Making Money on Medium Is a Whole New Game

Don’t fall for old advice about making the big bucks.

I am highly irritated as I write this. My entire day was thrown off because of an email I received this morning. It was from yet another person trying to sell me a class about making big money each month on Medium.

My original plan was to write an article about pen names today, but that got tossed aside when I read the email that came in this morning. I know pen names aren’t a super riveting topic, but I felt I had something of value to say about it.

Anyway, the thing that bothered me so much about this particular email was that the writer had recently sent me an email belly-aching about how they aren’t making very much money from Medium anymore. Apparently, the remedy for that problem is to sell a bunch of classes to make up for what they no longer make from the Medium Partner Program.

I’m sorry, but that’s not how I roll. I don’t appreciate it when people lie to me and rip me off because they need money.

Guess what? I need money too. I have a bunch of rescue cats to support. I have bills to pay. I need money to put gas in my car to drive halfway across the state to get a COVID vaccine. But I digress.

I’m going to try to calm down now. I really shouldn’t have chewed half a pack of caffeine gum followed by some chocolate and my daily medication – breakfast of champions.

In the past, before writing on Medium, I took three classes about how to make money on Medium. Each course was different; some were better than others.

I will break down everything that I learned from those classes and put it in this article for free. No charge. I am also going to include helpful information that I have learned on my own. Pay close attention.

You need to write regularly on Medium. You need to write frequently on Medium. You need to write well. You need to write what readers want to read. You need to do this for an extended time; no one knows precisely how long. After some unknown period, you will get more readers, which translates into reading time which translates into money. Medium can change the rules at any moment, which will make all of this advice worthless, which is no big deal because you aren’t supposed to make money on Medium anyway. Only a minuscule minority of writers make decent money on Medium, and that’s how it’s designed to work.

That is what I learned from the classes I took, in a nutshell. There you have it, for free.

By reading Medium, I learned that Medium is currently moving toward a “more relational” Medium. I have no idea what that means.

Some days I think it means that you will only have the same five readers every day, and you will be able to invite them over for cookouts and birthday parties and stuff like that after the pandemic is over. Just kidding, of course.

Does anyone who is offering these classes emphasize that they have been writing on Medium for years, that they have tens of thousands of followers, that they made the big bucks before this whole “more relational” thing was going on, that their views have tanked, that their reads have tanked, that they now make far less money, and that they are showing you old screen shots of their Medium Partner Program earnings?

This is the type of stuff you need to look out for regarding the money-making aspect of these classes.

There are classes out there that can offer you excellent information, but be very cautious about the aspects of the classes that address earning money from the Partner Program right now.

Earning money on Medium is a whole different ball game than it used to be. If these high rollers are struggling, a newbie certainly isn’t going to have an easy time of it.

I am a newbie, and I know what I am talking about. I don’t have a lot of followers, I have far fewer readers, and I’m not able to publish top-notch stories three times a day every day.

I am not a machine. I am a human who has things come up that I have to deal with, and chronic depression is part of bipolar disorder that likes to rear its ugly head all too frequently.

Sometimes what I write sucks. Sometimes even what I think is a good story falls flat. Stuff happens, and I earn virtually nothing for the day.

If I didn’t have a husband who works his tired-old-ass off so that I can sit and write Medium posts, I would be living in a cardboard box from a stove that fell off the back of a delivery truck. That is not a pretty picture.

No one knows exactly how to make money from the Medium Partner Program, given this “more relational” stuff that is going on. This is a new game, and no one seems to know the new rules.

We newbies are having a challenging time getting traction. So, if you decide to take a class or two or three like I did, don’t expect to follow the suggestions and automatically make money like the people who are teaching the classes did. They have been around for quite a while, and their rules were different than they are now.

We need to figure out the money-making rules on our own. That’s not to say that you can’t get valuable information from the classes, just don’t plan out your finances based on how some of these classes make you think that you can earn lots of money if you keep writing stuff that people want to read consistently.

If I were to teach a course, I would call it “I Don’t Have a Clue How To Make Money on Medium.” It would be free, and we could all complain to each other about how we aren’t making any money.

And we would tell each other to keep writing because that’s all anyone can think to do.

Sound advice, and it’s free.

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Linda Kowalchek is a work in progress and a member of the typewriter generation. She spends her time with her husband and her rescue cats waiting for golf balls to crash through their windows. PSA: Don’t live next to a golf course.