How I Ruined My Medium Earnings Permanently
…and what you can do to avoid (or copy) my ‘mistake’
I’m banned from curation. It’s been going on since October 2019. While curation-banning offers a huge amount of freedom (and a monkey off my back).
In a second, I’ll share what happened, why it happened, and what you can do to copy or avoid my ‘mistake.’
While ruining your Medium earnings might sound like a really stupid move, I’ll give you both the pros and cons of my strategy. Medium allows us a lot of leeway to carve our own writing path.
Your path will be different than mine.
As a result of my process, not only have my earnings been chopped, but I’ve also lost most of my ‘top writer’ statuses.
Recently, I’ve found you can only get top writer in a category for curated stories.
Since my stories are no longer curated, only the lingering content keeps the remaining top writer titles I have. Although these status badges don’t mean much for reads, it would be nice to receive credit for prolific content creation.
So, here we are.
I we play by the rules we’ll stay in curation’s good graces. While it’s harder than ever to get curated, it’s in your best interest to keep trying if Medium is your only goal for extra income.
If you’ve got bigger plans with your Medium content, you may want to try a more-aggressive approach. This is the plan I used. It got me banned, but the benefits have far outweighed the consequences.
Here’s why…
How to ruin your Medium earnings deliberately
If you want to cut your Medium earnings in half and get banned from curation forever, take an aggressive approach to list-building.
Medium allows you to link to your website, but they don’t want one of the primary goals of your content to be lead-generation.
I get it.
If I spent millions of dollars on a platform, I’d want to keep my customers on the platform too.
Problem is, Medium controls your income when you write on Medium. They control the reader traffic. Medium can take away your partner money overnight.
Another way to get curation-banned is to write stories about Medium. That’s in the rules. Don’t talk about Fight Club if you want to get curated. Sure, you can write about Medium all you want, but the editors will automatically avoid your stories.
I now use the last third of my stories to encourage my readers to join my tribe.
Before I took a low-key approach. Now that I took an aggressive approach, I get 5–10X more subscribers per day.
There is a trade-off. Big time.
It looks as though I’ve lost half my Medium income on a regular, recurring basis. About a thousand dollars a month, so it’s a spicy meatball to swallow.
But I still get a fair amount of traffic for my content, and my secondary, list-building approach is my insurance policy for the future.
I’m building a tribe I own.
Social media sites, like Medium, come and go. Someday there will be a better place for content and everyone will leave.
We can’t take our followers with us.
When you build a tribe of people who love your work, it’s the long-game. We’re looking at the lifetime value of a reader when we use email. Not just a couple pennies per read and they leave.
When you control your tribe you control the message and the delivery.
Email is a very powerful tool for marketing your writing.
The choice is yours. If you don’t want to be a legacy-level publishing business, where you earn money over the long-term — do not follow my lead.
If you get banned from curation your income will suffer immediately.
Curated stories can earn money for years, while non-curated stories might last a couple weeks at best. I ruined my earnings, but I did so deliberately. There are pros and cons to both approach.
You need an email list either way
Your email list will keep you from typing for dollars. Using your list, you can sell your writing on autopilot, earning you money while you sleep.
I call this mailbox money. I got some this morning.
Medium won’t be here forever. If you don’t own your traffic you don’t own your business. It’s time to take control of your financial destiny if you want to write as a long-game business.
If you’d like to start your email list today (or tomorrow), I’ve got a hand-crafted email masterclass for you. I call it the Tribe 1K. Past students include New York Times bestselling authors.
I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 readers (or your next 1,000) without spending a hot nickel on ads.
Enrollment is free.
Guarantee your seat today before I change my mind.
We’re waiting for you.
Enroll in my Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers
August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.