How to Take Breaks from Publishing and Still Make $100,- a Month
Breaks are healthy — find your balance
Most people believe quitting writing for over a week is algorithm death squad
So they find themselves being mice in a content creation thread-mill running on writers NZT-48
But did you try?
For real — What actually happens when you quit Medium for 2 months? Reads collapsing? Income dropping? Anxiety attacks? Missing the tribe?
I did leave Medium for exactly eight weeks and this is what happened.
A pyramid content machine detox.
This is the mantra everybody is talking about; When you wanna make some bucks you need to show up here, you need to play the game, dream of becoming that top writer.
The viral piece dream should keep you going, the promise of the Pharaohs of Medium, the ones that make a sports car a month. The fact that they exist is your shot of writing caffeine. Every-single-freaking-day.
But not me. I dropped out, took a break, came to my senses.
It feels great, this Medium detox. I can highly recommend it.
The reason?
I wanted to finish my latest book. And I was sick of making $2.44 for eight hours of work. That’s the money I make when I sell one book.
I’m dreaming of selling ten while I sleep.
Writing your first serious novel or any part of your body of work as a writer makes up perfectly for skipping Medium for a while.
This is what I learned from leaving Medium for eight weeks. I’ll finish explaining to you how you can make more than $100 a month while writing absolutely nothing here for more than eight weeks.
There’s More to Life
Yep. There is.
I just scrolled through Medium’s front page after the eight-week detox. Guess what? Nothing really changed. The same top writers pop up first.
The same percentage of influencers are telling you what an amazing life they have, making tons of $$$, and you can have this too when you only… read their blogs.
Then a storm of Ukraine-Russia war stories from people that have no clue about world politics. Just like me.
One thing did change. Not even one post about Cojonas. What a relief.
Then there is an army of articles about life hacks, listicles, and how you can improve almost anything.
Reading a good book can make up for skipping Medium for two weeks. Having seven Tinder dates in ten days can make up for skipping Medium, and so can so much more.
Real-life can, and should.
Medium is not God. You are God in your own universe.
Medium should be working for you and when you feel you are working too much for Medium, take a break.
Medium Is a Window of Opportunity
Medium is a means to an end, not the end goal per se.
Look at my ex-partner for a moment, she’s the perfect example. She gets 90% of her clients through one article on Medium.
Don’t make Medium your end goal, don’t get stuck here making pennies unless you’re a top writer. Make your strategy, find your passion/niche/purpose, and use Medium to help achieve your goals, find your costumers.
It’s that simple.
It all starts with including a creative variant on the “subscribe to my newsletter” line at the bottom of your work with a link to your Mailchimp or Upscribe account. Medium will give you a solid list of mail addresses from followers. Don’t get too enthusiastic about it right away, but it all adds up.
For Medium to start working for you it might take three, six, or nine months or even more than a year. My ex did it in a little over a year writing one article a week on average. She got accepted in Human Parts, which helped too. And she included her posts on her website. Clever move, it is a great filler, shows your commitment and professionalism.
Let your clients find you via Medium. Period.
Let’s Talk About the Money
Here’s the proof of how I managed to make more than $100, while not publishing anything for eight weeks.
I didn’t have any clue how fast my stats would tank after stopping. This is how my stats behaved after writing almost 250 articles in the five months before taking my break!
As you’ll notice, my July 2020 stats developed into a wave pattern, declining slowly. I stopped writing for Medium on June 30th and I scored 337 views that day. At the end of July, I had around 240 reads in a day. I made close to $150 in July having close to 2K reads.
So what happened with my stats in August 2020? Further decline?
Not really!
As you can see, my stats climbed at the end of July and in mid-August to over and close to 400 reads respectively. That’s more than when I stopped at the end of June (337 reads).
This is all due to the one viral piece I was lucky enough to create on Medium. This one article made me $2,792 and apparently, the algorithms keep on finding it for it to keep on spitting out money.
Takeaways
Take a break when you feel you are working for Medium. This platform should work for you. Make no mistake, you’ll need to put in the hours and invest your time when you start, that’s with all things in life. Stay in creative balance.
First, plough the land, sow the seed, water and maintain the land, and then harvest.
There is more to life than getting addicted to writing for a content pyramid. When you’re a writer, keep on working on your body of work. Use Medium to promote your work.
My honest best advice for now: stick to Medium in your first months (plough the land and sow the seed) until you write your first viral article (harvest). The mysterious Medium AI does reward a lot of beginners here that put in enough content above a certain quality level with some kind of going viral.
When you’re a coach, when you stick around long enough, clients will find your articles on the web and start to contact you. This will also happen to online marketing heroes, therapists, writers, and anyone who is passionate about their work and knows how to package it in well-written stories that bring enough value.
I just wrote my 500th blog here in 3 years making $15k. My aim is to stick around for 5 years and see if Tim Denning is right.
Apart from the money, I just love writing and blogging. It helps me to make sense of the world. Medium inspired me to create my weekly newsletter service via Substack too!
Connect to your growing list of readers via your thoughts, words, and inspiration. That’s the wisest takeaway I can give you. Everything else that happens here is a big bonus.
Join my tribe and my substack to receive free weekly medicine to start living a more meaningful life in this age of disruption
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