I Made $53.60 on 45 Articles in My First Month on Medium

Tips and tricks to help you learn how to build a passive income

I’ve been on Medium for almost a year, but this was my first month of really dedicating a lot of time to the platform. Although $53.60 does not seem like a lot of money, I’m actually encouraged by the progress and excited about my earning prospects for month number two. In this article, you’ll find a brief recap of what I learned during my first month of Medium.

My background

I have a degree in English Literature and I’ve been working as a freelance writer for more than twenty years. I have publishing contracts with Perseid Press, Harren Press, and Burning Bulb publications. My income is divided among a variety of writing related occupations.

I have made over a thousand dollars a month writing on a variety of platforms, and I’m currently working on an article that will provide more details (so follow me). The nice thing about Medium is that it offers you the opportunity to make money writing about subjects that are of interest and importance to you.

Dabbling with Medium

I’ve been curious about Medium for more than a year, but June of 2020 was the first month I was able to dedicate a lot of time to it. At first, I only wanted to organize all of my book and movie reviews on one platform, so I founded Write and Review:

As I continue to grow the platform, I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to contribute to many of Medium’s publications (I’m taking writers for the publication, so just let me know if you’re interested).

Publications are fun

I’ve been writing and submitting for years, and it is always exciting to get an article accepted anywhere. Medium’s publications are a great resource for writers since they give you an opportunity to achieve huge visibility for your work.

I like the process of submitting to Medium publications because it’s like an accelerated version of submitting to other markets. When you work as a freelancer, you sometimes don’t get a response for months after your email. On Medium, you’re likely to hear back within a week. This is awesome because it allows you to compose and publish articles on current events. This opens up a whole new realm of writing prompts and article possibilities.

Here’s an article I wrote on how to get added as a writer to various publications (you REALLY need to read it):

My highest performing articles

My highest performing articles were all published with publications. Here is a rundown of my most popular work from the month of June:

‘8 Cruel Lessons From a Year of Content Writing’ outpaced the rest of my work by a wide margin. The article was published with The Writing Cooperative and was also selected for curation.

In fact, all of the articles I wrote for The Writing Cooperative were selected for curation within a few minutes of being published.

I have no idea if ‘8 Cruel Lessons’ will continue to outpace everything else in terms of views, but even without the earnings of that article, I would have made $35.15 in the first month. Here are my top articles:

Assessment of my top articles

Three of my top articles are with The Writing Cooperative which is to be expected because the publication has over 200k followers.

‘Be Wary of People Who Don’t Swear’ is probably my favorite article on my account so far, and it has performed well. It was published with P.S. I Love You which also has over 200k followers (as I wrote this, I was actually surprised to see it was my number 2 article for the month).

The other major publication I’ve been added to as a writer is The Startup Grind which has over 400k followers. The article I placed with them is ‘How to Build a Community Around Your brand.’

Interesting note: ‘How to Build’ was the first article I wrote specifically for Medium with the intent of getting it placed on a large publication. It took them about two weeks to respond.

My other top articles are with the smaller publications Curiosity Never Killed the Writer, and Illumination. I think the ‘Lessons Learned’ article performed well because it’s very long and therefore takes more time to read.

Promotion

My work as a writer has allowed me to develop a decent social reach. I’ve been using the Agorapulse social media management tool, but only because it was available on a free trial basis.

Hint: you can sign up for Agorapulse for two weeks, and then they’ll give you another two weeks at the end of the first trial.

I might dabble with another social media management tool like Hootsuite just because it helps you from getting lost scrolling through Facebook posts. I would be willing to pay around $10 a month for a service like this, but these guys always want between $30 and $100, so I’ll probably discontinue use after this month.

If you have a recommendation for a good social media management tool, please add it in the comments.

Lately, I’ve had it up to here with Facebook:

Overall, I’m encouraged

I came to Medium with a strong writing background. The work I’ve done as a content writer allows me to sit down and crank out 10k words a day when I need to. Like anything else, your Medium account will earn more for you if you have a catalog of thousands of articles.

What I really enjoy about Medium is that it gives me some visibility when I wish to crank out an 800 to 1,200 word essay. By far, the most popular article I’ve ever written is ‘Speaking Spanish in America’ which deals with the harassment my Spanish Speaking family endured prior to the 2016 election.

I also did a follow up:

‘Speaking Spanish’ was published as a letter to the editor in the local paper and ended up being the most read article for that publication in 2016.

I like that Medium provides me with the opportunity to wake up in the morning and hammer out a thought with the assurance that there’s the potential a lot of people will see it.

What’s next?

Like anyone else, my Medium experience started with an article that earned about $0.08. The first couple weeks are slow going, but you might experience a few days of doubling. It can be exciting to see your earnings go to $0.16 to $0.32 to $0.64.

If you remember the doubling exercise from your grade school math class, you’ll know it only takes a couple weeks to double a penny into a billion dollars.

The doubling isn’t going to last, but when you start getting to the point where you’re making a couple of dollars a day, you’ll find it helps with the motivation to keep cranking out articles.

There’s no way of knowing if the articles I wrote that performed well will continue to earn in July, but we’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll continue to crank out articles and accumulate followers. I’ll check back in and let you know the results a month from now.

Best of luck to you in all your endeavors!

Here’s one last instructional article that will have you well on your way to greater success on Medium: