I Earned My First $100 in January So How Can You Do It?

Review of 4 articles that helped me earn my first $100 in medium

When I started writing in medium 8 months ago, I told myself that even if I earned a single dollar, I would consider it a success. I was excited. One of the first things I learned when I entered the platform was that the rate of writers earning over $100 was very low. Although this situation scares me a little, I earned $100 from the medium as the first goal for myself. Getting into this small writer community could have been an important turning point in my writing career.

I posted 6 posts in the first month and earned just $2. I have to admit that I am a bit of a lazy and instinctive writer. I always take the care to write, but for publishing I get stuck. This situation stems from the perfectionist character that I am trying to overcome. Although writing every day is also a strong challenge, I only realized after 3 months that my identity as a writer did not improve when I did not publish them.

I know you’re tired of monthly earnings sharing. But I think these articles are not just about earning, but about learning. I love the articles where successful writers on medium describe what works for them. It offers me more suggestions to activate my potential. I apply the suggestions that previously worked to my articles and combine them with my own experiences to get stronger results.

After a very long 7 months, I became one of the $100 Club writers in January 2021. This was just a symbolic thing. But it carried significant progress in it. We know that only 6% of the medium earned $100. Being in a small writer group showed me I can do more. As my articles continued to be read, I wanted to be more useful. And now I want to write my experiences to the beginning writers when I am 8 months in the medium.

Let’s start with 10 things I did before I earned my first mid-sized income from Medium.

1. I set a goal
2. I adapted the most read articles to my own life
3. Sometimes I just read and took notes during the week
4. I wrote 10 headlines every day
5. I made an inspiration list. Which people, publications, and articles are you inspired by? Keep them together.
6. I wrote my feelings and fears. And I put these experiences into my writing.
7. When I gave up hope, I wrote about it. I continued to write. It’s not just your success, it’s how you get up after your fall.
8. I gave more importance to small publications than big publications. Writing in small publications then moves to larger audiences.
9. I tried to comment on the articles I read as best I could. And I answered all the comments to my articles.
10. Finally, I got into one of the medium’s big publication

In this article, I will examine the 4 articles that helped me overcome the first milestone in this platform.

9 websites that improved my writing skills in 2020

This post was the first one published a month ago in writing cooperative. And I have had an article that performed well. It has been viewed 8.7k so far and has earned $150. I have read this post many times and thought about the reasons behind its success.

1. I outsourced a little while writing the article. I just quoted my own experiences. This increased the reliability of the article by providing a clear user experience to the reader.
2. I finished the article in one day without thinking or delaying.

I’ve noticed that experience-based reviews are more successful in my articles that perform well. While writing the title of this post, I asked myself if I would click on any post that says how it improves your writing skills. Since my answer is yes, I put this title in the article.

While I was recommending author websites in this article, I did not want the article to turn into a boring promotion article. So while explaining the tools to the reader, I also explained how I use them step by step. And my article has turned from a recommendation article into a large tutorial article. The 3 main details that made the article read a lot were these:

1. A detailed description of the methods that improve authorship
2. Authorship resources available to the reader
3. The websites I recommend are less known outside of the mainstream. (I use Grammarly fondly, but the reader also needs to know new sites.)

3 common features of the most read articles

This article published in Brave Writer received 870 views and earning me $27, it became one of my articles that I find most useful for the reader. I got the title of this post from within another article. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you may not write a good title.

In such situations, I go to my old articles and inspire them. A sentence in those posts grabs my attention and gives a nice title idea for my new post. I suggest you pay attention to this detail while writing your articles because we know it is not clear where an ambitious title will come from.

While writing this article, I have reviewed over 50 article titles and read a lot of articles. I decided that the common point of many of the articles I have examined is empathic experience. So one thing I touched on the most in the article was empathic writing. While writing this article, the only thought in my mind was to combine the concept of empathy with the fundamental idea of ​​the most read articles.

I carefully studied the comments to the article and extracted 3 common elements that the reader likes. The reader loved to read the experience. But one’s experience should have been more of an empathetic “how I overcame” theme than a diary post. According to the comments I received from the article, the subheadings that the reader benefited from most were as follows:

1. Sharing an intimate experience within the article allows you to connect with the reader.
2. Don’t let research links impede your opinion.
3. We like to read step-by-step articles because everything goes through a process in our life and we want to know how to do something.
4. Reading someone’s personal experience on a topic reminds us of reality in our own lives.
5. We always need a reality check

What I wrote in this article was the efficient use of only the most read titles. We all write articles that start with how-to, but most of them are for a limited audience. Being as transparent as possible while presenting your experience to the reader is an important detail that increases the visibility of your article.

How to write better every day, thanks to a Japanese philosophy

My first article published in better marketing took place in the second month of writing in the medium. Before writing this article, I was reading 10 articles every day and getting advice on how to write. But I didn’t need to stress that much. I could be new to Medium, but I had 8 years of writing. And one day I just let good writing flow into my mind automatically. That day I came across one of my old articles. I wrote this article, inspired by an article I wrote about Kaizen.

Some days you have to let the article come to you. When you press your mind to write, you become even more stressed. This results in just looking at the screen and not being able to type anything. If you don’t have a new post idea that day, let go. Use your right to do nothing. If you do, you’ll suddenly realize that ideas want to come to you. Ideas come when you don’t chase them. This is a simple but effective method for improving my writing.

I rewrote the Kaizen article in a short time and sent it to better marketing. The editor sincerely encouraged me to add more authorship advice to my post. I reread the article and realized that I was writing a self-help article rather than an authorship article. That’s why I rearranged the post. And I have included steps to activate the reader in the post. Combining Kaizen's philosophy with good writing, I created a 1-week program. I was happy that 600 people read my first article, which I spread to a large-scale audience. There were 2 lessons I learned from this post.

1. The reader likes to read articles based on a particular method or philosophy.
2. It is much easier to write about any topic you want to improve in your life with the help of philosophy.

After this article, I started enriching my articles by adding expert opinions, book citations, and scientific-based links.

8 simple ways to survive as a new writer in the medium

This article was my first experience article in the medium. In this article, I wanted to convey to the readers the intensity and sped up the experience I had in 3 months on this platform. Although I only earn a few dollars from this article, I wanted to add it to this post because I think it is useful for new writers.

In this article, I wrote what I learned from my rejections in my first 3 months. The medium had its own language and the experience I gained while trying to decode that language allowed me to add a lot of new depth to my writing.

This platform required a beginner’s guide even for someone who enjoys writing more than anything, so I identified and wrote 3 key points for beginners. There were the following items between these 3 points.

1. See your rejections as an authoring lesson
2. Curation is essential but doesn’t be obsessed with it.
3. Open your own publication

Besides these 3 items, I also added the most common mistakes new authors make in the medium because I have done them all. I had sent an incomplete article before I fully read a significant publication’s submission guide. I didn’t comply with the title rule Medium wanted, and more… Besides, this platform is continuously changing, so always stay up to date and always read.

Last words

In my 8 months writing experience at Medium, I experienced that a useful article reaches readers everywhere. Our journey through Medium is not about publications. It’s about revealing ourselves. If your experience adds value to the reader, please write it. Just consider the way you narrate your experience. And present your value to the reader. Tell your story in how best suits you.

One of my new goals on this platform is to pay less attention to the reading stats every day because when I do this, I have observed that my willingness and creativity increase. Second, I set myself the goal of sharing my stories with courage. Writing more sincere stories is one of the writing practices that has improved me, and I want to continue this.

I love the variety on Medium. We all have a different story that helps us maintain the vitality here. At the same time, we add vitality to each other’s creativity and lives. I know that a writer’s best friend is someone who comes out of another writer’s pen. So while reading an article, pay attention to the inspiration you get from that article. As I always say, you never know where inspiration is hiding.