Top Medium Writers Earn Thousand$ Per Month — and You Can Too

It’s not too late to establish yourself in the top slots on Medium

Although it appears more writers are joining Medium than ever, there’s still plenty of room at the top, if you’re willing to write your face off to get there. Only 7% of all Medium writers make more than a hundred bucks, but you don’t have to be a statistic.

We Medium writers write a lot. Like a whole lot. An every-freaking-day lot.

That’s the starting point. None of this is easy, but it’s not hard. You have to choose a tribe to serve, earn your place up the line, and create great content your audience will love to read (and interact with).

Your niche matters.

If you serve a niche with a ton of readers, you’ll have a better chance of growing your Medium following. If you choose a small, obscure niche, you may never earn a lot of money from your writing here.

Your following matters.

Although you won’t earn money directly from the number of followers you have, Medium, like all social platforms only delivers your content to a small percentage of your followers until your story is curated.

If you story isn’t curated, your views are determined by that small percentage of people who saw your article.

People with larger followings can boost their views by the sheer volume of their readership, regardless of curation, all due to this viewer percentage distribution.

Curation matters.

Write novel content worthy of a solid read. Fluff won’t get curated anymore. There are a few curators for hundreds of thousands of stories submitted every day. If you want to get curated, follow Medium’s rules, and make sure yours floats to the top.

You might get three curations in a row. You might go a couple weeks without one.

The luck of curation isn’t always based on quality, sometimes it’s based on being in the right in-box at the right time. You can’t control curation, so there’s no use in sweating over it. Although if you do want to get curated, make sure you publish your stories to a publication, not just yourself. Those are rarely curated now.

Old content matters.

If you want to earn residual income from your older Medium stories, you’ve got to keep them alive. The algorithm changes all the time. Sometimes Medium favors older stories, sometimes new.

If you take control of your own distribution, you can strategically paste the old stories you wish to keep alive, in your latest stories. Don’t worry about being repetitive. There are millions of readers. You’re one tiny fish.

Your title matters. A lot.

Medium stories are like TV channels or news headlines. Your title needs to tell the reader exactly what she’ll get by clicking on it. I used to try and be more clever with my titles, but I clever-ed myself out of readers. All the clever titles did poorly.

No, you can’t use clickbait, which I’ll define as a false title to bait-and-switch you into reading something entirely different. What you can (and should) do is learn the basics of copywriting.

A good title works the same as a good headline. Copywriters work their entire lives to perfect the art of the headline. If the reader doesn’t click on the story, she won’t read it. She won’t clap. And you won’t get paid.

Your subject matter-matters. A lot.

Same with the tags you choose. The niche you serve and the subjects you write about will have an audience cap. The larger the potential audience, the more engagement you could earn with your story.

If you write about some obscure herb in the middle of a rain forest, there may be a total of 34 people total on Medium, interested in your piece of content. The larger the scale of a problem you can solve, the larger the readership you’ll garner.

Your platform matters.

The beauty of Medium is you can use it to build your own platform while you earn money from your content. I look at it like double-dipping. And it’s a must-do practice if you want to have your own writing business.

This is where the real money will come from (the quit-your-job money).

The time to build that list, is now. These are your future readers.

This should be a list you own (instead of relying on social media or some other big-business platform). Tap the link below. Enroll in my Tribe 1K indie email masterclass. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (and your next 1,000) without spending one hot nickel on ads.

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August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.