How New Medium Writers Earn $25 Per Story… Even with Few Followers

…and how you can too

As a writer, there’s no better feeling than earning a great side-income from your writing. Even better, making a full-income. While Medium is a lucrative place to make money from your writing, there are some initial hurdles we face when we start.

Everyone starts from zero.

Followers make a big difference in your partner income. New writers don’t always realize this. They spend all their time trying to get published under the big publications, and spend little time building a following.

The problem lies when you publish.

Even if you hit the majors, if you don’t have many followers, you might get traction from a single story, but your attention-getting won’t have staying power until you build an audience.

Audience is everything.

Medium will give your story a boost, once it shows you’ve written something readers connect with, but we’ve got to get the story off the launchpad. And we do that with followers.

But the partner program isn’t everything.

Sometimes you earn pennies per story — or worse — nothing.

It can get real frustrating i you don’t have a back-up plan to ensure you earn money from your stories. Keep reading and I’ll share how new writers can earn $25/story, even if they don’t have much of a following.

$25 per story

This will take some work on your part. The strategy won’t work for everyone, because I can’t control how much you’re willing to put in. But I can say, those who do — win.

This strategy is a mindset shift — away from trading typing time for money.

Instead, we put our writing to work for us. While we might make a little money per story, from the partner program, the real money comes from what happens later.

Instead of looking at a Medium story as an end-goal, the story becomes a calling card.

Every story you’ll write is an opportunity to earn a new fan — a member of your tribe. Your tribe is everything to your writing business. These are the people you serve. This is your work that matter most.

I use a three-step process to ensure I earn approximately $25 per story.

Some of the money comes from the partner program. The better stories earn much more than $25 on their own. But the real gold is what happens at the bottom of every story.

The invitation.

I call this my Easy Invite.

I invite my best readers to join my tribe.

Your gather your tribe onto an email list you own — away from Medium. Right now, Medium own your follows. You can’t take them with you. You can’t contact them directly (unless you own a publication), and you definitely can’t contact all of them once you publish a new story.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s start with the three-step process:

1. Spend five minutes a day growing your Medium following (see story below).
2. Publish every day. Write specific stories that serve your niche. This helps cement you as a leader of your tribe. You write stories for the tribe and no one else. This helps you gather the people you wish to serve for the long-term.
3. Attach an Easy Invite to the bottom of every story. Your easy invite is the low-barrier offer to entice readers to join your tribe.

Once a new reader joins our email list, not only do we have the opportunity to provide them great value and develop a relationship — we also have the chance to sell our writing — automatically.

With email we can contact everyone in our tribe. There’s no throttle, as with Medium and other social sites.

I would not be surprised if Medium added a mechanism for writers to pay to reach their full audience in the future. They haven’t yet, but I’ll bet it’s coming.

Not so with email. It’s the last, great frontier, the most-lucrative app in your pocket, and the most-overlooked. If you set up your welcome sequence correctly, you can easily earn $25 over the life of each story.

We need a tribe… yesterday

If you want to earn at least $25 per Medium story, there’s some back-end work required. We’re talking about building an email list, with all the bells and a frills.

This infrastructure is a lot of work.

Most writers won’t build an email list.

You will, because you understand. You know better. And you want more for yourself and your family.

When we’ve got a tribe we can sell our work — automatically — while we sleep. I call this mailbox money. There’s nothing more fun than waking up to in-box income.

When you write Medium stories that generate leads, you writing works harder for you — allowing you more time to practice your work that matters most — spending less time wasting money on ads and social.

By the way…

I’ve got just the thing for you. I’ve built a 7-day, free, email masterclass called the Tribe 1K. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 (or your next 1,000) readers without spending a hot nickel on ads.

Not only will you gain the ability to start your email list, you’ll also get access to me.

Here’s the link.

Guarantee your seat 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.