It Took Me a Year to Make Nearly $10,000 a Month on Medium. Here’s My Story.
Thinking about quitting? Wait, hear me out…
It’s been a crazy year. There have been some good months and some bad ones, a global pandemic and the most catastrophic presidency in the United States in my lifetime. It hasn’t all be great economically, either. I’ve had my $10,000 months and I got lazy for a while and had had some weaker months. That’s how freelancing goes, and it’s especially how it goes when you write for Medium. I’m OK with it and just accept the ebbs and flows as part of the gig.
When it comes to writing, change is the only constant. You win some months, you lose some months. But I’ve performed well enough often enough that $10,000 a month is my monthly goal and that’s where it’s likely to remain for the foreseeable future and I’ll keep it there throughout 2021. If I don’t make that in a month, it’s safe to say I have room to improve, at least in my own mind.
But how did I get here? That seems to be the $10,000 question I get asked a lot.
Let me first flip that question around and prompt you to ask yourself, “Why am I writing?” Stash that question in the back of your mind for a minute and take a journey with me from a modest start to $10,000 months.
My first month at Medium yielded a whopping $57. I wrote 124 stories that month. I’m going to repeat that because it deserves being repeated: In my first month on Medium, I wrote 124 stories and all I had to show for it was a puny $57. I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when that deposit came through…
I was disheartened. I was deflated. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to puke or cry more. It hurt, I’m not going to lie, it hurt bad. I didn’t understand curation. I didn’t know anyone on the platform. It all seemed like a foreign language. My pieces went nowhere after spending hours, even days pouring my heart out into them.
But I refused to give up…
Back in January 2019, I had a faint idea that one could make $10,000 in a month by blogging. To be honest, I’d read it on some website somewhere and took it as gospel. I didn’t think Medium was a place you could accomplish such a feat. At the time, I just needed a new place to write and an income to live on. Turns out, I was dead wrong.
I can almost hear the moment of cringe now when I boasted to my girlfriend that bloggers could make $10,000 a month. I’m fairly certain she rolled her eyes at me, even if after she turned away and walked into the other room. And understandably so. Your dreams always sound crazy to others until you manifest them.
But at that point, I hadn’t yet been there. I hadn’t proven myself. The other company I was writing for as a freelancer was up to six months late on the payments it owed me. So what if my productivity was through the roof, I was resembling a failed writer with a fledgling career more than anything else, even if I was churning out three pieces a day every day for $100 a pop (that would usually come painfully late).
My girlfriend gave me a lecture about why my quest was doomed to fail. So I did what any man would do: I assured her it wasn’t, picked my head up, and trudged on.
I sort of needed Medium to work. I couldn’t afford for it to flop like the previous company that didn’t pay or the current company that never paid on time. And thankfully, it did.
One year after that first month making a pitiful $57, I would end up a few hundred dollars shy of $10,000 month at Medium alone, in January 2020. In one year, my income monthly rose from $57 to $9,355 — and I didn’t write cookie-cutter pieces. I would go on to have equally awesome months before getting complacent and taking it easy as the pandemic set in and life’s priorities got in the way.
So how did I do it? And what can you learn from it? The first lesson to be learned is don’t be afraid to take chances. Where I failed in that first month was making the mistake of trying to play it safe and copy other people’s work. I would see these ultra-safe, friendly takes that looked like they were doing well and I figured I’d emulate that and make my way toward the first-class section of the success train. That failed miserably.
I wasn’t being authentic. I was trying to compete in areas that were already taken. I was writing what I thought other people did well for an audience I didn’t even really want.
So I went back to the drawing board and I wrote about what fascinates me. I dug deep into the depths of myself, unearthing the dark stuff we don’t usually talk about and put it into a story.
Then I sat nervously as I stared back and forth down the article I’d drawn up that challenged a lot of conventions. I was almost shaking, unsure if I should press publish or just delete the thing. And then I took a chance and went for it. And it paid off. I had my first “viral” piece.
My prior month’s stats were shattered, all because I took a chance and wrote what I thought was interesting and stopped trying to copy the success I saw around me.
If you haven’t had this happen to you yet, don’t give up. Keep trying. And don’t second guess yourself too much. If you replicate what you think people want to read, you might be missing out on that piece that makes people really stop and pay attention to you.
And if you haven’t had this happen yet, be prepared for the rush to subside after a few days — then you get to start working on doing it all over again. I kept up that process until I hit that arbitrary goal of $10,000 a month that I’d once read on a random site somewhere. Here’s that month.
In the subsequent year, I’d come up with a lot of interesting pieces that other people just weren’t doing, covering topics others weren’t writing about, and I’m proud of that fact. I didn’t take the shortcut, self-help path to Medium success. Instead, I came up with stories like:
- The History of Pornography: From the Paleolithic to PornHub
- Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Human Cannibalism
- The History of Euthanasia: The Good Death
Don’t wait for someone else to make your writing popular…
Another important step in the equation was the fact that I created my own publication that month instead of waiting for big publications to “make” me famous. I wanted to express myself and say what I wanted to say without interference from editorial staff who might not be too keen on taking the same risks that I wanted to take with my work.
I think a lot of us harbor this secret fantasy that if we publish at publications that have these massive followings, we’ll be seen, discovered, and everything will just work out wonderfully. But that wasn’t my experience. All of my best-performing pieces were self-published in my own publications.
You don’t have time to be waiting seven days on a ghost. If big pubs aren’t accepting your pitches, make your own pub and make it big. If you can’t find a path, carve it yourself.
Publications are a great way to get exposure, don’t get me wrong, and I employed a mixed strategy of doing both, but ultimately, when it came to the pieces that gained the most traction, they weren’t subjected to the perspective shift that comes along with writing for the editors of major pubs who have stringent standards in place they adhere to.
Give yourself a chance.
Don’t be afraid to dare. And if you’ve been thinking about quitting, consider where I’d be had I gotten deflated and given up. Swimming in my ignorance as I had no clue about the life I’d missed out on.
Wrapping things up, I’ve had a lot of people reach out lately and ask me about Medium and how to be successful. The very first question that pops in my head is what they mean when they use the word “successful.” Our ideas of success are as varied as our ideas of happiness. What might be a “success” for one person is a failure for another.
In the words of 20th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, those who have their reason “why” can bear almost any “how.” When you believe in yourself and what you’re doing, perseverance goes a long way.
Find your “why” and put it into words. What drives you, what makes you feel alive, what kicks your curiosity into overdrive, what kind of content can you not stop reading?
Write about that. Make it cool, make it gritty, dirty, unadulterated, raw, and real — make it human — and don’t water it down because you see others doing so. And most of all, make it unique to you. Don’t write like everybody else. At the end of the day, just being myself took me a lot farther than even the most sparkly-clean articles written to perfection could ever have. Don’t forsake readability and quality in the process, but dare to pick unique topics.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this story, you may enjoy the one below as well. If you haven’t, be sure to sign up for Medium here. You’ll get access to thousands of writers like me and you’ll be able to see all of my future stories.
