Earn Money on Medium-How I Tripled My Medium Earnings From $19.20 to $58.67 in Five Days

Learn how to earn money on Medium the quick and easy way by following my steps.

In order not to waste your time, I am going to layout the boilerplate information up front before diving into how I learned all of this and the full step-by-step guide of my process.

Takeaways That You Can Use in Your Own Writing

• Write headlines that show personal experience and how to achieve something like How I Biked 1,000-miles by Listening to Audio Books.
• Find the biggest publication in your niche and read their most recent articles to learn voice, format, and what the readers engage with before submitting to them.
• Publish multiple times with a big publication to create a wave of views.
• Share your articles widely and at varying times throughout the day.
• Make sure the title and subtitle of your article have a clear summary and takeaway for the reader.
• Write content that gives some sort of value to the reader, so they can walk away and say they learned something.
• Read your readers' work, encouraging them to read more of your work.
• Publish at least two articles a day at varying times in varying publications.
• Spend your off days writing your content so that you can focus on getting the story draft finished without worrying about reading, stats, or anything else.
• Have the days when you publish, share, and submit be different than your writing days so that you can put more effort and energy into getting eyes on your work.

Introduction and This Quest to $100/Day

For the past six weeks, I’ve been charting my weekly journey on Medium. Mainly, so that I have a documented record of the steps I took if I need to come up with a new strategy. Having these articles gives me an idea of what worked and what didn’t.

When it comes to any sort of endeavor whether creative or otherwise, it’s smart to keep a record of where you’ve been and where you want to go.

Like for instance, I realized two days is the max to go without writing on here. After that, earnings and reader views take a major drop. Sharing posts once in the morning and later in the day drives new engagement and boosts stats.

There are tons I’ve learned over the past six weeks of publishing and experimenting. It’s all to get to the end goal of making $100/day on this site. I know — barely 10% make $100 in a month and even less make $1,000 in a month.

But I’m a motivated writer — I like to test and push myself because I’m confident that I can achieve what I put my mind and abilities too. Hell, even if I don’t achieve it, I’ll still have a backlog of tons of stories published on the web for people to find or that I can compile into a book.

So, this whole endeavor is a win-win for me.

Essentially, I’m a professional writer with tons of credits off Medium like in Tor Nightfire, Discover Pods, Rue Morgue, and more. Writing and editing are how I feed my cat. It is my job. Like all successful full-time writers, I aim to have multiple streams of revenue — Medium is one of them.

I’ve had Medium for about a year, but only actually started trying on this platform the last few days of November, which garnered me about $4 and almost 200 followers. In December, I continued experimenting with Medium and ended upping my earnings by 1,000% to just under $40 and ~400 new followers.

My goal for January is to make at least $93 or $3/day and get 1,000 followers. In my efforts to reach those goals, I’ve tried two ways. The first way failed me. Yeah, I was able to make almost $20 in under a week not publishing a lot, but I lost reader engagement. My earnings weren’t anywhere near what they could have been if I had only applied this strategy at the beginning of the month.

Where I’ve Been in This Journey

It’s important to mark your successes and failures for examination later. In the month in a half I’ve been on this road to $100/day, I’ve figured out the keys to curation, aligned my action with my intent, and gained over 800 followers.

It took experimenting and learning something new every week about Medium and reader trends. If something doesn’t work, I examine and tweak it. That’s been the general basis for my success.

The first few pieces on this site looked nothing like this and that was less than two months ago. In fact, they looked a lot like the articles by the people who wonder why their posts aren’t getting read or curated. Instead of staying in that area of failing, I adapted.

First I started upping my output and figuring out how to get eyes on my self-published pieces. While pushing out content, I was also consuming content — specifically articles from Medium about Medium. I wanted to understand how Medium distributed its content and which type of content is favored.

Like many of you, I also read articles by writers like this one where they talk about what they did to earn more. They weren’t always as helpful as the guides Medium puts out, but they gave me insight into how the top earners thought and operated.

It was about ROI, return on investment. Many of them knew that writing on Medium could be a bust, but only if they let it. Time and time again these top earners talked about persistence and sticking to publishing on a consistent basis to earn a following and money. I used that type of thinking to continue releasing content and publishing with publications that reached the audiences I wanted to touch.

What I Did To Triple My Earnings

I set out last week with the hopes of making up the loss in earnings that I felt by not posting consistently. My strategy was to post every day at least once and to share two posts each day in groups and on my social channels—once in the morning and again later in the day—and publish in top publications. I changed up my reading to focusing on my favorite writers and reading the work of people who were engaging with my stories in some way.

Since you can self-publish on Medium, I knew that I wouldn’t have any trouble publishing or posting two times a day, but getting into top publications is a bit more tricky. Luckily, as I’ve mentioned above, I’m a professional full-time writer off of Medium, so getting into publications is what I do.

I aimed for Better Marketing because they have a huge audience of readers within my niche, and even though I’ve been rejected from there in the past, I knew that I was close to breaking in.

How did I know?

The more you write, publish, edit, read, and in general grow as a writer, the more you become sensitive to things within your writing. I knew that for me the reason I wasn’t breaking into the publication had to do with the titles, takeaways, and voice of my pieces.

I knew the content was solid, but making it work for Better Marketing was where I needed to knuckle down. So, I did. I spent a few minutes one morning reading through their recent articles, paying particular attention to the ones that were performing well. Through reading the articles, I got a sense of the format and what type of takeaways the readers resonated with.

I also noticed while reading that the top articles in the publication at the time all had similar titles: How I …, What I Learned…, etc. Each one had I or Me in the title along with some outrageous earning or publishing stat. Sometimes they were attached to uncommon factors like How I Made $5,000 by Brushing My Teeth.

That’s not a real article to my knowledge, but the sentiment is still the same. Show the reader you’re an expert by using personal pronouns like I or my. Give the reader an interesting and unique factor to cling to like brushing your teeth to earn money, and show the value that the reader is going to get from the article by have information in the subtitle and including a how-to type of heading.

So, after crafting my article and reworking it to look more like a Better Marketing article, I changed the title and subtitle of my piece.

Better Marketing accepted that article and it is my best performing for the week and to date. Within the first 24 hours, it received over 300 views.

That made up for most of the earning loss that I suffered during the first week of January. The majority of views are from internal sources, so even though I shared it through my normal channels, it’s performing well on its own without me marketing it.

I wholly believe that it has everything to do with the title because even though it has a high view and engagement rate, the other stats aren’t as high as they should be with that many eyes on the piece. For example, it only has a 35% read ratio. That tells me that people were drawn to it, but fell away once they got into the article.

My theory is that I don’t get to what the reader wants to know fast enough. I tend to write introductions that let people know where I’m coming from and who I am. I’ve been criticized about this before, but I like letting the reader know that the information they are getting is from a credible source vs. some random writer on the internet. Moving forward, though, I am going to change this.

With my newfound grasp on the Better Marketing publishing strategy and a personal note from the editor to submit some work from my personal site, I submitted another article almost immediately. I didn’t want to have two similar-sounding articles, so I kept the general formula but changed some things around.

Once it was published, I followed my posting and sharing strategy of going to Medium Facebook groups and sharing it on there where appropriate. I only had to do this a little bit, because like I said, it performs well on its own.

That article was published almost a day later in Better Marketing and also received high engagement.

This piece and one other that I published on Friday with P.S. I Love You were recommended across the Medium platform. From my very loose understanding of recommended vs. curated, curated gets your story shared within a topic but recommended gets your story shared to more members in their daily reads and such.

If that is wrong, someone tell me.

My worst performing post was a flash fiction piece that is a reprint from an old story I sold.

My fiction doesn’t usually net big earnings or engagement, but it is what I love to write, so I share it on here. This article didn’t perform well for a variety of reasons like it not having an informative enough title, not being curated, and it’s a bit morbid.

To be honest, I didn’t push this article half as much as I pushed my other two top-earning ones because I knew that it wasn’t a story for everyone. The people who did read it were engaged the whole way through, however. So, I take this story as a big win even though not many people read it.

Together each of the nine articles I published worked to help me triple my earnings. It wasn’t magic that led to my success but studying the market and readers. Then taking that knowledge and using it to shape the pieces I already had. It was also the fact that I published nine high-quality pieces that I put time and effort into promoting.

In Closing

I read about a lot of writers on this site. Often, I come across the frustrated writer who has spent months if not years trying to earn reads or money from Medium. The common thing I see is that they refuse to experiment or engage with anyone or anything on the site. Many writers think that simply landing a spot in a top publication will get them the glory.

Sadly, that’s wrong. Tons of stories at top publications fall away into nothingness without more than one or two readers. There are other writers who say you have to write and publish a new story every day to get views. Many people who do that are writing into a dark hole where no one sees or cares about their writing.

The way to success and high earnings on this site isn’t a one-way system. It’s a multifaceted system that takes engaging with others, writing clear high-quality content, publishing and sharing on a consistent basis, and the willingness to try new things.

The important factors for success

• Write headlines that show personal experience and how to achieve something like How I Biked 1,000-miles by Listening to Audio Books.
• Find the biggest publication in your niche and read their most recent articles to learn voice, format, and what the readers engage with before submitting to them.
• Publish multiple times with a big publication to create a wave of views.
• Share your articles widely and at varying times throughout the day.
• Make sure the title and subtitle of your article have a clear summary and takeaway for the reader.
• Write content that gives some sort of value to the reader, so they can walk away and say they learned something.
• Read your readers' work, encouraging them to read more of your work.
• Publish at least two articles a day at varying times in varying publications.
• Spend your off days writing your content so that you can focus on getting the story out without worrying about reading, stats, or anything else.
• Have the days when you publish, share, and submit be different than your writing days so that you can put more effort and energy into getting eyes on your work.

Moving Forward

Stop writing yourself into a rut. If you want to be one of the people who doubles or triples their earnings, change the way you do things and take risks.