My First Month on Medium Visualized: $300, 300 followers, No Big Publications

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Abstract

acoiloiecaholjiegdaklelpig">beautiful Google Chrome extension</a> and used them to create a visualization in Tableau. It was an interesting exercise that sparked a few insights:</p><ul><li>Most of my articles were self-published in my own publication <b>Dare To Be Better. </b>Even though I have 2 articles in another publication, those articles were seen only by 20–30 people max. So either it wasn’t the right publication for these articles or publications don’t matter much after all. This is something I plan to explore more next month.</li><li>My 5 most read articles (as seen above) were all about things I genuinely love: the books I’ve read, courses I took, websites, and apps I use on a regular basis.</li><li>The length of the article didn’t really matter (you can see it for yourself when you open this data viz in Tableau and play with the filters).</li><li>Medium doesn’t allow embedding Tableau charts. Boo!</li><li>It’s not about trends, it’s about passion. Of course, you can get some easy views by writing on topics people desperately want to see (“How to earn $1,000 in one day without leaving your home”) but will these people become your loyal readers after discovering that you lied to their faces? Not sure.</li><li>Writing daily matters. At least, for my little publication. I published a few pieces back in January (when I haven’t even heard that you can monetize your content) and surprise — nobody noticed them. Then I had some health-related issues and disappeared from Medium f

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or almost a year. When I came back at the end of July, I committed to writing at least one blog post a day and earned $3 for a few articles. In August, I already made$ 300.</li><li>Curation is great and I always get excited when I see the magical “<b>Chosen for further distribution</b>” badge. But I do have some articles that performed way better than curated pieces. Go figure.</li><li>It’s hard to tell if the article is going to be successful during the first few days. Some of my blog posts were forgotten for weeks before people started reading them. So instead of refreshing those stats every 5 minutes, I’m trying to start writing something new instead. It proved to be a good distraction.</li></ul><h2 id="5d1f">Conclusion</h2><p id="3cf9">Alas, I don’t have any life-changing tips and tricks to offer. I’m not a professional writer. I’m not even a native English speaker.</p><p id="49a6"><b>All I can do is share my experience and offer you some encouragement.</b> I see too many articles on Medium from people are who are desperately trying to make money here, crack the algorithm, get more followers... But let’s not forget that first of all, Medium is a great creative platform to experiment and have fun! You can write about anything you want, design your own publication and profile, read amazing articles, find like-minded people, learn something new.</p><p id="e53d">Of course, money is important, but when was the last time you did something for the sheer fun of it?</p></article></body>

I don’t have any “secrets” to share. But I hope this will inspire you to find your path and keep writing.

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I genuinely love Medium. Its design, simplicity, community. I’m glad I finally decided to try writing on this platform.

For me, it’s not about algorithms. And it’s not about money either (even though it’s a nice bonus). It’s about finding like-minded people and sharing my passion with them. When one of my articles about geeky programming books with memes and jokes got more than 10K views, I was stunned. Do people really like reading about this? Oh wow. Finally, I’ve found my crowd.

As a proud nerd, I downloaded all my stats using this beautiful Google Chrome extension and used them to create a visualization in Tableau. It was an interesting exercise that sparked a few insights:

Most of my articles were self-published in my own publication Dare To Be Better. Even though I have 2 articles in another publication, those articles were seen only by 20–30 people max. So either it wasn’t the right publication for these articles or publications don’t matter much after all. This is something I plan to explore more next month.

My 5 most read articles (as seen above) were all about things I genuinely love: the books I’ve read, courses I took, websites, and apps I use on a regular basis.

The length of the article didn’t really matter (you can see it for yourself when you open this data viz in Tableau and play with the filters).

Medium doesn’t allow embedding Tableau charts. Boo!

It’s not about trends, it’s about passion. Of course, you can get some easy views by writing on topics people desperately want to see (“How to earn $1,000 in one day without leaving your home”) but will these people become your loyal readers after discovering that you lied to their faces? Not sure.

Writing daily matters. At least, for my little publication. I published a few pieces back in January (when I haven’t even heard that you can monetize your content) and surprise — nobody noticed them. Then I had some health-related issues and disappeared from Medium for almost a year. When I came back at the end of July, I committed to writing at least one blog post a day and earned $3 for a few articles. In August, I already made $300.

Curation is great and I always get excited when I see the magical “Chosen for further distribution” badge. But I do have some articles that performed way better than curated pieces. Go figure.

It’s hard to tell if the article is going to be successful during the first few days. Some of my blog posts were forgotten for weeks before people started reading them. So instead of refreshing those stats every 5 minutes, I’m trying to start writing something new instead. It proved to be a good distraction.

Conclusion

Alas, I don’t have any life-changing tips and tricks to offer. I’m not a professional writer. I’m not even a native English speaker.

All I can do is share my experience and offer you some encouragement. I see too many articles on Medium from people are who are desperately trying to make money here, crack the algorithm, get more followers... But let’s not forget that first of all, Medium is a great creative platform to experiment and have fun! You can write about anything you want, design your own publication and profile, read amazing articles, find like-minded people, learn something new.

Of course, money is important, but when was the last time you did something for the sheer fun of it?