I Earned My First $1000+ on Medium in Four Months — I Didn’t Learn Shit
There is no secret to success
I had published two articles on Medium before I joined the Medium partner program. I have always been an avid reader and an aperiodic writer. While reading great articles here on Medium, I decided to flex my writing muscles. I thought I had great ideas I wish to share. So why not earn some money doing so?
To maximize my earning potential, I clicked on every article like this one I am writing this moment. If the title had anything to do with “Medium earnings” or “Medium how-to”, you can bet I read it.
“How I earned my first $XXX on Medium”
“What I learned after publishing XXX articles on Medium”
“How to do XXX on Medium”
Reading articles like this is not bad until it becomes bad. When you are second-guessing yourself, enveloped in fear, or procrastinating, the most rational way to keep yourself held back is to hide under the shadows of preparation and learning. It always works.
Some would-be writers learn and prepare to be writers all their lives. They wait till they are good enough and the timing is perfect enough. But how do you know when you are good enough and when is the timing perfect?
I was looking for the secret to success on Medium. I must have read over 50 articles about how so and so made so and so dollars on Medium, or what they have learned writing so and so numbers of articles. While some of these articles were helpful, I fell into the learning trap. I genuinely felt I was productive when I was reading all that came my way on how to succeed on Medium.
In this piece, I do not intend to tell you anything new. You already know what you need. It’s stale gist. If you are like I was, you have probably read dozens of articles like this. And if you are new (like yesterday kind of new) and you haven’t seen them all over your face, you will. On the contrary, I want to tell you what you probably already know and probably aren’t doing — Sometimes, that is what we need.
Medium considers you successful if you earn above $100 in a month. And I think it’s a good milestone to cross. According to the October 2020 edition of the Medium writers’ newsletter, “6.4% of active writers earned over $100.” That tells us that only a few writers are making good money on Medium.
I earned $4.82 my first month. Aside from the role luck played, I was doing it wrong. I wasn’t learning right. To learn is not to read and know in theory. As a writer, you need skin in the game. That’s how you truly learn.
Imagine you are learning a new language. You may not have to buy any language books or download the highest-rated language apps (these are also helpful). If you live amongst these people, what has worked for centuries is the natural approach of trying to speak the language however terrible you are at it, saying it wrong, and doing that over and over again, till you get it right.
“We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences. The unique way in which we mix up the part of culture others have deemed ‘high’ and the low”
Austin Kleon
If you want to learn a new language and you care so much about people laughing at your pronunciation or accent, you probably would never learn to speak the language. It’s that simple.
Aim. Shoot. Swear. Repeat.
As a new writer, I was focused more on being the perfect writer. I was reading books and articles on how to be a prolific writer and learning everything I could about Medium and writing. I spent most of the time I should have used to write, learning to write.
I had read and learned “enough”, but I felt there was still more to learn. You only learn a skill by doing the skill. One of the best pieces of advice to achieve any goal is to aim, shoot, (swear), repeat.
To make it simpler, Just shoot. The more you shoot, the more you learn to shoot. Yeah, you already know that. Just shoot. Just write. And write again and again and again. Till you write better. I am still in the process.
Same Ol’ Gist
You already know what makes anyone, or at least most people, successful on Medium. We can say it with different wordings and phrases, but it all boils down to:
- Read often
2. Write and published often
3. Learn from what you read and write
4. Repeat 1, 2 and 3
When I did this, my earning jumped to $308 the second month. A lot of writing advice on Medium tells you to write daily. I do not write daily. How often you write depends on how much time you have to write and how writing works for you. If you have a full-time job, you might not have as much time to write or publish every day.
It’s better to have one valuable thing to say all week than to say irrelevant things every day of the week. So it’s better to ensure you have quality content to write.
Find Yourself, Nothing Works For Everyone
We can all agree that there are general rules for success like Hard work, perseverance, diligence, and the likes. But when you take specific recommendations too seriously, you might set yourself up for failure.
As beneficial as exercise is, a specific exercise routine might not be good for you, depending on your health conditions. You should be wary of advice from people who do not know your particular situation and have no requisite knowledge to make any recommendations for you. Similarly, when you see advice like, “Write for eight hours daily.” or “Publish daily”, and you take it as the perfect formula for success on Medium, you might do yourself disfavor.
Some technical and research-laden pieces may take more than a day to complete. I have seen topics like “How I write an article in 15 minutes”. While I doff my hat for writers like that, I know I can’t do that, and I won’t even try. What works for the next person might not work for you. Get in the game and find yourself. Experience will teach you what works for you.
Conclusion
There is no magic wand you can swing to make you successful. Perhaps that’s what I have learned, but I already knew that, and you already know that too. I deliberately didn’t talk about how to write a good topic, formatting, images, submitting to publications, etc. Those are the simple part. The hard part is showing up. If you continually show up, you would inevitably figure those out.
You can’t be an excellent writer if you are not an expert reader. You can’t be an expert writer if you do not write often and get feedback from readers. It’s nothing new!
Best wishes.