Medium Pays Me $20 per Hour to Write My Blog

Am I part of some secret club? Here’s how I make $20/hr from the Medium Partner Program.

Breaking news: it’s possible to earn a living wage on Medium, if you’re willing to lower your standards as a writer.

Do you have dignity? Do you not like to write about Medium? Do you need to get curated to satisfy your ego? This approach won’t work for you.

But, if you write as fast as you possibly can, you might be able to make a decent hourly wage on Medium.

Real-world example

I recently wrote a fun piece about some tips for your Medium profile. Medium has a lot of hidden features, so I like to share them. This post actually started as a Slack message to an online writer’s group that I participate in:

Said post took me less than 15 minutes start to finish, and honestly a lot of that time was spent looking for some good Harry Potter GIFs.

I love a good GIF.

Since I already knew the content, it was super fast to write and format. In total, it was about 315 words, and I type about 100 words per minute.

But such a short article can’t actually earn me any money, right? After all, it wasn’t even curated (because articles about Medium are never curated).

In one day, the article earned $0.18 from the Medium Partner Program:

In 30 days, earning $0.18 per day, that would be $5.40 — enough to pay my Medium membership fee for a month.

Most articles tend to have a precipitous drop-off after a month in my experience, but I feel pretty confident that said article will make me $5.

Earning $5 in 15 minutes is $20 per hour.

Is it a great-paying job? No, but it’s more than 2.75x the US minimum wage of $7.25/hr.

And I’d much rather earn $5 by posting my Slack message to Medium instead of just sending it off into the void.

What’s this mean for you?

Guess what — this post also took me 15 minutes to write. It may not be the best article you’ve ever read, but it’s short and inspirational.

More to the point: you can produce content much faster than you thought possible if you force yourself to, and call it done.

In fact, some of my best performing technical articles started off as low-effort 💩. I’m being super honest here.

For example, the following article has earned me over $428 so far, and it’s “evergreen” — I still get $30+ in royalties from it every month:

That article originally took me about 4 hours to write, and it was not good. I actually got a lot of responses to that article saying that people wish I had spent some more time with it.

So I listened to my audience and spent another 4 hours to revise it. Since then, I’ve given it some more minor updates, taking about another 2 hours.

In total, said post has earned me $40/hour so far — and it started off as a short, easy-to-write, not-great article.

The magic of blogging is you can always go back and fix it later.

Now get out there and get money! 💸💰💲

Dr. Derek Austin is the author of Career Programming: How You Can Become a Successful 6-Figure Programmer in 6 Months, now available on Amazon.