How I Tripled My Earnings on Medium in the Last 30 Days

Data deep dives, writing smart and building an epic community

I tripled my earnings on Medium in the last 30 days.

How did I do it?

• Deep dives into data
• Writing smart
• Building community

Now, to be sure, I’m not making six figures on this platform — or anything close to that amount of money.

But I did triple my writing income in the last 30 days.

Around two weeks ago, I posted this article after writing my first 22 stories on Medium:

In that article, I report that I had made $7.24 as of December 18th. Today is December 27th, and my total earnings at this moment are $35.49. So, in reality, my earnings have more than tripled in little more than a week.

My goal (fingers crossed) is to make $50 my first month on Medium.

The short summary of how I did it is that I learned five lessons that I hope can help you plan, write, and promote your content. With any luck, perhaps you can triple your writing income, too.

Let’s get to it.

How I Took a Deep Dive Into Medium.com Data

I used paid software to peek at what goes on behind-the-scenes at Medium — the most popular pages, keywords, and opportunities for new content. I also studied the data from my own published articles.

Before we get into the data findings, let me quickly recap how to I took the deep dive into the data.

I used software via a website called Ahrefs.com. I used their paid (expensive but worth it) tools to mine data to plan my own content. One of my favorite tools is called “Site explorer.”

Basically, you type in any website URL and — boom — Ahrefs unloads a ton of valuable information about the website.

I’ve used this tool on my personal website, on competing websites, and on websites that produce content similar to what I like to write.

Here’s what I looked at on Medium.com:

• Most popular pages (these pages get the most web visitors per month of any page on Medium)
• Most popular keywords (these keywords get the highest volume of traffic)
• Content Gap (opportunities for new content that is likely to perform well)

3 Money-Making Lessons From My Data Deep Dive

I love data, so I was excited to dive into the information behind Medium.com. On the screenshot above, you can see that Medium has a high Domain Ranking of 94 and an Ahrefs Rank of 72.

That means Medium is an established and credible website that Google trusts. This is very good news to us Medium writers.

Why? It means that the articles we write are more likely to rank higher in Google search. Although getting external traffic doesn’t make us money right away, increased eyeballs on our work is a good thing.

Some of the eyeballs might turn into paying Medium Partner Program members within 30 days of reading our article. When they do, we can get a commission.

As I mentioned earlier, during my data deep dive, I looked at top pages, organic keywords, and gaps in content.

The results were as instructive as they were fascinating:

Top pages

1. Medium.com
2. ♕ ✦ — • Symbols for Social Media• — ☮✌
3. Stop Saying “Backslash” While Reading URLs, You Nincompoop
4. The Man Kept Alive Against His Will
5. Informative Speech Topics for 2019: Make a wise choice
6. Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life Might Just Help You Live a More Fulfilling Life
7. How to Unblur Course Hero Documents
8. 444 Meaning: What To Do If You Keep Seeing This Number
9. ↳➦ ➜ ➼🔝💘Arrow Symbols (Copy and Paste) ⇢
10. How to Give a Blowjob He’ll Never Forget

Here are a few interesting takeaways:

• The number one page is Medium.com. No surprises there.
• Two of the top 10 stories are about symbols.
• One is about numbers (and, really, numbers are symbols, too).
• If you read the stories, you’ll see that five (or 50%) of the stories are clearly how-to articles.
• 50% of the top 10 articles were published in publications.
• 80–90% are informative.
• One story is clearly about sex (#10)

If you broaden your search to the top 50 stories, five of those stories are about sex or sexuality.

Top organic keywords

1. Medium
2. Hisashi ouchi
3. Ikigai
4. Microsoft 365
5. Blow jobs
6. Informative speech topics
7. 444 meaning
8. Calendar 2019
9. Monster anime
10. How to unblur course hero

Here are a few interesting takeaways:

• At least three of these articles are clearly connected to Japan or Japanese culture.
• At least 3 of these keywords are related to technology.
• One is related to sex.
• You can use these same keywords to write completely original articles.

Content gaps

During my research, I looked at the top domains competing with Medium, what keywords those domains ranked for, and especially those keywords for which Medium itself does not currently rank in the top ten search results on Google.

Those are the content gaps.

What is important here is to find the content gaps and then write articles that fill those gaps.

Here are ten keywords where there are content gaps:

1. Furlough
2. JK Rowling
3. Sex toys
4. Ashley madison
5. Imposter syndrome
6. Emily Ratajkowski
7. 9/11
8. Seal
9. You]
10. Blockchain

Now for the takeaways:

• You can use these content gaps to write 100% original articles.
• I definitely recommend that you run a Google Search on any topics that interest you to research the top 10 Google results, average article length, and searcher intent.

Three money-making lessons

After my deep dive into Medium data, I came away with three lessons that I want to share with you.

1. Write informative articles on the topics of technology, dating, sex.
2. Write 100% original articles on the most popular keywords on Medium.
3. Write articles to fill Medium’s content gap.

Write Smarter Using Medium Dashboard Data

Another step I took was to study the story data from my personal Medium dashboard. Of course, this isn’t rocket science — many other writers have suggested something similar.

But it has really worked for me so far.

I studied which articles seemed to do well, and I have focused on replicating those kinds of articles.

After the first few weeks, it was very clear which topics were working for me (see screenshot above):

• 2 Science-Based Signs That Your Man Might Actually Cheat On You has earned me $6.40 so far.
• 13 Absolutely Hilarious Things People Have Actually Said While Having Sex has earned me $6.00 so far.
• Talk Nerdy to Me: The Scientific Reasons You are Attracted to Intelligence has earned me $2.92 so far.

So it’s very clear that articles on relationships and sex have been my highest earners so far.

These are not crazy numbers, but they have tripled in the last few weeks.

In case you are curious about analyzing or reading those articles, here they are:

Here are a few important takeaways:

• Consider writing about dating, relationships, and sex.
• Study your story analytics to find out what stories work best for you.
• Publish your stories in publications (all of my best-earning stories were published in publications).
• When you find a topic that works for you, double down on it. Write many other articles related to that same topic.

Build an Epic Community

Lastly, I can’t overemphasize the importance of building an authentic community of mutual support.

The main way I have started to grow my community is to join Facebook Medium groups like the ones listed below:

• Medium Writers and Bloggers
• Medium Writers Lounge
• Medium Writing
• Medium Writer’s Boost

After joining, I engaged with other members of the group by reading their Medium stories, clapping, highlighting, and following them. I also posted my own Medium articles and invited other members of the groups to read them.

What matters most is to authentically engage, support other Medium writers, and write the very best articles that you can.

I have found that interacting in these Medium groups is fun, personally satisfying, and helps to give my articles an initial boost on Medium.

5 Money-Making Lessons Review

Since this has been a longer article, here is a recap of the lessons I used to triple my earnings on Medium in the last 30 days:

1. Write informative articles on the topics of technology, dating, and sex.
2. Write 100% original articles on the most popular keywords on Medium.
3. Write articles to fill Medium’s content gap.
4. Write articles based on the data in your personal Medium dashboard.
5. Build a mutually supportive community by joining and engaging in Medium groups on Facebook.

I hope these lessons help you earn even more money on Medium!

While you are here, please check out my other articles on making money on Medium:

I also write about writing at www.WritingBeginner.com