How to Make $500 Per Month Writing Medium Stories in 2020

You’ve got competition, but this is an achievable goal

Here we are. We’ve tossed another perfectly good year of writing in the cabinet. We’ve got a big decision to make in 2020. Will we cave or will we persevere?

Medium is getting better/overwhelmed/more-strict/and will offer a greater opportunity to writers as the platform grows. Medium is still small compared to the size of other social platforms.

I may be in the minority, but I lump Medium in with the likes of Facespace, Tweeter, and Linkedout. The platform owns the traffic. If we play nice we get a little piece of said traffic trickled to our stories via a magic algorithm.

If we don’t play nice, we don’t get traffic. Period.

Doesn’t matter if you write about politics or pottery, writing or rights. Medium holds the eyeballs and its our job as writers to tickle the algorithm into diverting a few towards our stories.

How?

In a second I’ll show you what I do. It works for me. It might work for you too. But my method is not the only way, for sure. There are better ways to play nicely on the platform.

Whether you pitch stories to publications, go it alone, or build your own publishing empire, there are five things you need to do with your content if you want to make $500 a month in 2020.

…let’s get started.

Five things you need to earn $500 per month in 2020

1. You need a drop-dead, direct, grabbing title —

This isn’t your grandma’s newspaper. You get a tenth of a second or so to make or break your reader’s attention.

Your story is in competition with tens of thousands of others.

If you make it to the homepage, or a tagged page, even there you’ve got maybe 50 other stories arm-wrestling for readership.

Spend as much time crafting your title as you do writing your story. What!? Yep. I said it and I’m not kidding. Look at the homepage. Every one of those top stories will make your mouth water with interest.

This is where you title needs to be too. No good title = no reads = no money.

2. You need to write content readers want to read —

This is tough spot for many writers who don’t want to succumb to ‘the man.’ But if your stories aren’t getting traction (and you have a great title) it might be for two reasons: you either don’t have many followers, or your followers don’t want to read what you wrote.

I’ve written many pet projects. None of them got read.

Medium is a fun place to launch all those random thoughts on our minds. But random thoughts don’t buy the Christmas ham and they sure don’t build a readership.

3. You need followers —

You’ve got to be active on Medium. Medium knows whether you’ve been naughty or nice, busy or elsewhere. If you don’t have your own following it’ll be a lot harder to get people to read your stories. Even if you hit a major publication.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s a gamble.

4. You need to get curated —

I realize the irony here, since I’m banned from curation due to my marketing practices. But I’ve got a lot of curated stories from 2018 and 2019. Those stories still earn money for me.

Non-curated stories are disposable.

If you want greater passive income from Medium, you need to make the curators happy, follow every rule to the tee, and only make tiny asks at the end of your stories.

If the story looks at all like you’re fishing for subscribers, there’s a good chance you won’t get curated. I go after new subscribers hard. This is my strategy. This may not be the best choice for you.

5. You need a call to action to join your email list —

Email is the way you’ll bring your publishing business to the next level. With email you own the traffic, the message, and your income.

As you can see in the final section of this story, I use every Medium story to build my own tribe — a platform I own and control, so I don’t wake up tomorrow and find all my followers have been erased.

Your bank account needs an email list

Whether you’ve got six books in the hopper, or ten books in your melon, your publishing business could use a big dose of email.

With your email list, you can sell your books automatically, while you sleep, so you have more time to spend on the work that matters most — your best writing.

Email isn’t easy, quick, or for the lazy — but it works.

It’s got a 40+ year track record. Older than the internet itself.

Those other social apps in your pocket could lose all their venture funding tomorrow and fold. But email isn’t going anywhere. It’s the great equalizer. You get just as much right to your customer’s in-box as Amazon, Apple, or Budweiser.

If you want to earn more money from your writing, without worrying about your income being taken from you overnight, it’s time to start your email list.

Let’s start the year strong.

Whether you need your first 1,000 subscribers or your next 1,000, my free email masterclass will show you how to get there, using content marketing, without spending a hot nickel on ads.

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.