My Second Month In A Row In The Top 8%

Those who earn over $100 a month at Medium are among the financially most successful 8% of writers on the platform. It took me a year to reach this milestone.

My journey on Medium began on March 1st, 2019. I don’t remember the first time I heard about this platform, but I wrote my first article because I was looking for a way to build a second revenue stream.

Until then, I was solely dependent on my income from Amazon. Since November 2018, I live exclusively from my books. Over time, I became more and more uncomfortable with the idea of being entirely dependent on Amazon, so I started looking for additional sources of income.

A journey with ups and downs

My first attempts at Medium were not very encouraging. I quickly had to realize that it took enormous efforts to be seen on this platform. When quick successes failed to materialize, I drastically reduced the time I spent writing articles.

Over the next few months, I published only a few articles per month. So I was not particularly committed to my Medium career.

Only in September 2019 did I decide to publish daily on Medium. I had understood that I would have to work continuously over a more extended period to slowly but surely achieve more success on the platform.

I became friends with the idea of having to work a lot for many months for very little money. If I held out long enough, the reward would come eventually. I was ready to make a bet on the future.

In my first month, when I really took it seriously, I earned $56.90.

By October 2019, I had already made $82.06, and by December, I had made another $80.95.

After that, I had to cut my work back to Medium again, because my next book had to be finished. I could not permanently use all my time for writing articles and neglect my time for writing books. I earn too much money with my books for that.

It will be a very long time before I can earn anywhere near as much with my articles as I do with my books.

Accordingly, my medium incomes fell drastically again in the next two months.

In January 2020, I earned only 40.28 dollars.

In February, at 43.21 dollars, things went about the same as in the previous month.

The reason why then March became my first month, with over 100 dollars, was Illumination.

Although I had already started publishing daily again on March 1st, it was only when @myildizmel asked me on March 23rd if I wanted to write for his new publication Illumination that everything changed.

In November 2019, for the first time on most days over 100 views. That was four months before I started writing for Illumination.

In March 2020, there was only one day left where I had less than 100 views. That alone would be remarkable, but since March 23rd, the day I joined Illumination, I haven’t had a single day under 200 views.

Also, the number of reads and the ratio of views to reads has increased enormously since that day.

This development was insane for me. It turned out that joining Illumination was much more critical for my career on Medium than publishing every day.

But that doesn’t mean that I can publish less now. The Illumination effect would not be nearly as strong without daily releases. Both together were necessary to break the $100 mark.

April could now bring in a few more dollars than March. Today, on the last day of the month, I am only $1.82 away from my March result.

In March, I earned $104.04 on Medium.

By April 29th, 2020, I had already earned $102.22. If today, April 30th, I were to surpass my March result, it would be a great success for me.

March had one day less than April. To exceed the March in April would, therefore, be all the more pleasing.

An exceptional article

My income is by no means evenly distributed among all my articles. Some make good money, while many others make no money at all.

There is one article that leaves all others far behind.

This article was distributed in Science. I have often heard that curation does very little in the short term, but can make an article visible for months.

This is precisely the case with this article. To date, this article has generated 2000 views at 85% internal views.

Most of the views came directly from the platform.

From its publication until today, the article has generated a total of 115.28 dollars. For the really successful authors, this is, of course, peanuts, but for me, this is an impressive number, because no other article comes even close to this amount.

These are the lifetime stats of this article.

The big spike on the right was on April 24th, 2020, just under five months after the release. Any non-curated article would have sunk into the depths of the Medium Ocean during that time, never to be seen again.

In April 2020, this article has so far accounted for $28.82. Without it, I would not have exceeded the $100 in March or April.

To make it clear how much this one article stands out from all the others, I show you a screenshot of my top 5 articles in April. I think the numbers speak for themselves.

Conclusion

There were three reasons for me to earn over $100 on Medium two months in a row:

1. To publish daily. Every day without publication has an immediate effect on the statistics.

2. being part of a strong community. Without Illumination and the influential community of authors and editors in this extraordinary publication, the enormous increase in views and reads since March 23rd would not have been possible.

3. have at least one Outlier article. A single piece that has been curated can eclipse all others for months and contribute massively to the overall result. Not every curated piece has this kind of impact, but an uncurated article will never be able to do so.

I hope you were able to gain some insights from this report that will help you with your further way to Medium.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

Do you want more of this?

Receive weekly emails, and don’t miss any of my articles.

subscribe here http://bit.ly/ReneJunge

Read also: