My First $100 Month: Choices I Made, and Lessons Learned
My fourth full month got me into the top 7% of Medium writers
I typically do a monthly round-up story to share any of the Medium wisdom I acquired during the month gone by. Also, since I started writing on Medium in mid-July, I set myself a target, to reach the coveted $100-earnings club within 6 months i.e. by Jan 2021.
Writing on Medium is something I started to rekindle my love for writing, and not as an income source — I have a full-time job that takes care of that. Yet, the competitive nature within me, as in many of us, made me want to compete with myself to be consistent and get in the “elite club” of writers.
Earnings come from member read time, and by no means is the metric that determines the quality of writing — but probably a good judge of how many readers you’re reaching out to and actually engaging such that they give you a fraction of their precious time.
And so, when I got to the $100 club sooner than expected, I dragged my feet for 6 days feeling semi-guilty for having gotten there, but finally decided I should do what I do every month — and write this story. So, here goes.
Fan-Favorites are Often Not Critics-Favorites
If movie awards, book awards, all kinds of awards have taught us one thing, it is that the critics’ choice is quite often not the same as the fans’ choice or the popular choice.
The same goes with writing on Medium. If you listed the stories that gave you the most intellectual or literary joy while writing and then listed out your top earning stories — there is a high chance the lists will look completely different.
That is surely the case for me.
But what is important is that if you’re here also in part to make money, you need to push out stories that are a good mix of both. Focus on quality content — but mix up the popular ones with the literary gems.
If they’re the same, you’re in luck, but if not, then you’ll need to “sell your writing soul” a tad bit. Although to be fair, I do enjoy my “popular” pieces as well, as it is also a challenge to figure out what my audience likes and wants to read.
Continue the Focus on Quality: Curation = Sustained Earnings
My popular pieces may not have been philosophical or deeply-thought pieces, but they were written to a high quality.
My best earners have been True Crime stories — with very high average read times, but what’s been consistent is they’ve all been curated stories. I’ve had about 5 curated pieces within True Crime. Here is a snapshot of my best performer so far.
What’s not showing here is the average read time — 4 min 16 secs on a 6-min read. That’s pretty damn good.
I have another 8-min story with an average read time of 6 mins + and it is also trending towards $40 of lifetime earnings.
The fact that this story was curated meant that it had a 7–10 day streak of solid read times which meant that it brought in a few dollars for a sustained period vs. dying a quick 2-day death.
Most Engaging Stories May Not Earn As Much
Now coming to the critics’ favorite. Actually, funnily enough, this is also the fan-favorite — I got a ton of engagement and claps, but not enough “read time”.
This is because on any “advice” piece, the audience doesn’t need to read through every line in detail to get the broad idea — so these are unlikely to get long read times. Your best bet here is to pray for virality, which hasn’t happened for me yet.
This piece was curated in “Money” — one of the best performing topics on Medium. It got close to 1,500 claps and over 50 fans, yet only about $4 in earnings. Also, there was a lot of “external” traffic — which doesn’t pay!
I Never “Follow-for-Follow” and Never Will
The strategy to increase followers is different for everyone. And I am by no means belittling other strategies. But the “I’ll follow you if you follow me, or I’ll follow you in the hope that you will follow me back” strategy isn’t for me.
I follow the writers I really WANT to follow. And so, my following has organically grown to whatever it is today — a bit over 400. I grow 100 followers a month at a fairly steady rate.
A lot of people have gotten to 2000–3000 followers in 2 months, so I may be slow. But I’ll argue the “quality” i.e. the willingness of my followers wanting to read my stories is probably slightly higher than some of those.
But the truth is you’re focusing on getting to the maximum number of eyes that you possibly can so follow the strategy that suits you best.
My Learnings and Forward Strategy Summarized
- Focus on a combination of stories that bring you money, and stories that bring you writer’s satisfaction — for me that means about 5 $-earning stories and about 20 personally satisfying pieces. Because the reality is the 80–20 principle holds true on Medium as well.
- Quality should never be compromised — I continue to write every story with the goal of being high quality enough to deserve curation — whether I get it or not, except some that just aren’t meant for curation like this one.
- Consistency is still key — I wrote fewer stories in November than each of my other months, yet that “less” number was 23 — by no means a low monthly count.
- Followers are important, so grow them as you please — I’ll continue to grow as I currently do — i.e. hoping to find more people that like a story of mine and decide to follow me. I hope I’ll win this race going slow and steady as I go.
- Steady effort = Steady but sustained results — As you will see with my earnings chart in my feature image, I’ve grown earnings by a fair margin every month that I’ve been here. I hope to continue that, and learn every month!
- Virality can’t be chased — it finds you if you’re lucky AND good — I still haven’t found my viral article yet, but maybe one day I will. But the truth is I can’t control that, so I’ll never try to chase it, but I’ll be ready as can be for when it decides to come i.e. I will continue to write stories that are viral-worthy for when the stars decide to align!
With that, happy writing, and happy reading! I am always willing and open to learning and sharing my own ideas with anyone who wants to grow together — so feel free to reach out!
