How to Use Medium Stories to Pay Your Mortgage

A simple practice of disciplined, daily writing can grow your income a lot

There are many ways to earn money faster, than writing. But Medium still sits as a unique opportunity for those writers willing to put in the time. More writers are learning how to grow their own platforms and increase their Medium reach, simultaneously.

Bottom line — there’s real money to be made on Medium.

• Is it too late to join the Medium train? Nope.
• Will I make a lot of money off my stories in my first month, or five? Probably nope.
• Is is easy to make money on Medium? Heck nope.
• Can I pay my mortgage with my Medium earnings? Yep.

This is a story of cumulative effort.

While you can’t count on a certain Medium income every month, you can put the necessary fuel into the system to keep your writing income growing.

This is a multi-faceted approach.

We won’t just write articles and hope they earn money.

That one-sided approach is the hamster wheel of content.

Instead, we’ll steadily grow your platform. You’ll write your face-off. And over the course of a few months, you’ll grow your Medium income to a respectable level.

If you want Medium to pay your mortgage, prepare to write some serious content.

Dominate your niche

While you should write for multiple tags, I believe it’s important to dominate your niche. This means you should pick a theme for your body of work and stick with it.

First, you must decide who you want to serve.

I serve writers and creators who want to sell more of their work. Therefor, I write a lot about writing, creating, and the marketing of both writing and creating.

Use your personal expertise as a guide to help you.

What do you know that others do not? How can you use that knowledge in a way that helps others get what they want?

If you write about picking flowers one day, cooking hot dogs the next, and public speaking a third — we have no idea what you stand for. We want you to plant a flag in a niche, so we can decide if you’re work is something we want to follow.

Dominating your niche means writing a lot. Like every. single. day.

Not every Medium story will be a hit. Most won’t. Some will take-off and make you a lot of money. This is the law of averages. Over time, if you write enough great stories, your Medium income will grow.

As Medium changes the algorithms etc. your income will fluctuate. There will be months where your views drop for no reason. You don’t own the platform. Change is inevitable.

Watch your best posts and write more of those. Stop writing the posts that don’t do well.

Increase your followers

While having a lot of followers doesn’t equal a lot of claps or reads, you will need more followers if you want to earn real money on Medium.

The more followers you have, the greater the opportunity you’ll have for regular readers.

The most-consistent way I’ve found to increase followers is to be active on the platform. Clap for the other popular posts in your niche. Follow a few key players. Don’t go overboard with the following.

Slowly, people will find you. If they like your work, they’ll follow you.

If you follow the biggest earners on Medium, they also have large followings. While followers don’t always mean readers, they’re a big indicator you’re on the right path.

Don’t target random followers just for the sake of boosting your numbers, that won’t help.

Target people you wish to help. The idea is to build a platform of only the people you want to serve. No one else is invited to the party. We can’t be everything to everyone.

Choose a specific voice.

If your writing voice resonates with readers, they’ll return to your work repeatedly and the algorithm will reward you for it.

Use the double-dip power of your own publication

Publications are a way to double-dip on the power of your stories. Not only can you build a bigger fan-base for your work, but some people may follow your publication, while they don’t follow you.

When you own a publication, you earn the ability to email your followers directly (something you can’t do as a regular writer). These emails can be additional reminders to read your latest content, or you can use them to keep in touch.

• Publications give you street cred in your niche.
• Publications appear to get curated more often, although I only have anecdotal references to back this up.
• Publications help you grow an entirely separate following, using the power of multiple authors to help grow your niche topic.

Are publications an overnight success strategy? Nope. Like anything worth doing, it takes a long time to grow your publication. Not all topics are equally-exciting.

Will your publication get listed at the top of the homepage? Probably never.

But you’re already writing the content. Why not have a home base that shows what you stand for, who you serve, and allows you to take advantage of the added benefits publication-owners enjoy?

Build your own tribe

The monthly Medium income is fantastic, but that’s not where your real Medium money will come from. If you want to make consistent, semi-automated income from your Medium audience, you need an email list.

Not just any email list, either.

You need a list of people you wish to serve — a valuable tribe that enjoys your work so much they’re willing to hear from you often.

Medium can change the rules any time they want.

Maybe a competitor swoops-in and takes their market-share overnight. This means you’ll lose your income overnight. I don’t want that kind of risk. When you own your list you own your future too.

If you own your list you also own your writing business.

When you own your list you control the message, and all the in-box real estate. You no longer have to rely on social traffic from a platform you don’t control. We can’t own a business on borrowed customers. That’s too shaky.

If you want to build your tribe now, you’ll have a pre-built, rabid audience when you launch your next book or creative project.

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.