I Made $145.93 on 63 Articles in my Second Month on Medium

Tips and tricks for new writers

The end of July 2020 brings to a close my second month of publishing with Medium. There are a lot of articles that offer advice on how to use the platform to make money, but I think there’s value in providing an analytical account of my experience.

I concluded June with an article entitled “I Made $53.60 on 45 Articles in My First Month on Medium.” You can read that here:

In June and July I published 108 articles. Prior to those two months, I posted a handful of articles sporadically throughout the years bringing my total to 131. This total also represents articles that I imported from my blog which keep the original timestamp when imported so they aren’t counted in my monthly totals. Incidentally, that happens with blog articles, but not articles I import from Vocal.

My writing background

For reference, I’m 45 years old with a degree in English literature. I have publishing contracts with a 5 small publishers and my latest book was a finalist with the Wishing Shelf Book Awards. I’ve worked as an editor, content writer, blogger, transcriber, and I’ve also done a lot of freelancing work. Basically, I’ve dabbled in just about every writing related field.

As a freelancer, I’m confident that I can earn around $100 for a 1,000 word article. Obviously the amount I’m earning on Medium doesn’t reflect that, but there are some advantages to Medium nonetheless. Medium allows you to publish instantly, while working as a freelancer contains the inherent delays of querying, waiting for acceptance, waiting for publication, then finally being paid. If I can start earning today, even if it’s only a dollar a day, I’ll still be at the same place 100 days later when I would have finally received a check from the magazine.

One other advantage of Medium is that it offers you the opportunity to write about current topics because there is no publishing delay. In regular freelancing you have to pick topics that will still be relevant in 3 months. Medium allows you to respond to something that’s trending in the morning and, hopefully, catch some of the wave that’s still going in the afternoon.

My overall strategy

Right now, my plan is to produce around 1,000 articles as quickly as possible and then reassess how much I’m making at that time. At 1,000 words per article (approximately), that represents one million words. The books I’ve written average around 70–80,000 words, so this is a significant investment in time.

However, keep in mind that the time it takes to write a single 80,000 word book is greater than the time it takes to write 80 articles of 1,000 words. There is not nearly as much revision time or plotting work that has to be done. Still, I’m finding a “down the rabbit hole” kind of effect working on Medium as article concepts and responses send you off in different directions.

Writers can’t help but take notice in one way or another as to what tactics seem to generate the best response, but for the most part I enjoy the community on Medium and I feel they’re a vast improvement over the people you find on platforms like Facebook.

What will happen next month?

I would assume that my earnings would continue to rise if I keep writing 60+ articles a month, however there really isn’t any guarantee that will happen. The articles must continue to be at a consistent quality and earn regular viewership. I am finding that occasionally when I am discovered by new readers, they read a dozen or so of the articles I’ve already published (which is very gratifying).

For July I more or less expected to be making around $150 based on other articles I’d read. However, August is new territory. My earnings essentially tripled from June to July, but it doesn’t seem likely that would repeat. At the very least, I would like to earn around $200, but I think $450 is unlikely. There is always the chance of a “wild card” viral article (and I have had that happen before).

Right now, my trajectory is very workmanlike and I think it represents results other writers could realistically expect to achieve.

Publications

The publications are the major gatekeepers that can give your stories a lot of visibility. In June, I experimented with self-publishing two articles because I thought it might be a ticket into some of Medium’s bigger publications (some of them indicate on their submissions pages that they peruse self-published articles for good content).

The self-published articles didn’t perform as well, although one of them did just get selected to be curated (above). For August, I anticipate placing all of my work with publications except for the articles that I plan to import from Vocal. I have around 50 articles with Vocal, and I expect to import them all by the end of August, so I should be able to hit around 100 articles for this month.

Curation

19 of my last 63 articles were selected to be curated. This is a 30% selection rate. About 20 of my articles are still under consideration, so there’s a small chance that number will rise slightly. I probably wrote about 10 Medium related articles (like this one) that were disqualified from consideration.

Also, as of August 1st, I’m now a top writer in the following categories: This Happened to Me, Diversity, Parenting, Travel, and Writing.

My outlook

My purpose in working with Medium is to establish another line of income to supplement my other writing related income sources. Most writers have to have multiple revenue streams in order to make ends meet. Working on Medium allows me to do less content writing, and I’m grateful for that. Also, the work on Medium is a lot more meaningful because it allows me to lend my voice to issues and topics that are of importance to me.

I’m very happy with the Medium community. There are always a lot of good responses, although I did find I had to block 2 different people in June, but that always starts to happen as you develop more visibility. In the far greater majority of interactions, the people are kind, considerate, and intelligent. I appreciate the chance Medium affords me to wrestle with concepts and share ideas.

Good luck to all of you in August 2020 and beyond!