

Look around at those who write consistently. What do they do?

Besides writing, they grow their email lists, make money side hustling, develop a YouTube channel, run consulting businesses, etc.

Medium is a powerful lead generation tool, and this fact should not be neglected. You can gain earnings through the Medium Partner program, but there are a bunch of opportunities apart from it.

Let me share my humble win when I woke up one day and noticed that a random article made me $3,110.40 bucks in a day through affiliate marketing. Wondering what did I do for it? Not that much! However, there are some key points to remember if you want to benefit from affiliate marketing.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is Powerful

I work as a marketer, and I love the concept of affiliate marketing. Its business model is simple.

Let’s say you have a blog and you want to keep making money from your old blog posts. Your readers like the content you share, and they trust you. Whenever you review a tool, a device, or a service, your opinion matters to others, and this is how you can make income— passive income.

There are a bunch of partner programs available online that give you a chance to get your affiliate link and include it in your posts.

If your readers follow the link and make a purchase — you will get a commission from this sale. Easy right? It is how affiliate marketing works. Everyone benefits from it: You get a commission (could be up to 50% from a sale), while a business gets a new client.

If You Want to Use Affiliate Promotion on Medium

In a nutshell, you can include affiliate links in your posts and build your side business with the help of Medium. However, there are specific nuances to know. Medium rules share the following statements about the promotions. Make sure to scrutinize these rules before you start doing any marketing activity through your posts; otherwise, your account can be banned.

While it is hard to define this content with precision or completeness, here are some representative behaviors we look for that are characteristic of spam:

1. Posting content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service.

2. Third-party advertising and sponsorships are not allowed. You may not advertise or promote third-party products, services, or brands through Medium posts, publications, or letters. This includes images that indicate brand sponsorship in a post or letter, or as part of a publication name or logo.

3. Images functioning as third-party ads are not allowed. Inline images or embeds that link out and function as banner ads for third-party brands are not allowed.

4. You must disclose affiliate links or payment for a post. Affiliate links, such as link out to Amazon with your code, or any other link out where you will receive a commission or other value, are allowed in posts.

You must disclose somewhere in the post that it includes affiliate links. If you have received payment, goods or services, or something else of value in exchange for writing a post, you must still disclose this fact in writing within your post.

The excerpt above is pretty much everything you need to know about affiliate marketing on Medium. Still, I would suggest reading Medium rules and make sure you understand and follow them.

Medium allows affiliate link usage, but you have to disclose them in the post by saying “some external links in the post are affiliate” or you can specify which links are affiliate by saying “the link above/below is an affiliate.”

I disclose all my affiliate links in the post because I want to follow Medium rules and build a sustainable business, which later on can be independent of the Medium platform.

How I Made $3K as an Affiliate Commission

Whenever you publish a piece of content that can potentially be used for affiliate promotions, you need to examine the tone of your voice. Too promotional is a failure, your post will not be curated and readers will quickly recognize that you explicitly advertise something.

A proven way is to mention a tool or a product in a post, give a short paragraph of description and that will be it! Your post should not necessarily be a complete review or a selling pitch, a mention is enough. If you manage to pinpoint your reader’s pains and needs, they will follow your links.

The post you see below was published in June 2020 and it did not perform well on Medium. Now I know why it happened. The topic is niche and only a few people read it. However, those readers are my target audience. I continuously write about marketing and side hustling and they follow me.

The post targets product managers, marketers, and business representatives who lack development resources, but need help with the website. I often work under such conditions. Hence, I know how painful this topic can be.

In my article, I shared my experience and provided a list of my favorite design tools that help me manage my needs. I’ve included several disclosed affiliate links for readers and curators to be aware of what I was doing.

My conclusion: disclosed affiliate links do not prevent your articles from being curated and read. If the content is appealing and well-written, readers will most likely follow the links to check what’s there.

Here is my table with affiliate stats:

In July and August, I’ve got 40 clicks and one referral, which generated $3,110.40. Withdrawals are split for a year, which brings me a steady income each month without doing anything.

This is the tool I use for affiliate program selection and partnership. You can join multiple programs at once and store all your links, data, stats, and earnings in one place. Deposits come to PayPal or Stripe.

Takeaways

Medium is a fantastic platform with endless business opportunities for writers. You never know when you can get an invite to write for a famous journal or whenever your read will go viral.

However, there are specific actions you can do to make a decent income without relying much on Medium algorithms. If you have a niche blog with loyal readers, partner programs are your lucky ticket to unlock a new income source.

Experiment with different business ideas, define the ones that work for you, and nail them until they become your decent income sources.

You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action. — Tony Robbins

Let this quote motivate you to keep writing, grow your visibility as a writer, and develop multiple income sources from a single platform.

Download my free guide with 5 ways to make money writing. Work for yourself from home even with zero former experience.

You can get full access to every story on Medium for just $5/month by signing up through this link.