I Just Entered the Top 5.4% of Medium Earners

$100 in earnings for the month of July

I opened up my account this morning to a pleasant surprise. My earnings report for this month had just crossed $100 for the first time. Although this might not seem like a significant amount of money, it is sort of a symbolic achievement. The last Medium newsletter stated that only 5.4% of all Medium writers earn more than $100. As of today, that group includes me!

Although I’ve been a member of Medium for a year, I’ve only been committed to this platform for about two months. If you look through my profile, you’ll see that I published 6 articles in August of 2019, but moved on after I couldn’t get anything going. I published 6 articles in May of 2020, then 45 in June, and I have 46 already through the 24th of July.

Here’s a summary of my first 50 articles:

A workmanlike approach

Everybody dreams of writing the big article that goes viral and brings in millions of views all on its own. I’ve actually had that happen, but not on this platform. I’ve been working as a writer for more than 20 years, and I’ve had success selling short stories, articles, and even novels.

Here’s the article I wrote that went viral:

In my experience, going viral is more a result of luck than the actual quality of piece. I used the exact same process for writing my viral article than I’ve used for every other article. For some reason one article earns a bunch of attention, and the others just trudge along with a certain amount of grudging respect.

I think it would be a mistake for writers to get too hung up on trying to figure out what it takes to go viral. It really is sort of random, and if you start insisting that you see a pattern in the chaos, you’ll just go crazy. Instead, write a lot. It’s like printing your own lottery tickets.

Curation

I’ve published 115 articles on Medium and had 21 selected by Medium curators. I do spend a fair amount of time writing articles about Medium (like this one), which are instantly disqualified for curation.

Getting selected helps, but some of my articles that were not selected outperform some of the selected ones. It is important to follow the guidelines to create the kind of articles that Medium is looking for, but writers shouldn’t be discouraged if their work isn’t selected. You can still have a very popular article that isn’t selected.

Publications

I really enjoy working with the publications. For publications like The Writing Cooperative, P.S. I Love You, and The Ascent, having an article accepted almost guarantees that the article will be curated. My most popular article to date was published on The Writing Cooperative and has received 1.7k views. Although that is small compared to the articles of some other writers, the article has only been live for a bit over a month.

My most popular article so far:

I understand that some of Medium’s larger publications will look for quality articles that were self-published on the platform. I experimented with that by self-publishing “Just Shut Up and Wear Your Goddamned Mask.” I felt that article had a great chance to gain some traction, and it has, although not enough to grab the attention of a large publication.

For now, I’m going to continue to submit to large publications rather than self-publish.

Where will it go from here?

I made $53 in June and I’m up to $102 for July. The big question is if I’ll make $200+ in August, or if I will continue to see my earnings go up only by $50.

A lot of this will depend on the number and quality of articles that I write for the month. Even though my earnings were higher in July, I didn’t write anything that really “hit.” I had one article with 700+ views, and the others were all under 200. However, you have to think of your articles as seedlings. Keep sharing them, and if you’re lucky, they’ll get indexed by Google and you’ll start earning some search engine views.

My most popular article for July, articles about making money are always popular:

Keep on writing

Medium is a great platform for getting some visibility for your thoughts and ideas. I’ve had a wonderful time networking with other writers and have had a couple interview opportunities as a result. If you’re just starting out, don’t be discouraged if you’re not getting a lot of views right away. Steadily increase your followers and build your portfolio. After a while, you’ll start to see regular interactions and consistent views.

If you are looking for writing ideas, check out this article. If you tag me in a post inspired by this article, I’ll give it a shout out!