How to Earn More than $1,000 a Month with Only 140 Medium Stories

Not every story you write will earn money every week, but that’s OK

I want to point to your stats a minute, because if you’re a new Medium writer (or a frustrated, seasoned one), you might freak-out when you click your Wednesday payment results.

As of this writing, I’ve got 531 Medium stories published.

On a typical Wednesday, I only earn money from 140 of them. And some of those payouts are 3 cents for a full month. This is normal. This also means that only 26% of my writing earns a single penny, while 74% of my stories earn NOTHING.

Yep, nothing.

…and I still consistently earn four-figures a month from my writing.

Why this doesn’t bother me: I’ve got stories I wrote a year ago that still earn money, racking-up $500+ per story. I wrote them once. Readers loved them. The old stories continue to get traction, or a related story starts linking to them.

The interesting part is that the good-earners aren’t always the same stories.

This is the great news. Where you might’ve written a high-performing piece which lost traction quickly, six months later it’ll show up again and start earning.

Don’t focus on the outcome. Focus on the process

You don’t own Medium. You don’t control Medium. As much as you’d like to write about Medium, you can’t control the final earning potential of your stories.

There are so many writers, so many genres, and multiple ways to suggest articles, the best we an do is control our writing process.

If you want to earn more money from your Medium stories, you need to develop a work process that fits your life, and keep showing up. Every day. The process is what separates those who make money on Medium versus those who want to make money on Medium.

I write every day. I publish almost every day.

This is the process. I sit behind the keyboard knowing the story I’m about to write may either fall into the 26% that earn, or the 74% that don’t earn. I have no control over the outcome, so I don’t let it bother me.

I do the best I can. I try to help my readers learn something new with each story. And I try to help writers create work that people want to read, and help sell more of that work once it’s written.

…there’s no “I will make X by the end of the year,” written on a sticky note, pasted to my monitor.

Those kinds of goals will drive you insane, because you can’t control the outcome, only the process. It’s best to develop a publishing schedule that works for you and make sure you follow it, religiously.

This is how your grow your Medium income.

Don’t let your old stories die

I realize I just said I don’t worry about the 76% of my writing that doesn’t earn a penny. But I do make sure I scroll through my entire list with every story I publish.

By keeping your older work in rotation, you help build yourself a self-promoting back-catalog.

Medium can’t show all your stories all the time. Every writer in a category is competing against all the other writers in a category. The home page doesn’t have enough room to display everything I’ve written. I’m one of hundreds of thousands of writers.

It’s up to us.

We email our readers and let them know we’re still here to serve them.

We submit to publications and try our hardest to get stories curated (which will also give them a longer life. In the end, the best we can do is follow our personal publishing process (PPP).

When you get after your weekly writing volume with a PPP mindset, the money will come as a byproduct. The money is never the goal. You can’t eat a money and you can’t be a money when you grow up.

We serve the readers of a particular niche and we write our faces-off in the process to ensure we dominate our topic. The old stories are just as important as the new.

Promote your 100+ fan stories more often

This little strategy has helped me a lot, lately. I look at my highest-earning stories (ones with more than 100 fans, not 100 claps). These will earn over $50.

By linking to the high-achievers more often they’ll get promoted on more of your stories and subsequently will be recommended to your readers more often, hence earning you even more money for your best stories.

It might feel like everyone’s read these posts already, but look at the views. Maybe you’ve got 1.5K views on a good-earner. There are millions of people on Medium.

Even a story that earns you $500 will never be seen by 99% of the Medium population. Don’t worry about promoting the same story a lot. I used to worry about it until I looked at the numbers.

No one is coming to save you. You’ve got to promote your best work yourself.

Trust your process.

Get you butt in the seat.

Find stories that hit a nerve with your readers and write more of those.

The Medium income is the fun money

While it’s great to earn four (or five) figures a month off your Medium posts, there’s a higher (more-automated) level of achievement at play.

Instead of writing for dollars, you can use your Medium stories to build your own tribe — a list you own, not someone else.

The most cost-effective way to build this tribe, is through email.

Email is great for writers, because readers like to read. Email is 99% about the reading. Not every niche is served as well through email, as the readers’ niche.

Build your email list before you need it, not after.

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.