How to Earn $5 Per Medium Follower, Per Year (or More)
Your reading audience is worth more than you think
This process isn’t magic, but it requires a little pre-planning. Nope, there isn’t some back-door where you can earn more money per follower. There’s no insider’s club. No secret handshake. And no hidden instruction manual that will show you how to earn more money from your Medium following.
In fact, most writers won’t earn much from their direct readership.
The algorithm requires you to get curated if you want to earn many eyeballs from a single story.
While there are single paydays, most of your writing income will be from your cumulative effort. By the end of 2020 I’ll have written more than 1,000 stories on Medium.
Only 8–9% of Medium writers earn $100 a month.
So, how do we get to that $5 per follower number? Maybe you’ve got 400 followers and you’re waiting to break the two-figure mark. I get it. There are many writers in your shoes too.
While I’m not one of the high-earners directly on the platform (although I do pretty well), I’ve learned to leverage the audience I do have — creating additional income streams away from the platform, using the followers I’ve earned on the platform.
Confused yet?
No worries. It’s not too complicated.
With a little creative infrastructure on the back-end, you’ll lose fewer followers to the atmosphere, and maintain them inside your tribe. By giving each follower a valuable reason to stick around (helping them get what they want first), they’ll help you get what you want, later.
Your Medium followers don’t have to be passive observers
Instead of writing and hoping, as most Medium writers do, you can create your own ecosystem to keep all your followers abreast of your work.
Medium won’t show your writing to most of your followers — only a handful. This can get really discouraging if you have a small number of followers. The fewer the fans the fewer people see your story once it’s published — especially if the story isn’t curated.
Now, I am no poster boy for curation.
I’ve been banned from curation due to my aggressive marketing practices (which I’ve done deliberately, so caveat emptor here)
So, we need a consistent way to keep in touch with our following. Not only do we need to publish stories daily, but we’ve also got to remind everyone who loves our work, that we’re still here. We’ve got something new to read, and they should read it now.
Here’s the inside baseball model I use:
- Build an email list with multiple offers inside — Every new subscriber will get a series of valuable, automated emails that earn you money while you sleep (and while you’re awake, too). These don’t have to be your offers either. You can be an affiliate for other peoples’ stuff until you have something of your own writing to sell.
- Start your own Medium publication — This gets you access to letters. Letters allow you to email your email everyone who follows the publication. Basic writers don’t have access to this feature. Letters allow you to double-dip your Medium following. You can promote your latest stories, latest product — whatever. However, any letter you send will also be public for all of Medium to see (until you delete it), so beware.
- Ask people to join your email list in every Medium story — This is the last of the trifecta. Every Medium story will not only earn you income from your followers, through reads, but you’ll also earn a lot more money from these followers on the back-end. These same folks who love your Medium stories, will also buy your work outside the platform.
The dollars per subscriber add-up quickly if you have the right offers in place.
You don’t need a huge course or a ten-thousand-dollar consulting package either.
I’ve got a $29 micro-course that pays all my annual business expenses with just one month of sales. And I’ve got a lot of business expenses.
With email, you can remind people to read your older content (earning money per read), you sell your own writing, and you can earn money from affiliate products.
This is how you boost your income per follower.
The more people you add to your following, the greater your writing income will grow from multiple fronts.
None of this happens without an email list you own
While the Medium letters feature is nice, it’s very limited in abilities. The stats are poor. The letters are public.
If you really want to earn $5 per follower per year (and I believe this is a really good bench-mark to start), you need to use email.
Email isn’t like social media.
Email has sticking power. I’ve got clients who keep my emails for months (or forever), referring back to them multiple times. I’ve had people open the same email 30–50 times. I’ve seen the stats!
You don’t get that kind of engagement with social. While social has an important place, it’s attention span is fleeting. You’ve got minutes or seconds, not months.
Plus, with email, you write them once and they work for you forever. I’ve written emails three years ago and I have readers will respond today, as if I wrote it this morning.
If you want to get on the path to earning $5 per follower, per year (or more) — I’ve got a free email masterclass to help you get started write. It took me two months to make this masterclass, so there’s no fluff here.
The Tribe 1K email masterclass will help you earn your first 1,000 subscribers (or your next 1,000) without spending a hot nickel on ads.
Get your first lesson in minutes.
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.