My Medium Journey

My First Month on Medium: A Realistic Review

So, I’m back with another update. This time I have achieved a very exciting milestone:

I have just finished my first entire month writing for Medium!

Wow, just wow! I cannot believe that I have stuck to this goal and I am so happy with the results.

The hard work definitely paid off.

For those of you who are new to my profile and have never heard of me before, my name is Joel and I am a 16-year old based in the UK who writes about photography and tech.

I also run a photography blog called Photoaspire alongside this Medium page and you should go and check that out too if you wish.

If you haven’t read any of my previous progress reports on Medium, I highly suggest you go and take a few minutes to go and take a look at those before you continue reading this article:

These will help you get a better idea of why I set myself certain goals and you can see how I have progressed.

If you have read those articles and you are eager to see how I have done, keep on reading!

Let’s get straight into the stats and earnings!

How many views and reads did I get?

First of all, let’s talk about the views. 14 days ago, I had gained about 400 views in the first fortnight.

Not bad, but I could definitely push myself to gain more views.

In order to do this, I wrote nearly once a day and I have interacted and engaged with the community a lot more.

I have also made it a goal of mine to reply to every comment I receive on my posts. If you have any thoughts on any of my articles, feel free to give me a shout and I’ll get back to you.

So, how many views did I get for the whole month? Here you go:

Wow, that is a large improvement. This means that in the past fortnight I have gained 1,000 views on my writing.

This is a 250% increase compared to the month before

What fascinates me, even more, is that the traffic is consistent, too. It doesn’t just dip as soon as the initial traction is over.

As you can see from the graph, I had an average of 40–60 views a day.

Almost all of my articles were submitted to publications. The rest were put into my own publication, which I will explain later in this article.

I am also very pleased with the number of fans and reads I received. This means I am averaging a 40–45% read rate and an 8–12% fan rate. Not bad!

I have also been curated on a few of my articles too and this definitely does have an effect on my views and earnings:

This article was curated and I published it 23 days ago.

Thanks to the curation, I have steadily been earning around $0.30 from this article alone.

This is why it is handy to write for curation as it can generate you a passive income and your articles will be promoted to people across the platform over a longer period of time.

I have also noticed that the individual views for my articles have also increased, too:

These images are in order of date published, from left to right.

The articles that were curated have now surpassed 100 views and a few of my articles, newer and older, are starting to creep past the 10 fan mark.

I am also happy with the read ratio on these articles, with the lowest being 29% and the highest being 68%.

Overall, I am proud of the views I have received and it means I am gaining a lot more traction on my posts.

So what impact have these stats had on my follower count?

This month, in particular, I have been making a great effort to try and gain a following.

In order to do this, I have commented, clapped and highlighted on other relevant articles in the niches I write for.

I have also followed other writers who write about topics similar to mine.

Thanks to the engagement with the community and interacting with other fellow writers, I am now at a total of 316 followers.

This is an amazing number, particularly considering that it is my first month writing on the platform.

These followers were gained only from the platform and I do not have any other audiences I could have used to give me a boost.

I am also a top writer in 2 categories: Photography and Art.

Getting top writer status in these tags has always been a goal of mine as it shows to others who stumble across my profile that I am a trustworthy and reliable writer.

This will no doubt have had an impact on my follower count as it will make more people likely to press that follows button once they have seen the top writer tags.

My next step is to gain top writer status in creativity and entrepreneurship and to achieve that, I am going to write more articles on these topics, alongside my photography articles.

I also hope to reach 500 followers in the next 30 days, though hopefully, I will reach this goal a lot quicker.

Last, but definitely not least, how did all these stats impact my earnings?

I earned over $30 in my first month on Medium

This is the bit a lot of you will no doubt want to find out about.

How all of this hard work and effort transpires into cold, hard cash.

Well, I can definitely say it is a great start and I recommend you write on Medium if you want to earn a little on the side, too.

In total, I have earned $31.01.

This is an amazing result for my first-month writing on the platform.

This figure is very motivating and it will no doubt grow exponentially as I write more articles.

This is where curated articles come into play. These articles are promoted to people on a consistent basis for weeks or even months. This means that you will earn around 10–30c from the curated article after the initial peak of traffic.

If you can write a lot of articles that get curated, this can add up to potentially $3–$8 of passive income/day.

I am happy with this result and it definitely motivates me to write more often.

I am probably going to write daily as much as I can and on the days I cannot write, I will still earn revenue passively from the previous articles.

This is known as exponential growth and all of the past articles earning a few cents a day soon add up!

So, that’s the stats, earnings and followers taken care of.

But what about my personal goals? Did I manage to meet them or did I fall a little behind?

Did I meet the goals that I set?

14 days ago at that progress update, I set myself some goals to try and achieve for the next 2 weeks.

Let’s take a look at what they were and see if I have achieved them:

I can definitely say I have achieved a lot of these goals, though I have not been able to complete them all.

Overall, I am still happy with these results and it definitely helps me to outline what I need to do for my next steps. But before I mention my next plans and steps, let’s go over the goals one by one and see whether I have achieved them:

• Publish at least one article/day — Failed, published one every 2 or 3 days
• Reach 300 followers on Medium — Achieved, 316 followers
• Comment on 4 articles/day — Failed, I will comment, highlight and clap for more engagement
• Reach a total of 1,400 story views — Definitely passed, reached over 1,400 views
• Gain 5 subscribers — Failed, got a total of 5 subscribers, but I haven’t gained 5 subscribers
• Gain 100 fans across all my articles — Yes, I have nearly 150 total fans
• Reach 50 followers on my personal publication — Failed, 10 followers. I am going to also promote my personal publication more often, too.

Because I haven’t met a few goals, I am going to set myself some new targets for the next month.

These goals will then take me up to the next month where I will do another progress review for you all:

• Publish at least one article/day — I will do my best to achieve this
• Reach 500 followers on Medium — I am confident I will reach this goal
• Comment and engage with the community for 20 mins/day — This is a better goal to set than commenting on a certain number of posts per day because I may choose to clap or highlight instead.
• Reach a total of 3,000 story views — This is going to be a big target for me but if I publish consistently I believe it will certainly be achievable
• Reach 10 email subscribers — I will promote my email list and my FREE course more often and hopefully, I will reach this goal
• Gain 300 fans across all my articles — Fans are a handy metric to determine how well your content is performing. I will definitely be aiming for this.
• Reach 50 followers on my personal publication — I will be pushing this publication more now and I will link it into my articles to get more followers.

I will use these goals as benchmarks for the next month and I look forward to giving you an update in a month’s time.

And finally, THANK YOU!

Thank you to each and every one of you for making this possible.

Having a following of passionate readers who engage with my content means a lot to me and I look forward to growing it now and in the future.

Thanks to those who have followed me and come back for more of my content.

And thanks to those new here who have not followed. I hope you have enjoyed reading my content and this article and I look forward to hearing and engaging with you soon.

As mentioned earlier, if you want to follow my new personal publication, go and follow it down at the link below:

And for those of you who want to take your photography to the next level, I also have a FREE 7-Day Photography Bootcamp which you can sign up to.

This will help you to kickstart your photography journey with all of the basic skills you need.