My Results From My 30 Day Medium Challenge

And tips if you’d like to do it too

A month ago I read David Majister’s pledge to submit 30 articles to 30 different publications over the course of 30 days. He welcomed any reader to join in on the challenge, so I decided to take him up on the challenge, beginning on 2nd March.

David had some pretty awesome results from his challenge which you can see here:

Let’s get into my results

Through this challenge I wanted to:

• Double my follower count
• Double my earnings
• Submit the required 30 articles

My follower count surprised me the most.

As you can see on the screenshots below, I began the challenge with 78 followers and ended with 338 followers. That’s an increase of 260 followers, more than four times my initial follower count.

My revenue also exceeded my expectations too!

I’ve only been posting on Medium since mid-December 2020, so I am still very new to the platform and I didn’t expect to be earning lots of money yet. As you can see from the screenshot below, the challenge enabled me to almost triple my earnings from February. Yes, I know that $38.53 isn’t going to incentivise me to quit my day job soon, but I am thrilled with my results and my growth rate.

Finally, did I manage to post 30 articles?

No. In the end, I only managed to submit 18 articles, falling 12 short of my original goal. Of those 18 submitted articles, 14 were published, 3 were rejected and I haven’t heard back about the final one.

I won’t lie, I am very disappointed that I missed out on submitting 30. So what happened? Life got in the way for me. I run two small businesses, have a job, and have two small children. My kids got sick, work got busy and I got burnt out.

Would I do the challenge again?

Yes! I am planning to do the challenge again in the future because I am so thrilled with my results and how much I learnt over the past month. Also, I got to know David and Alana Rister, Ph.D. through their challenge posts. Both of them are fabulous writers and their posts are packed with plenty of value. I will continue to follow both of them in the future.

However, if I do the challenge again, I won’t just jump into it like I did this time. I had no plan for this challenge, and I believe a plan will help with success.

To be able to succeed in this challenge I recommend that you:

• Plan out some posts ahead of time. I hadn’t planned anything, so going in fresh every day was very difficult for me.
• Get approved as a writer for a variety of pubs first. I was only a writer for about 8 pubs when I started this journey, and of course, I tried to publish with them first. Some publications took up to 10 days to be approved. This is not negative feedback on the pubs, because I know they are very busy. It just goes to show that I needed to have already been pre-approved.
• Know submission guidelines well. Because I wasn’t an approved write for most of the publications I submitted to, I didn’t know all of their submission guidelines. I wasted a lot of time reading through guidelines of a variety of different pubs and comparing them to my articles. Had I just already known the guidelines and became familiar with them, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.
• Set aside some dedicated writing time. If you’re like me and just writing on Medium as a side hobby, you won’t have any time dedicated to writing. If you are planning on doing the challenge, arrange some writing time, where you can be focussed
• Get help if you need it. For everyone, this will look a little different. For me, I needed more help with my children when they were sick. I was trying to be everything at once, which is the ultimate recipe for burnout.

I intend to partake in the challenge again later in the year once I build up some more writing experience. Have you ever taken on a writing challenge? Will you take on this challenge in the future?

If you’re interested, here is my original pledge post:

And, here were my two most popular articles from the challenge: