How To Make Money Writing on Medium

Have the right attitude, focus on mastery, and be patient

I’ve been writing on Medium since 2016, back when you couldn’t make money, only expose your work to readers. I fell into writing by accident when my friend, who owned a Wordpress blog, asked me to write an article for him—and it ended up reading like a press release instead of an article on entrepreneurship.

After writing a few articles on his blog, I had an instructional step-by-step guide of how I changed my life go viral on Facebook, with more than 84,000 shares. From 2014 to now, I have had more than ten articles go viral and have written for many major publications.

When Medium introduced the partner program, I began publishing articles through it and have now made tens of thousands of dollars because of it.

I tell you this not to impress you but to show you that anyone can do it with the right strategy. I am about to give you that strategy, although I am going to skip the baby steps, which you can easily find in the FAQs, and stick to more tangible and lesser-known tips that I personally followed.

The Attitude Required

A lot of what has kept me writing over the last five years has been about the attitude I cultivated. With the right attitude, the process and results come much easier and your focus is on the right tasks.

It is not about you

Take your ego out of it, as nobody is going to read your work to hear how good you are and support any fascination you might have for vanity metrics. People read your work to get something out of it.

Whenever you are writing something, ask yourself, “Have I taught, educated, inspired, entertained, or made the reader laugh?” If the answer is no, then your intentions may be selfish. It’s an easy problem to solve by focusing in on one of these outcomes.

Share real-life stories

A lot of what writers do is tell stories. Step-by-step guides or how-to articles such as these are very boring to read when there is no story attached. When you sit down to write something, brainstorm what stories you have from your own life — or from the life of someone you know or have read about.

The best articles on Medium, from my observation, are the ones that tell a story and make you feel something at the end. When a reader has a feeling towards a story, it makes the advice or knowledge help them in considering whether they could take action, in a similar way, in their own life.

Be yourself

It was tempting when I started writing on Medium to try and be somebody else. The fascination was to be like the writers that were having all the success and getting all the claps.

This strategy, initially, was flawed and no one really paid attention. When I became obsessed with being myself and disconnected from the judgment I was likely to encounter in the dark alleys of the comment section, everything changed.

There are enough people on other social media platforms trying to be somebody else; it’s not useful here on Medium. Your differentiator is your personal experience and your perspective on the world.

“The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust.” — Jason Calacanis

Put money to the back of your mind in the beginning

Focusing on money when you first start writing on Medium is not a great idea because it distracts you — the way your phone does — from the process you need to generate money eventually.

Money comes after you nail the writing process on Medium.

Treat the work as storytelling with practical tips

Other than just telling stories, what takes things to the next level is when there is some form of usefulness that comes from your writing. It’s the idea that at the end of every story, there is a lesson that can help the reader.

The trouble is that not every reader will get the lesson. As a writer, you can make life easy. What I do is spell out the lessons and actionable advice to the reader, so they don’t get left feeling lost or not knowing what to do next.

Fuse stories with actionable tips and strategies and you’ll quickly gain many more readers on Medium.

The Process of Mastery

Everyone has a process on how they do something and this is the specific one I cultivated after a lot of trial and error.

Write frequently

“If you want to continually grow your blog, you need to learn to blog on a consistent basis.” — Neil Patel

The single biggest factor that led me to the results I later got was to write frequently. Once a week is the bare minimum you will need to create a writing skill that you can eventually get paid for.

The reason weekly works is that it’s the balance between readers seeing you enough and having the time to actually write. Most people can find 30–60 minutes a week to write whereas not everyone can publish eight articles a week the way I currently do — and I get that.

When I started writing on Medium, I published four articles a week, which helped me reach readers quickly. I tried to write about many different topics so that if someone didn’t find me in the self-improvement section, then they could find me under another section, such as writing or startups.

Writing on a consistent basis helped me in the following ways:

• It helped me find my voice
• It allowed me to find a writing style
• It perfected the way I communicated ideas
• It defined the formatting of my writing

Make your work stand out

The way your work looks matters. In the early days, one thing I believe I did differently was to make my work stand out.

Instead of using a generic stock photo of business people shaking hands, as an example, I scoured the internet looking for art that was related to the topic I was writing about. This took the image searching process from a few minutes to, often, a couple of hours.

The way I would define the images chosen at the time was to find ones that stopped me scrolling (aka scroll-stopping moments). I also formatted my articles in a very distinct way.

At the time, a lot of the articles on Medium had huge chunks of text that I disliked because I would lose my place when reading an article (especially on my mobile phone).

Because of this annoyance, I made my articles dead easy to read by utilizing lots of blank space, breaking up text with images, bolding sentences that were actionable and may inspire the reader, and trying to be useful in the presentation of my work.

Use a grammar tool

Even today, my grammar is not great. One of the biggest hurdles I see aspiring writers grapple with is the need to have their work perfect. When I go back and read the first one hundred posts I published on Medium, many of them are full of grammar and spelling errors.

If I had let the need for perfection settle in, I am not sure I would have ever published anything and got the results you see today.

Strangely, I think part of my success on Medium, in the early days, was the very fact that my writing was a bit rough and imperfect, and that is what made it relatable to the average reader.

Nowadays, I use a grammar tool and proofread my work, which has helped.

Timebox your writing sessions

Otherwise, you will think you have all the time in the world and probably not write a hell of a lot. A tiny little hack I used was to book something in at the end of my writing sessions.

The typical writing day for me is a Saturday and I always have a dinner reservation with my girlfriend booked in for right after I finish writing. This means I have to stay as focused as possible, otherwise I am going to have a disappointed partner because of a missed dinner reservation.

Jam tasks that can’t be moved on either side of your writing sessions.

Focus on writing above everything else

Not editing, photos, podcast interviews, marketing, or email lists. This is the biggest mistake I see. You can waste so much of your time on Medium trying to do things that will have little to no effect on your long-term writing success.

If I was to map out the best way to use your time, I would say this: spend 90% of your time doing the writing.

Getting Paid to Write

Okay, finally we have arrived at the section so many people ask me about via emails and direct messages.

Put your articles behind the paywall

I promised at the top of this article that I wasn’t going to give you the simple tips that you can Google and this is one that may sound obvious.

The decision you need to make if you want to earn money on Medium is whether or not you will put your articles behind the paywall. Doing so means that only Medium Members can read your work, but it also means you can earn money.

I have chosen only to publish articles for members, which has been part of the reason I have made tens of thousands of dollars from the platform. When I want to publish free articles, I use other platforms. Making money on Medium comes down to this decision.

And I’ll add this: it is okay to charge for your work and you don’t need to feel guilty about it.

Join a publication

You can reach readers, but reaching the right ones also matters, as Medium pays you on more than having your article viewed for a few seconds.

I chose to join publications because it allows me to reach my own followers, plus theirs, and target specific niches where I know my work might be useful. (Being useful is a helpful way to look at Medium — and look at life too.)

Be patient

This one is unpopular and it’s worth mentioning. You won’t make money on Medium overnight. Like any pursuit in life, you have to be patient. I didn’t get paid to write for several years, and it’s the same with many bloggers who I am friends with.

Getting paid to write takes time and so having it be a side-hustle, to begin with, was useful for me. I never depended on it to make a living and so that took the stress away and allowed me to enjoy the process.

What’s the point of writing if you don’t love it? Loving what I do is what eventually led me to make money, not the other way round.

Start with the enjoyment and when you’ve put in enough work, earned the trust of an audience, found your voice, found a way to be useful and helped enough people, then, and maybe then, you can get paid for your work.