How to Earn $500 From a Single Medium Story

5 Steps to a three-figure Medium story

I’ve got a few $500 stories under my wing (even more $300 stories). They don’t come often. Most of my stories are grinders. I peck-away at a topic, make $20 here… $75 there. I try to average at least $30.

But the three-figure stories are special.

We all look at the earnings reports and wonder what it must be like to be the person who earned eight-grand from a single story. While I can’t help you with four-figures (yet), I will tell you how I got my three-figure stories.

There are five key ingredients I believe are essential to a three-figure story.

I’ll share them in a second.

First, we’ve got to set the stage. There’s more research involved. It’s not as much word-count that’s important, however. Some writers feel like the high-earning stories need to be long.

I haven’t found this to be the case, with the old payment method, nor the current one. Most of my higher earners are shorter, but not tiny — around 6 minute reads.

Here’s one of my high-earners that went me-viral:

Here’s another:

…and one more:

None of these stories are long (6–7 minutes), but they fit a series of criteria that may help you earn more from your writing.

Lets get you some three-figure writing too.

Before we start, please understand, these are cumulative earnings. The beauty of these high-earners is their ability to grow over time, with constant, daily reads.

I didn’t earn $500 the week they were released. It could’ve taken three months, or a year to reach three-figures.

But I only had to spend the time to write the story once. And they keep earning for me long after I spent the effort to get the words on the screen.

Think of how well you can do if you get a bunch of these high-earners on your shelf.

5 Steps to a three-figure Medium story

1. You must get the story curated — Curation is the key to a long-life story. If your story doesn’t get curated you’ll have a long road ahead of you. Yes, I’m now banned from curation, so my high-earning stories are from the good-old days. This doesn’t mean you can’t earn great money from non-curated stories, but they’ll live a lot longer if they are. My non-curated stories rarely live longer than a couple weeks unless I force them with a lot of cross-linking.
2. The story must be easy to share with a wide-audience — Three-figure stories get shared a lot — hundreds or thousands of times. This leads to Google finding them as well. Not only will you get shares, but your story will show-up in search results. This means you need your keywords in the title and throughout.
3. The story should be based on a topic that’s already popular — Three-figure stories are ones that people already love. These are themes we’re searching for, ideas we want more of, and variations on a common theme, already in the popular culture. If you want a three-figure story it’s harder to write one we’ve never heard of. These are hard-hitting, valuable, and transformative.
4. Link the story dozens of times in your newer stories to keep it alive longer — You need to tell the others if you want your story to spread. Not only should you share it multiple times on social, but you’ve also got to keep linking to it to keep the story alive. I’ve linked to my top-earners dozens, maybe even a hundred times. I lost count. Don’t worry about being repetitive. There are millions of readers and only a tiny sliver of them will read your work at a time.
5. You were passionate about the story when you wrote it — This is crucial and often ignored. When you’re passionate about the topic, the passion leaks into your writing. We can literally feel it when you scroll through your work. If you’re not so excited about the topic, or your trying to make a fat buck, we’ll smell it in your word choice. When you phone it in, we know. Three-figure stories ooze passion. They don’t have to be perfect, just wrapped in a blanket of care.

No matter what, start building your email list

Sure, the Medium income is cool. There’s nothing better than some quick-cash you earned from your own labors.

But Medium-writing alone can be a bit of a drag. Most days we trade typing time for money. When we don’t write we don’t get paid. The stories drop-off quick and we’ve got to grind-out new ones to keep the money flowing.

This is why we need email.

As a commercial writer or creator, if you don’t own your traffic you don’t own your business.

Here, Medium owns your readers. You can’t take followers with you if you leave, the platform folds, or you get kicked-out.

Medium is also 100% in control of your money.

Sure, it feels like we’ve got a little control, but our income is up to the algorithm and the platform who owns it. They can take away our payments any time they want.

Not so when you own your platform.

Email will help you sell your work automatically, while you sleep. It’s a fantastic added source of funds.

If you’d like to start your email list today (or tomorrow), I’ve got a hand-crafted email masterclass for you. I call it the Tribe 1K. Past students include New York Times bestselling authors.

I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 readers (or your next 1,000) without spending a hot nickel on ads.

Enrollment is free.

Guarantee your seat today before I change my mind.

Tap the link.

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.