How to Earn $100 on Medium by the End of Next Month (Then $200)

Five steps to earn more money from your Medium stories, faster

It hurts me when I read about Medium writers who spend an entire month in the trenches, only to post they’ve earned $1.62 and they’re optimistic about the future. Yes, everyone starts from zero. The first month or so on the platform feels like you’re writing to an empty room (you are). But we can do better.

Earning on Medium doesn’t have to be out of reach.

But there are a few things you’ll need to change if you want to start earning Medium money above the change-in-the-couch-cushions level. I know I don’t want to write for pennies. I doubt you do too.

There are five things you’ll need to do if you want to win your first $100 month on Medium (and grow that income the next month). Part of this will take some soul-searching. The writing you want to do may not always be the writing readers want to read.

While I can’t guarantee you’ll make $100 using this method (you might make a lot more) — I can tell you your tribe will grow, you’re readership will follow, and eventually, you’ll make some significant money.

Medium is growing and changing, rapidly.

While we can’t control the outcome, we can control our workflow. Using these five steps you’ll get closer to your first $100 month. Next month will be even better.

Five steps to your first $100 month on Medium:

1. Do you homework —

You can’t sit and write about anything, then assume other folks will want to read it. There’s a huge variety of writing on Medium, but not all stories are created equally.

Look at the stories with the most views.

Look at the top writers.

How do these folks craft their stories?

How do their titles read?

Are there any common themes among the popular stories?

Remember, there are hundreds of thousands of people all writing for the same eyeballs. If you don’t write stories that people want to read (on Medium), you won’t grow your income.

2. Plant your flag —

Your writing should stand for something. Even if you write for an audience of three to get started. If you want to build a large tribe of repeat readers (and you will want to do this), you’ll need to give us a reason to come back.

What’s your expertise?

What do you know that we don’t?

What are the best stories you can share with us that will motivate us to choose you for our reading today?

If you write about horses today, space tomorrow, and mental health on Sunday, we have no idea what you stand for. We might choose your stories occasionally, but if you don’t have a soapbox we understand, we’ll find a writer who does.

3. Write your face-off —

If you want to earn serious money on Medium, you’ve got to write every day. Or almost every day. There’s too much content. If you want yours to be seen, and linked-to by other stories, you’ve got to write until it hurts. Then write a little more.

Post at least one story a day, every day, during your first month.

If you want to do better, post one in the morning and one in the evening.

If you want to make this your full-time job, you could be looking at 3–5 per day until you build a large following.

You’ve got to get Medium’s attention — to your work — away from all the others.

The good news is you’ll become a much faster writer. Give yourself a daily deadline and hit it — like it’s your job. Because it is. If you want to write full-time someday, developing the discipline on Medium is a great place to start.

Your subject lines matter a lot. Write one, then write ten more. Pick number nine or ten as the one you choose for a title.

Use popular tags. These matter too.

You can’t control if you’ll get curated (which matters a lot), but you can give the curators the best product with which to make a curation decision.

4. Track your progress —

Write more (a lot more) of what works and stop writing what doesn’t.

If you want to write commercially, you write for the reader, not yourself. Self-writing can be done in a journal. Get all the train-of -thought stuff dumped from your head before you hit the public writing.

Don’t become obsessed with your stats to the point it hurts your writing.

However, your stats tell you if you’ll get paid or not. You need reads and claps. Views don’t pay the bills.

Look at the types of writing you post. What types of stories get the most claps? Are there types that get views but no claps? Are you writing stories that interest people?

Are you giving us new information, or something we’ve read 100 times elsewhere?

Medium readers have finite time. They scroll around to learn something new. If you don’t give them something new, they won’t reward you with engagement and claps. And they sure won’t come back for more tomorrow.

5. Don’t let your best stories die —

Link to your old work inside your new work.

Re-post your old stories on social.

If you have a few pieces that don’t do well, let them go. Maybe they’re not being read for a reason. I use to try and revive failed pieces, but all I did was spend a lot of time linking to posts no one wanted to read.

Look at your results.

Link to the best stories in your stats.

Keep scrolling to the bottom and link to them in your new stories, occasionally. Medium won’t promote your old work forever. I’ve got over 500 stories, and maybe half don’t earn a penny each month.

The platform likes novelty and high-performing pieces.

Medium will also link to your old stories and the bottom of your new stories. The more great work you write, the more fuel you’ll have for Medium’s search algorithm.

You want readers to find you everywhere they look.

Dominate your niche with your great ideas. We won’t be able to ignore you anymore. We’ll open and read your stories.

Treat this writing like a business

Sure, the one-off money we earn here is nice, but there’s more money to be had away from the Medium platform.

When you treat your commercial writing like a business, you build a platform for yourself — a platform you own — that earns you money while you’re not writing too.

We accomplish this platform by building an email list.

No one can take away your list. Even after Medium is long-gone and turned into something else.

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.