How to Boost Your Writing Income from Your Medium Stories — a Lot

Start with your end goals and work backwards

For every Medium writer who says they don’t do it for the claps, “the money isn’t important,” and “I’ll write here whether they pay me or not,” is probably not earning much money from their writing on Medium.

I understand the internal pep talk.

I feel your pain too.

I’ve been there and I’ve had the same conversation with myself. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Medium makes great money from your hard work, so there’s no reason to sell yourself short. Writers deserve to get paid too. Wanting to earn a fair wage for your work is not selling-out.

It’s time you earned more money for your writing on Medium.

Here’s the deal — the claps and the reads (not views) write your pay check. If you want to earn as a Medium writer, you’ve got to create content that gets both claps and reads. Period.

The math doesn’t work out evenly. You can create your own little rule. But I like to ignore my views and focus on the fans stats. Not total claps, but total fans.

As I said, this is a rough estimate.

Your results will vary.

But a fan is worth about 50 cents, once you ignore all other stats. Remember, your results will vary. But it’s a great way to know the general trajectory of your income in a month (or for an article). I cut my total fans in half and that’s about how many dollars I’ll earn.

If I want to earn more, I write more until I earn enough fans to achieve a certain income level.

No, you can’t decide this on day one.

You will build your readership over time. If you’re new to Medium, the platform won’t find you for awhile. Remember, there are hundreds of thousands of people competing for attention, here.

Some posts will hit harder than others. When you write a great post with tons of fans, you can throttle-back your writing. If you’ve written all week and you got two fans per post, well — you probably made $6 that week instead of $600.

Time to write more — until you develop a post that hits. This is a numbers game as much as a quality game. One great piece of writing won’t do it. The more content that gets shovel-crammed into Medium, the faster our writing will get lost.

You can use this little rule of thumb to judge a single post, or your entire month.

Want to earn more? Write where the fans are

I go fan-hunting a lot. I do this by choosing different topics inside my niche (not by writing random articles in a bunch of places), writing my face-off, and seeing what sticks. If a certain topic doesn’t resonate, I don’t earn claps.

When I see a topic light-up my stats, you better believe that’s the one where I focus my attention.

I’ve found this isn’t the best place for art pieces. I keep my art elsewhere. Yes, craft matters a lot. Poor grammar and hundreds of spelling errors won’t make for a high-earning story.

Look at the trending stories.

Don’t copy them, that makes your work redundant. But do study the titles — why these posts hit more than others. Look at the subject matter, the tags, and the audience.

There’s also a large bit of luck involved.

The times you post your story matters. You need a lot of engagement in the first hour, or it probably won’t trend as well as you’d like. Experiment with everything, because each writer’s niche is a little different.

Remember that curators are overwhelmed too.

Understand your first few dozen stories are terrible

This is a new platform when you start writing. Even if you’ve written for years. Not all writing translates well to Medium, especially if you’re classically-trained.

I recently got an email from a reader asking if I’d read her unfinished story to make sure it was good enough to post.

I politely declined, because I barely have the time to do my own writing, let alone help edit others. I told her it was a rite of passage — kind of.

Get those first Medium posts out of your system as fast as you can.

Understand what genres get attention and which don’t.

Write those terrible posts, so you can get to the ones that count. You’ll delete plenty of your early ones. If you haven’t you should. Once you get those terrible posts written, you’ll have a few hundred fans.

The money will grow as the fans engage.

You don’t have to write really long posts to earn well

The fans matter the most. You need to collect fans. A five minute post with 200 fans will pay you a lot more than a 20 minute post with more view time, but fewer fans.

Yes, long posts are stickier and easier to get curated, but they take 5x longer to write.

If you want to get your fan quota boosted on a given day, you’ll need to generate more, shorter posts. But don’t write less than four minutes. I think those stories feel phoned-in to me. Take a little more time.

…but the best income will be from your list outside Medium.

If you build your reader’s list now, you’ll have a pre-built, rabid audience ready when you launch your next book (or re-launch your last books). This should be a list you own (instead of relying on social media or some other big-business platform). Tap the link below. Enroll in my Tribe 1K indie email masterclass. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (and your next 1,000) without spending one hot nickel on ads.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Free 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.