How to Earn $2,000 Per Month Writing Medium Stories for One Niche

By focusing on the people you serve, you can earn great side-income

It’s Wednesday. The happiest day for Medium writers. This is the day we get to check the stats and see how our previous week of writing earned money. Not all stories will gain traction. But if we write enough of them, our work, in aggregate, can pay our mortgage entirely with Medium stories.

Most writers will burn out before they make the cut.

But not you.

You’ve got the drive to start from nothing, and earn your way up the Medium food chain. Although this kind of writing is hard work, it’s fulfilling work.

You get instant feedback from your tribe.

Your niche will teach you what you should write more of and stories you should avoid in the future. Your niche will help you grow to be the writer you want to be.

Maybe two-grand a month isn’t a lot to you. Maybe it’s life-changing.

While only a small handful of writers earn a full-time income from Medium, you can offset most of your living costs, but supporting yourself with Medium stories.

How long will it take to get you to this level? Probably a year’s-worth of consistent, daily effort. You income will grow over time, as you increase your fan-base and spread your message across hundreds of stories.

For reference, I’m up to 628 stories after a little over a year of writing.

I write a lot. Sometimes 3–5 stories a day, because of the lag time required with getting accepted for other publications. Not all of my stories earn money. Some do well. Most do mediocre. But over time they all become tiny little oil wells.

I use the oil well as an analogy, not to diminish your writing, or make any kind of statement that you should only write on Medium for the money.

But you can do well here. The money is a byproduct of all your hard work. Why not be paid well for your writing?

Boost your Medium earnings

I’ll warn you from the get. This is a process. You start by earning nothing and slowing build a following for your work. Not every will enjoy what you write, but that’s fine.

This is why Medium is so great.

There’s such a variety of information here, and the speed at which new content comes to the site, gives everyone an unlimited supply of knowledge.

1. Tone is important —

You don’t have to please everyone, but you need to focus on pleasing enough people so they’ll return for the next story. For example, I tend to be a pessimist. When I’m really rocking and rolling, I’ll come up with some real downers for stories.

No ones wants to have their day rained-on more than it already is. It’s not like your reader comes to your stories to make herself feel worse, when she’s trying to escape her boss by reading at work.

She wants to be uplifted.

She wants to be entertained. She wants to learn stuff so she can quite her job with the dumb boss, that she’s trying to escape.

Think about the tone of your content before you hit publish. No one likes Negative Ned. No matter how cool you feel when you write the story — myself included.

2. Plan to write every. single. day —

Not just Monday-Friday. Not once a week. But every day until you’ve built yourself a serious following.

Remember, Medium gets new stories 24/7/365. You’re competing against hundreds of thousands of content creators from all over the world. Whether you like it or not this is a social media channel.

With that channel comes traction. If you don’t have a constant stream of content to add to the kitty, you’re stats will drop every Monday morning, once you start writing again.

You need to build upward momentum. We gain that momentum by writing a lot.

3. Your audience wants more of the stuff they already like —

Look at your stats. The stories that worked well in the past will work again in the future. Create evergreen content around the behaviors of your tribe.

Maybe you thought you wrote a great story but it flopped. Stop writing stories like that one.

We already know what we want. Give us more of that.

4. Mirror top performers in your niche —

These folks are doing well for a reason. Everything is public on Medium. You can read the comments they make. You can read the comments they receive. You can see how many people clapped for their stories.

There is no reason to try and go it alone here.

You’ve only got so many formatting options. We all must stay withing the publication guidelines. If you try and do this without mirroring (not copying) those who came before you, it will be a long road.

5. Show that you know what you’re talking about —

If you want to position yourself as the go-to writer in your niche, give us valuable, actionable information we can take back to our caves and apply in our own lives.

We return the writers who know their stuff.

We ignore the writers who don’t offer anything new to the table.

Don’t lose your readers

Medium is huge. It’s easy to gain a reader one day, then lose her to a different writer. We need to grow our readership to increase our income.

The best way to avoid losing your readers, is to build your own tribe.

This means you need to create an email list. Like yesterday. But since you can’t start yesterday, today will have to do.

With email, you’ve got a direct way to contact your readers — a straight line of connection you control, not some other platform. There’s nothing scarier than having all your income tied to someone that can turn it off overnight.

When we own our traffic we own our business.

The income you can earn from your email list can dwarf anything you’ll earn from Medium.

You’ve built a platform of people who know, like, and trust you.

You provide them with a frequent stream of valuable content they want to read. You ask them what they want. They help you design products to serve their needs.

Writing for Medium is just the beginning. Once you build a tribe, they’ll help support you for life.

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 create 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.