How to Earn Your Way to that First $900 Month on Medium (Faster)

A couple small tweaks in your writing process will have you earning more, quick

The Medium Partner Program can be a fantastic side-income stream for writers willing to go the distance. It can also be a hamster wheel of typing (with little gain) if you attack the process the wrong way.

I earn a consistent four-figures a month with Medium, and I’ve done it since my third month on the platform.

While Medium has changed a lot in the last year, there are some self-marketing fundamentals that will help you get more exposure, regardless of the algorithm.

Here are some guidelines that have worked well for me:

1. Don’t count on Medium to promote your work. They’ve made it very clear they want to feature the in-house publications the most (just look at the top of the page). This is similar to assuming Amazon will promote your book for you. Not gonna happen. But that’s OK if we know the game will be played this way.
2. Stay in your lane. Try to choose a niche (or voice… or both) early and stick with your decision. If we read one article by you, we want to know we can return for another one and feel the same way.
3. Curation matters for long-term exposure, but not as much in the first couple days of publishing. Once you build a big-enough following, your own readers will push your article along, over the first couple days. If this story doesn’t get curates, maybe the next one will. Keep writing. Curation is a bit of voodoo magic. I’ve found that articles published under publications are more-likely to get curated than rogue stories.
4. Your titles are (almost) as important as the article. Medium knows clicks matter. If your title is weird you won’t get clicked, so you won’t get curated either. Put real effort into your titles. They don’t have to be click-bait, but they MUST be click-friendly. If we don’t understand exactly what your story is about, you need a new title. Period.
5. Write a lot. Making your first $900 a month on Medium is no spectator sport. Most writers earn less than $50 a month. You don’t want to be most writers. This involves a publishing plan you can stick with, over time.

Keep old stories alive

Medium wants the new stuff. Most of the old stories in your pile won’t earn a penny. If you want to keep your old content alive, you’ve got to promote it yourself.

Whether you keep an email list and remind your readers of your best stories, or you link to your best stuff inside your new stuff (as I do in all my stories), you can keep your articles alive and earning if you remind readers to check them out.

The homepage of Medium doesn’t contain that many stories. There are hundreds of thousands of writers on Medium. If each writer created ten stories a month, there would be over three million new stories a month.

This is why most writers earn pennies.

It’s your job to promote your work.

Want to know how to make those cool link-boxes to your old posts?

1. Go to the story you want to link to, and copy the web address off the top of the article.
2. Post the link where you want it, in the new article.
3. Hit enter. This step is important. Medium will make the cool link card for you.

Don’t go too crazy with the links to other stories. I like to keep it around 3–4 per article. I’ve seen some writers bunch them all at the bottom. This looks like crap and gives your reader too many choices, so she’ll probably pick none.

Write stories that solve a problem for the reader

Sure, your rant might make you feel better as a writer (I do them sometimes), but what did it do for the reader? If your story doesn’t solve your reader’s problem (or take her on a transformation from where she is now to where she wants to be), you won’t get a lot of traffic.

There are problems in every niche. Including yours. Solve them. Get clicked.

Show us how to escape our current problem: I don’t make a hot nickel on Medium

Show us how to transform our situation and arrive at a new, better place: Here’s how to earn $900 a month on Medium

No, you don’t have to write how to make money on Medium posts. Those are just reading candy. These stories are never curated anyway.

You can earn real money with your well-researched post about the dangers of laundry soap. Or that one about how pet turtles bring you 10X more happiness than pet cats.

But you need to solve a problem we actually have.

If we don’t have the problem (or we can’t see a purpose in your solution) we won’t read, and we definitely won’t clap your story.

Use your stats

Look at your past stories. Review the stats. Look at the topics that paid well (and those that didn’t). Write more of the stuff that pays. Write less of the stuff that doesn’t.

Look at your post timing.

Supposedly there are fewer than 50 curators who must read all the stuff we cram into the Medium gullet every day. The time of day you publish matters. Experiment with your timing. Look into publishing in the middle of the night (where you live), because it’s the middle of the morning for your other readers.

I’m not saying timing will solve all your problems. It won’t. But think about the middle of the day when everyone’s vomiting their stories. Might not be the best time to bug a curator with 5,000 other stories in the queue.

Although Medium says your post timing doesn’t matter, it’s worth testing in your niche. I think it does (as far as curation goes).

Share your Medium stories on social

…and share them more than once. How long does a Tweet last? Three seconds for most people? You can re-social your old content repeatedly. You never know when someone with a lot of followers will share your story.

Use the friend links when you share on social, so anyone can see them. You won’t get paid for those views, but the added traffic will give your stories Medium juice, which will help your visibility with paid readers.

Social gets spread.

Viral stories earn money (but more-importantly, they earn you email subscribers).

Write every day too. If you don’t keep your momentum going, your readership (and your Medium income will fall). Like it or not, this is the way the game is played.

The longer you keep your momentum, the more readers you’ll earn. Throughout this process, we can double-dip — growing our own platform while earning a nice side income.

If you build your reader’s list now, you’ll have a waiting, rabid audience, ready when you launch your next book.

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.