How My $20 Personal Stories Don’t Earn $5,000 Per Month Easily
An analysis of my ascent to earning close to $200 a month
I hate those articles that claim they make $5,000 a month easily by writing about boring subjects that no one else wants to write about.
The writer of the last such story I read had 555 Followers, and even if their story got 500+ reads, I doubt their claim reflects the writer’s monthly earnings. It’s manipulation and lying.
If you’re going to make claims … show us a screenshot of your earnings.
I did the math: One of my eight-minute stories with 150 reads has earned me $13 … and if you times this number by four, you get about $50 for a story with 500 reads. This means it takes 100 $50 stories to earn $5000 a month.
That doesn’t sound easy — or very realistic.
I want to share a more honest analysis of my top-earning story so far to give a more realistic and honest portrait of the earning potential of your articles on an individual story and monthly basis.
Three P’s to Earn $ on Medium
Not long ago, I read Richard Armstrong’s story, “In Five Months, I Went from Coffee Money to $300 a Month on Medium.” He gives an honest account of how he’s earning $300-a-month and the realistic amount of effort it took to get there.
Here are the three P’s — Practice, Patience, and Production — that Richard used to inch his way towards from the $100, $200, and $300 a month club in his first five months as a writer and three other suggestions:
- Find a niche.
- Write for publications in your niche.
- Write with a positive spin.
I’ve been following Richard’s advice by writing stories related to my three niches — parenting, neurodiversity, and memoir— to make it into the $150 a month club in my third month on Medium. I estimate I wrote about 50 stories to reach that income — many refurbished from a past Word Press blog.
My highest earning story
The rest of this story is about my highest-earning story on Medium so far, and you can see if a writer with 695 Followers (me) can earn $5,000 a month easily:
My story, “How I Learned About PDA,” has the 3 Ps of Richard’s $300-a-month club elements. I wrote it for one of my niches (neurodiversity) for the publication Artfully Autistic, and I have written 14 articles on neurodiversity since my son is autistic and developed regular readers.
It has been a slow burn for my story to reach the $20 plateau, mostly from linking to stories on subjects that have the same target audience.
Here is some more analysis of my $20.26 story:
Data analysis
You can see from the screenshot the number of reads (111) and average reading time (four minutes, 35 seconds in the previous screenshot) needed to reach a $20 story. It was a seven-minute story, so the average reader read three-fourths of my story.
I’ve learned a five-minute read is the sweet spot for stories — unless my story is so captivating readers will want to keep reading. I consider anything over 40% view-to-read ratio to be good since reading is a subjective experience.
The screenshot below shows about half of the views (and half of the earnings) came after the week the story was published in Artfully Autistic. And the rest came over two months as a result of frequent backlinks to my story.
The formula for good stories
I think the formula for a high-earning story is simple: Write a good story. My $20 story is part of the memoir I’m writing and I revised it 10 or 15 times before I submitted it to a publication.
It’s not all about the money either: I love comments from people telling me it was the first time they’d heard of Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), a little-known subtype on the autism spectrum diagnosed only in the UK.
Some people said it helped them see the traits in their kids or themselves, and that’s what I love about writing on Medium is my stories have a real impact.
Final thought
I think the extra effort on writing a catchy title and the meaningful story is what gets writers more reads, but we all sometimes forget this because as content creators we can fall into the trap of writing like for a Content Mill.
I know I did not have this attitude for my $20 story and, as a result, hopefully, my $20 story will turn into a $30 story as it gets more reads.
My plan going forward is to keep putting my head down, be keyboard happy and keep writing without being in a rush, and to remember the suggestions from my friend, Richard Armstrong, in the $300-a-month club.
Niche down. Write for publications. Be positive.
I also pay close attention to my stats to see which stories to link at the end of my stories or which to revise a title/opening paragraphs if they perform badly.
I just revised the title to a story three times. It still only got a 20% view-to-read ratio, but it was fun trying to increase the reads — and I’ll keep experimenting.
And I’ll keep writing: You have to write a lot to increase your earnings on Medium.
Thanks for reading my story.
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Or check out my YouTube video on a common writing problem.
