It’s Still Possible for New Writers to Earn Money on Medium. Here’s How.

Are you patient enough to do the work?

My experiment is winding down. There are about two weeks left.

My goal was to see if I could get to where I was making $1000 a month in 90 days with a brand new, anonymous Medium account. October is the last month and we’ve only been given the first week’s earnings so far.

I made $93.09 in August and $245 in September. I’ve made a little more than $183.12 so far in October.

My engagement is up. I made $61.77 in week one of October and $121.35 in week two. So, I’m going to go with — maybe I can reach my goal? I’ll have to definitely keep upping my engagement in the next two weeks. By a lot. Like, a whole lot. And that may or may not happen.

This experiment turned out to be a little bit odd for me.

No where near as straight-forward as I thought it would be. Because there was no way for me to really approximate how I would have attacked this thing if it wasn’t an experiment.

I haven’t been writing about my favorite topics. I haven’t been self-promoting much (in an effort to preserve the experiment.) I don’t go after building an email list or publications the way I would if this was my real gig. I mostly post and then click away and don’t think about my post again.

Spoiler: post-and-forget-it is not a great strategy for success.

I haven’t tried to get into any of Medium’s publications. And, when I have a really good post — I don’t post it there. I post it here, where I’m more likely to earn money with it.

But maybe more importantly: I can’t help the fact that I’ve already gone through Medium’s learning curve.

I learned a ton about how Medium works these days — things I couldn’t have otherwise known. And I think the experiment has been worthwhile. But I think I asked the wrong question.

The right question is this: Can writers who are new to Medium still join and be successful?

And I think I’ve answered that pretty soundly. Yes. Definitely yes.

I am 100 percent sure that I would have made more than $1000 last month, if this wasn’t an experiment. If I’d gone all in and this was my one and only gig.

I’m not sure that means that you would have, though.

Because I’m not sure you would have had most of your posts curated the way that I did. I’ve already learned how to write in way that Medium responds to. I’ve learned how to write to their editorial standards. If you’re a professional writer, you might be able to do that super fast. If you’re a new writer? It might take longer.

I also don’t know if you’d put in the work. If this wasn’t an experiment, I would have put much more time and energy into it. I would have written more and I wouldn’t have saved my best posts for a different account.

I couldn’t get to $1000 a month just posting — even daily — without self-promo. (I mean, I don’t think so. There’s still two weeks!) Not with such a small following (I’ve gotten up to about 450 followers as of today on my new account) and without a back catalog of work bringing in some money as well. And not when I wasn’t posting my best work.

I could have gotten there if I‘d written more often, promoted more aggressively, written posts that were more likely to get a lot of traffic, and worked toward building an email list (and used it.)

What I hope you get from my experiment.

I hope, if you’ve been following this experiment, that you’ve picked up the idea that you can do this. If you want to make an income writing on Medium — even if you’re just coming in now and you weren’t an early adaptor — it’s definitely possible.

This whole experiment came about because I was asked that question so often.

So, yes. It’s possible. But it’s not easy. This is not passive income. You’re going to have to work for it.

You’ll have to write often and be consistent. The more often you write, the more quickly you’ll get to a decent income. Because the more often you write, the faster you’ll build your following and back catalog of posts that are earning some money every month.

You’ll have to be patient. Even with curation, you need followers in order to really do well on Medium.

You’ll have to do some outreach. Being in other people’s publications matters when you don’t have much of a following.

You can make an income writing on Medium — if you treat it like a job. You’ll have to learn how to do the work, then you’ll have to actually do it.

(You can click here to download a free ebook that contains pretty much everything I know about actually doing that work.)

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Your following matters. A lot. Before my experiment, I really didn’t think it did. I thought it was a vanity metric. Sitting over here with a solid following, it didn’t seem like Medium was really sharing my work with anyone.

I was wrong.

If you don’t have followers, Medium literally doesn’t share your work with anyone unless you’re curated. That’s how Medium works now. Posting here, without being curated, is very similar to writing on a Wordpress blog. You just have to hope you got the SEO right and Google will send some strangers over.

If you are curated, then Medium shares your work with their followers, but how much that matters correlates with your following. I’m not sure how it works, but curated posts on my main account go a lot further than curated posts on my experimental account.

Let me show you what I mean. I wrote a post on my new account. It was curated, but not put into any pubication, and I shared a link on my personal Facebook account. It got this much traffic:

Here’s a post that I posted on this account. Like the post above, it was curated, but was not put into any publication. I shared it on my personal Facebook account.

Big difference.

I took the post above down from my experimental account and posted it again here. I put it in a publication (P.S. I Love You) and shared it on my personal Facebook page. Since it’s not about writing, I didn’t do any other self-promotion.

Again. Big difference.

Because I have a following here, I have a better chance for a post to really take off. That happens, usually, once or twice a month. It’s fun to get results like this.

That kind of surprise successful story hasn’t happened at all on my experimental account. Not even remotely close. Maybe because I’m not posting the same kind of work over there. But I think that at least in part it’s because I just don’t have the following there to boost a post up enough to engage Medium’s distribution machine.

In other words, I’d need someone at Medium (or maybe an algorithm?) to decide to show a post from my experimental account to way more people than those who are following me for it to take off.

Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter and Instagram and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation, and The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.