I Earned $142,000 Per Year Writing for Medium — Then I Quit

This is a true story, but it’s clickbait; don’t click it.

Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly seen writers complaining that they weren’t earning much from writing on Medium. They’ve said that Medium is limiting their distribution and earnings. For the longest time, I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. As Hov said in 4:44, my grass was greener ‘cause I was raking in more.

I was earning roughly $11,800 per month writing for Medium. Then I quit and learned how earning money on Medium actually works for most writers.

In this article, I want to take some time to share with you my story of how I went from a lowly marketing major struggling to get enough sleep in college to becoming a highly paid writer for Medium despite the shortcomings of their Partner Program. This is a long story, but stick around until the end because I will reveal my secret of how I made so much money writing for Medium when the vast majority of other writers were understandably struggling to come by the treasured $100 mark each month writing in Medium’s program.

Background

All my life, I’ve been a net enjoyer and promoter of the art of writing. In elementary school, with the support of Mrs. Smart, I would write stories instead of sentences using the ten words of the week. I won the D.A.R.E essay contest in 5th grade. In middle school, I often received praise for the cleverness of my titles and thesis statements. The praise continued in high school. I struggled with math on standardized exams, but I always crushed the essay portions.

During my freshman year of college, my liberal arts English professor encouraged me to publish online the first essay I delivered to her because she loved it that much. The article was “How to Succeed” with a subtitle of “Fail.” It was my very first time publishing something online.

This was in the early days of Medium, through which I chose to distribute my piece to the new world. My article took off pretty much immediately. The readers were well engaged, and I was starting to find my audience, my tribe. Over the following two years, I wrote and published more pieces on Medium. Some did well, but many failed to reach any significant number of readers. Nonetheless, I kept at it through 2014 and 2015.

Getting off the ground

By 2016, I was finding my footing. I had been writing more, but my style and form of writing had drastically changed since I started writing on Medium in the fall of 2013. I was writing more complex pieces now. Still, I wasn’t making as much impact as I desired. I wanted my writing to engage more people. In the summer of 2016, I got a chance at a taste of how it would feel to earn money writing for Medium.

I spent about 10 weeks with a mentor in San Francisco learning how to write better. I learned how to craft more reliable, sustainable, and impactful written works. I even started to see my future in this field of writing. I wrote something every single day, but it was taking me more time to publish my writtens. I wanted to ensure the quality of my writing in order to impress my mentor.

By the end of the 10 weeks, I was ready to publish what would be my most impactful record yet. I grew so much over those three months that my mentor and his team of professional writers made me an offer to return the following summer to write more critically and actually get paid for it.

Warning: these words are not as they seem, but keep reading if you’re curious.

Starting my writing career writing for Medium

In May of 2017, I graduated college and set my sights on a new life in San Francisco with my mentor’s team. When I arrived in the golden state, I got to work writing full-time for Medium.

I wrote for at least 40 hours each week, Monday through Friday. I did my best to take the weekends off to rest my mind and prepare for each oncoming week of writing. The best part about starting my career writing for Medium was that the team behind Medium actually cared about my success as a writer.

They gave me tips on how to be a better writer. They accepted my feedback on how they could make the Partner Program better for writers. And they gave me space and tools to impact a large audience of both readers and other writers through my writing.

The Good

Because Medium gave me a reasonable amount of freedom to decide what I write and how I write it, I was able to do my best work. From Medium, I learned how to brainstorm the best ideas to serve my audience. I learned how to format my writing for optimal readability. I learned how to implement experimenting and testing of various ideas for my pieces. And I learned how to deliver works that were reliable.

Aside: Want to learn how to build more wealth from your Medium Partner Program earnings? Learn how to invest your money correctly in the stock market. Subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Gauging impact

As any self-respecting writer does, I often analyzed the stats surrounding the engagement my published works received from my audiences. I often tried to find ways to gauge the amount of impact my pieces had on my audience. By providing me with beautiful and comprehensive analytics dashboards, Medium made it all too easy.

I could dive into the various areas of engagement and easily determine which of my pieces were helping my audience and which were hindering their ability to succeed through the information I was putting into the world. I was routinely happy with what I saw from my reports.

Best of all, I managed to consistently earn about $11.8k writing for Medium each and every month. This was more money than I had ever seen in my life. I don’t mean the yearly sum of those monthly payments; I mean a single month of earnings from Medium was more money than I had seen in my entire life prior. Heck, just three months of those earnings were more than my parents earned in a year. I was raking it in.

But of course, as a writer, you know there are downsides to the profession.

The bad

About 14 months into writing for Medium, I started to quickly approach absolute boredom. I had spent a couple months prior to this point writing a significant piece that would call into question how writers publish on Medium and suggest a new solution that I had actually implemented with the help of my team. This composition required a great deal of effort on my part, and it took months to complete. By the time my team and I published this piece, I was exhausted — due in large part to the tedium of the process.

Burning out

Now in the start of 2019, despite being tired and bored, I continued writing for Medium. The Partner Program was showing signs of getting better for writers. My big piece that I had spent those many months pouring my labor of love into appeared to be helping other writers publish more effectively in Medium’s Partner Program, too. I was happy with how far I had come since starting to write full-time for Medium in Q3 of 2017.

Throughout my time, I saw plenty of steep increases in the amount of money I earned. Things were going well. I wanted to keep writing for Medium and continue helping other writers and their readers respectively produce and consume the best written works on the internet. But I was burnt out.

It turns out that I had worked way too hard. I expended all of my body’s energy to produce the best written forms for Medium. By this point, I was constantly tired. I was low on motivation to write. I was often in and out of my eye doctor’s office because I had spent almost two years routinely fixed before a bright computer screen barely blinking.

It didn’t help that I was struggling to maintain a consistent sleeping schedule. My body was sending clear signals that I needed to throw in the white flag and take a break from what I had started.

I quit

When March rolled around in 2019, I decided I couldn’t go on writing for Medium. I told my team and my support system that I needed to take some time off for myself. I didn’t have a plan for what I’d do after regaining my motivation to write full-time, but I knew I needed to stop at that time.

I had saved enough money from writing for Medium over the years to sustain my expensive lifestyle in San Francisco, California, so I didn’t have money problems as an additional source of stress. I would be fine for at least a year or two on my savings.

I was okay with walking away from Medium and the $142,000 more I stood to earn over the next year if I continued to write at least as well as I had in the past. Some things in life are more important than money; one of those things is the maintenance of your good health.

Note: I’m glad you’re still here, but brace yourself for what’s to come …

Lessons learned along the way

Writing is fun, and it can be lucrative if you take the time to work on your skills. By writing for Medium, I was able to hone my craft, establish myself as a productive and highly paid writer. From there, I knew that I could take my skills anywhere else and achieve comparable earnings.

The most important thing I learned throughout this process was that I need to take care of my mind and body first and foremost. I only have this one body to get me through my lifetime, so I need to treat it well. While I may enjoy writing, maintaining a consistent, frequent publishing schedule can’t come before my health.

Coming back to Medium

As is evident by the fact that you’re reading this article on Medium, I have returned to writing on Medium. Notice I said “writing on Medium” rather than “writing for Medium”. Things are different now. This time around, I’m taking a whole new approach to earning money from Medium.

I am writing much less frequently on Medium, but I am publishing more often than I did before quitting. Now, I write only when I’m in the mood and am excited to do so. While I still care about the quality of my writing, I do my best to put my articles into the public space for my readers to engage before I consider editing.

Realizing the struggles of publishing in the partner program

I’ve only been publishing in Medium’s Partner Program for the last six months, but I’m much more aware now of the pains other writers have been facing on the platform. Since returning to Medium and publishing in its program, I’ve struggled to earn even $100.

When I was writing for Medium, $100 was pocket change for me. Now that I’m writing for myself on Medium, I see that it’s hard to earn a worthwhile amount of money in the program. It’s even harder if you don’t follow the crowd by writing about the latest trends.

The good news is that you can earn a significant amount of money on this platform. It definitely doesn’t come easy, so you may have to take a different approach to your current writing style and form.

Aside: Want to learn how to build more wealth from your Medium Partner Program earnings? Learn how to invest your money correctly in the stock market. Subscribe to my YouTube channel.

How I earned so much writing for Medium

We’ve covered my writing background, how I started writing for Medium, and the amount of money I earned from Medium each month. By now, you’re probably wondering how I managed to earn so much money writing for Medium.

If you’re expecting life changing advice about how to drastically increase your earnings writing in Medium’s Partner Program, you won’t find that here. However, all hope is not lost for your earning potential as a writer.

Revealing the truth behind my writing

Throughout this article, I have used syntactic and lexical ambiguities along with my assumptions of your likely expectations of this article, given the title and the context in which you’re reading this article, to lead you, the reader, to believe that I earned $142,000 per year writing in Medium’s Partner Program.

The underlying truth in my words has been that I earned $142,000 in salary for *writing code* for A Medium Corporation, Inc — also known as Medium.com.

If you feel duped, I understand. I wouldn’t blame you for trying to find the negative-clap button to teach me a lesson for leveraging ambiguities and people’s expectations to lead them through a story. I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to throw water at my face at the end of this article on your computer screen. And I surely wouldn’t blame you for hate-following me on Medium; do it … you won’t!

However, you should keep reading because you may be inspired to find a more lucrative way to put your love for typing and telling stories to good use.

Yes, I earned a $142K salary writing for Medium, but not how you may have expected

I have not told you any lies in this article, and I intend to keep it that way. What I want you to take away from this article is that you are able to earn as much as you’d like through the writing skills you have and are developing each day.

Being a good writer is largely about understanding your audience — their background, desires and goals — in order to tell compelling stories that will help them achieve their goals. Note that I didn’t mention “readers” there.

If you publish written articles on Medium, your audience is the people who read the content of your articles; thus, your audience can be referred to as readers. However, as a writer, your audience doesn’t have to be limited to readers. That also means that you don’t have to publish written articles to be considered a writer.

A writer is a person who uses written words in different styles and techniques to communicate ideas. (Wikipedia)

I consider myself a writer when I write code because I use written words in different styles, leveraging various techniques, to communicate ideas from my mind, through a computer, and to my end users. In this form of writing, I am also considered a software engineer. The people who use the results of my engineering work, the pieces of code I publish, are my audience.

As a full-stack software engineer, I have to understand the background, desires and goals of my audience in order to tell them compelling stories through the user experiences that I develop. The stories that I choose to tell, along with how I go about it, help them achieve their goals and fulfill their desires.

Translating your writing skills

“Lincoln, you’re reaching a bit here …”

Okay, sure. I’m reaching. But I’ve made the connection, and I want you to understand that, with time and commitment, your writing skills can translate smoothly into a more lucrative career than writing for a couple $100, or even a few $1000, per month. In the time that it takes you to earn $600 over six months, you could spend that time learning how to become a programmer by building something.

With another six months, you can go through a structured learning program to learn how to write code effectively. Add another six months, and you can secure and complete an internship writing code. By the time that’s over, you’ll have a good chance at obtaining a full-time position writing code and earning much more money than most writers.

Okay, I’m hopping off of my soap box now.

I don’t expect or want every content writer to change directions towards becoming a programmer; that would be silly. Writing code isn’t for everyone.

However, what I hope you’ll take away from this is that your writing skills can translate into various opportunities; all you need to do is look for those opportunities even if they don’t appear obviously related to your existing skillset.

Conclusion

Thanks for taking your time to read this article. I hope that you enjoyed the journey and appreciated the twist.

If you’re still looking for ways to earn more money from participating in Medium’s partner program, I suggest you check out my articles that report monthly data on the most featured articles on Medium.

Whether you loved or hated this story, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. I do my best to respond to every comment.