avatarMira Lucas

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My First Four Weeks on Medium

My stats, earnings, and the three lessons that I learned in my first month

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

I just finished my first month on Medium.

Technically, that’s a lie, because I started being a Medium member over a year ago (when I wrote one story, about Chuck Palahniuk, Tim Ferris and the importance of making intentional mistakes).

I published this story on February 26, 2021. And since then, I haven’t been writing. I’ve been reading. This brings me to the first thing I learned:

1. The importance of reading

Reading is important.

I know that a lot of people value quantity over quality over Medium. And it’s understandable, because statistically if you want to increase your chance of going viral, you need to put a lot of stuff out there.

So I understand people saying that the key to success is to write daily.

But I think that another important key to success is to read daily.

I spent over a year reading stories and not writing (or earning) anything. But I don’t regret not being productive during this time.

It made me understand Medium. It made me understand other writers. I was able to learn from their stories, I was able to learn from their writing, and, of course, I had fun.

And this brings me to the second lesson I learned:

2. Community

I’ve only been writing for a few weeks, but already I’ve noticed how valuable the community on Medium is.

How nice it is to get feedback (both positive and negative) on your stories. How nice it is to be able to engage directly with other writers, and how nice it is to feel like your writing matters somehow, even if it is only in a small way.

This is entirely new for me.

Most of my income comes from freelance journalism, and even though I like doing that a lot, I never get any direct feedback. I don’t know the people who read my stories. Maybe I get a message from a friend who saw something I wrote every once in a while, but that’s it.

On Medium, you’re in direct contact with your readers. They can tell you what they liked, and they can point out potential mistakes.

And it also goes the other way around: you’re in direct contact with the authors of the stories you like.

3. It’s ok to be vulnerable

I find myself being a lot more personal and vulnerable on Medium than I am on other platforms.

One of my first stories, for example, was about rejection.

And I just wrote a story about my first Tinder date (which also ended up being about rejection somewhat).

And even though it can feel a bit scary sometimes, it’s also very nice to see that people respond in a positive and encouraging manner. So I’ll continue in sharing not only my successes but also my fears and weaknesses.

My stats and earnings

So how did the first few weeks go for me? I earned a total of $29.53.

This isn’t a crazy amount of money, of course, but it’s still very nice to be able to make money writing about topics that are important to me. And it’s only my first month, so I’m curious to see how the next months go.

What was more important to me, was the amount of views, reads, and claps I received. Here are my views and reads:

My views in March (image by author)
My reads in March (image by author)

There’s also an encouraging spike towards the end of the month (although that has gone down a bit again).

I also really enjoy looking at my read ratios, as I think these are a good measure of how engaging your stories are.

Here are my stories in order of read ratio.

My stories in order of read ratio (image by author)

As you can see, the story about my Tinder date and the story about self-help books both did quite well. The story with the lowest read ratio (31%) is about online magazines that pay for poetry.

I’m not sure what caused the difference in read ratios, but I do think it’s a good way of seeing which stories are interesting or captivating and which aren’t.

In conclusion, I’m very happy with my first month on Medium.

I like that I made a bit of money, but I’m most grateful for the interactions that I’m able to have with other readers and the feedback that I’m receiving through comments and stats.

I’m looking forward to April. :)

I hope you enjoyed reading this. If you’d like to support me as a writer, consider signing up to become a Medium member. It’s just $5 a month, and you get unlimited access to Medium.

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