I’m So Grateful For All The Money I Made During My Time Away From Medium

Passive income is always nice, but it’s the absolute best when you really need it.

A while ago I wrote about why I prefer Medium over Vocal Media and the ability to make passive income is at the top of the list. There’s no such thing as passive income on Vocal because in order to make a cent I would have to spend time promoting my own articles and even then the best I can hope to make is only a few cents.

When people talk about making passive income it’s usually talked about as a way to just make more money period, but not many people are talking about how incredibly helpful a little extra passive income can be when life happens and you want or need to take a break. I’m not going to act like I make a ton of money on Medium, not even close. I’m still new and the amount that I’ve made is tiny compared to the veterans on here, but $1 that I didn’t have to work for is a $1 that I didn’t have to work for. I’m truly grateful that I am able to make money on this platform every single month.

Most people know what passive income is but for those who don’t, passive income is money that you earn from work you previously did without having to keep putting more time/energy into it. This is sometimes referred to as “making money while you sleep.”

Medium is a great example of this because you can continue to make money off of old articles you wrote weeks, months, and even years ago even if you’re barely active on the site.

For Medium in particular you do have to remain at least a little active, publishing a minimum of one article every 6 months to remain part of the paid partner program. But having to publish a minimum of two articles a year while continuing to get paid from old articles is still a pretty great deal. Obviously, this only works if you’ve built up a library of popular articles that people continue reading well after they were published. But the point is it’s still a possibility. And like I said before a $1 I didn’t have to work for is a $1 I didn’t have to work for.

My Time Away

In mid-November, my mental health wasn’t in the best place so I stepped away from Medium. The longer I was away, the harder it was to come back. So what was meant to be a 2-week break turned into a month. And even when I did start publishing again in mid-December, it wasn’t much. I’m still struggling to balance work, my weight loss goals, writing, and just generally conjuring up the energy to do anything beyond what I have to do. Winter struggles.

How Much I Made In My Time Away

In October after successfully completing the challenge to publish 30 articles in 30 days I made $36, which was a nice increase from $1-$4 in previous months when I was barely trying on Medium. I was hoping to continue on this trend and make my first $100 in November, I didn’t quite hit that goal.

In November I had a goal to write a gratitude article every day as well as some other goals I wanted to accomplish in my personal life. None of that happened. The articles I wrote in November weren’t winners. I wrote 12 gratitude articles in my personal publication that got low views, but I wasn’t expecting them to do well. I also published an article about my emotional struggles with gaining weight and a final article explaining why I ended up failing my gratitude challenge. 14 articles in total.

Yet I was still able to double my earnings from October to November. I went from $36 to $71 because of one article I wrote at the end of October that got a lot of attention. The article answered a question that had been weighing on my mind for weeks. I figured one of the many gurus on this site has already written about it, but what I found instead was information that I knew couldn’t be right. This prompted me to finally do the research and find the answer myself. I figured out the difference between a view and a read and wrote about it. The title expressed exactly what the article was about (aka it was not clickbait), which lead to a lot of positive comments thanking me for the information. It turns out a lot of people were just as confused as I was, hence making the article so popular.

In November that article accounted for $40 of what I made with the runner-up being the article I wrote about gaining weight which made close to $5. The rest of the money I made in November mostly came from the articles I wrote in October.

In December I was still mostly away, publishing only 2 articles in total. I made far less money in December than I did in November but honestly, I’m ecstatic to have made over $30 when I barely did a thing.

There are a variety of articles on Medium about Medium, some helpful, some not helpful, and a lot that just repeat the same information. Yet I came across nothing that truly explained something I wanted to understand. The information had been so easy to find I felt like maybe people already understood the difference, but I figured it would help at least a few people. Turns out it has helped much more than a few people.

If you don’t know the answer to something (Medium related or not), don’t wait to come across the answer by chance, be intentional about finding the answer, and write about it. Not only will you be helping yourself, but you’ll also be helping others and it could very well end up being the article that makes you the most amount in passive income. Just make sure the title and body of the article match, nobody likes clickbait.

Thank you for taking a moment to read this. My mission is to live my life as positive and healthy as possible, both mentally and physically. Consider following my publication positively healthy vibes where I’ll be writing about my on/off battle with depression as well as my journey to lose 99 lbs.

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