Two Years, $30k, and 507 Articles on Medium. Here’s What I’ve Learned.

Every blogging success and mistake over the past 24 months laid out

I wrote my first story on Medium on September 12, 2018. Two years later, this is my 507th story on the platform. I honestly never thought I’d come this far.

I’ve earned nearly $30,000 in my spare time over the course of two years. My best month was $3,311.31 (May 2020); my worst was 1/1000th of that at $3.32 (Sept 2018). And I honestly believe the best is yet to come.

If you prefer the video version, you can check that out here:

My Learning Curve on Medium

People will have you believe Medium is a linear journey, that success means every month you earn more. It’s not true. Every month you learn more, but those lessons don’t necessarily correspond to more money.

Here’s a visual map of my journey on Medium, as illustrated by stories published and money earned per month. The blue bars are stories published, and the green line is money earned.

You can see a few months in, I quickly realized the more I wrote, the more money I earned. But I didn’t see the promised accumulation — it felt like I had to keep writing in order to continue earning that amount.

This led me to becoming a content mill, shamelessly recycling and republishing content in my frantic race to continue earning $1,000s per month. I knew some authors were making more by writing less, but I couldn’t figure out how.

You’ll notice a pretty precipitous drop about a year in — I started a new job, which didn’t let me write nearly as much — and I was tired. You’ll also see, however, that my earnings didn’t spiral down. I was writing less, but I cared so much more about every story I wrote. This meant I was earning more per story, even as I earned less and less per month.

In April 2020, about 18 months in, I picked back up. I published more, I earned more, which set me up for my first and second viral stories in May 2020. You’ll see that was my highest-earning month by a mile.

I had finally figured out the secret to writing on Medium — spend more time on each individual story, knowing it probably won’t go viral and earn thousands, but that it’s infinitely more likely to. I also had been quietly accumulating followers from my older stories, which meant I was gaining critical mass to reach virality. Anyone can go viral, but the more followers you have, the easier it is.

In June 2020, even after my viral success, I slumped again. Honestly, this was for personal reasons. The pandemic had been going on for several months, and I was all out of juice. It’d been six months at that point since I’d seen my husband, work wasn’t going well, and I was just plain tired. Very few stories got published in June, July, and early August compared to the storm of content I used to be able to publish.

Late August of this year, my strategy once again paid off — one of the stories I’d mustered the energy to write went viral, giving me my third viral hit.

Now, I have a much more refined plan of what I like to write on Medium. Long gone are the days when I could publish one or two times a day, but I’m earning more per month, on average. My writing quality has improved tremendously, and I’m earning more from external sources, too. I spend way more time working on my headlines than I used to, and I ensure every sentence I write is valuable and adds to my story.

Now you’ve seen my journey. Here are my takeaways.

1. Get Off the Platform as Soon as You Can

I’d shout this from the rooftops if I could. Start building your newsletter from day one. Come up with a good freebie (for example, I give people a free 5-day email course to make money on Medium) to show people you can provide value, and they’ll reward you down the line. Nowadays, Medium and my three other sources of freelance money have doubled my monthly income. But it started when I moved readers off Medium and onto my newsletter, YouTube channel, and Patreon.

That was part of the reason my income was so dependent on my content mill in the earlier months. Now, I can send people to read my stories with my newsletter, and even if I don’t write in a month, I can count on some income from YouTube, Patreon, and even the odd freelance gig.

Medium is an incredible place to make money by writing about what you love, but if you want an income you can rely on, that you’re not working below minimum wage for, get your readers off the platform.

2. Be Ready to Work a Lot Upfront

Go back and look at those first 12 months on Medium.

The first year I was on Medium, I wrote 383 articles. More than one article per day. I spent every spare second writing.

The second year, I wrote 118 stories. That’s less than 1/3 the number of stories. And yet despite that, I actually earned more money. Year 1 gave me about $13k, while Year 2 got me almost $17k.

But that second year wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t written like an absolute fiend in Year 1. I got vastly better at writing, I made connections with several big publication owners just through the sheer volume of stories I was pushing through their publications, and I accumulated an enormous backlog of stories that earn some money to this day (only about 1/4 of my month income, but last month that was around $500).

You don’t have to write every day to accomplish that, but I did. Other writers have learned the same lessons through far less writing, but it may be that you need the reps just like I did.

3. Medium Will Change Right Under Your Feet

Two years on Medium makes me a bit of a veteran: I’ve seen a heck of a lot of changes, and I’ve survived them all.

The shift to curation — October 2018

About a month after I began writing on Medium, curation became a thing. Suddenly, there was a glut of articles about how to maintain 60% or 70% curation. There was mystery around the topic, and a lot of bitterness around writers who’d been doing well and suddenly weren’t anymore.

Some people stuck around; others left. I underwent the painful process of learning how to write to be curated and stayed on. Back then, curation was rocket fuel — uncurated stories got 100 views and curated ones were guaranteed at least a 1,000. But then, that changed.

The shift to partner pubs — May 2019

Six months after that, Medium shifted again — the hot topic was publications. They unveiled several of their own pubs and announced they were partnering with new ones, like Better Marketing, Mind Cafe, and others. Suddenly if you wanted a shot at getting any views, you had to pitch and get into their pubs. That’s all the homepage was at that time — Medium-owned and -partnered publications.

Curation still mattered, but it was no longer the only factor for success. To get your stories on the homepage, you had to get into these new pubs.

Again, my Medium experience shifted as a lot of the names I’d been used to seeing slowly disappeared. You evolved to take advantage of the change, or you left.

I started pitching to Forge, OneZero, Human Parts — and reaped the rewards.

The shift to reads versus fans — October 2019

About a year ago, there were a ton of clap threads on countless Facebook groups. The idea was simple: You’d post your story and clap for everyone else who had posted.

The reason was that Medium paid by claps. The more claps, the more money. Medium then changed everything when they announced they’d pay by reads instead.

To me, it made way more sense: many of my readers didn’t even know you could clap. Plus, clap threads were only an indication of how quickly you could post your story on a Facebook group, rather than a sign of your story being engaging and rewarding for readers.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice a pattern — once again, a lot of people got annoyed at the change and left. I stopped posting on the groups, focused hard on making my stories more interesting and formatted in a way to keep reader attention — and stuck around. This was around the same time that the maximum amount of money a writer could earn on Medium absolutely skyrocketed — it went from about $5–10k per month to regularly around $20–$50k per month.

The shift to followers — September 2020

You may have seen Medium’s latest announcement that followers would be prioritized for writers. In a way, it feels like we’ve come full circle. Once again, who you follow is what Medium says will matter most in showing you your reading recommendations.

I still don’t know what this will look like, but I’m excited to find out. The main takeaway here is to ensure that you don’t get married to any one way of success, you persevere through changes, and you keep an open mind about how you can keep going.

Medium is constantly gaining and losing faces. The main factor for success is if you simply stay on here, writing, through all the weather shifts.

4. You Can’t Count on Your Audience

This was the lesson that was the most of an ego-wound — that I wasn’t Michelle Obama. People were not interested in my words simply because they came from me. I couldn’t get away with posting titles like “On Creativity” and expect people to read them. No, I had to earn every read that came my way.

And it’s fair — as a discerning reader myself, I learned that even as I only clicked on stories that looked entertaining, enlightening, or at least novel, I couldn’t expect my readers to do any differently.

I started spending 10 minutes on average working on each title — doing proper research on what other stories were popular on that topic, testing them out on family members, Googling keywords to see what had already been done and what hadn’t.

It worked. Most of my titles now are far more engaging and descriptive without being clickbaity, and I have the reads to prove it.

When I first watched Tom Kuegler’s webinar, two years ago now, on how to make money writing, he made it seem so easy — like anyone could start typing on a keyboard. And he was right. Anyone can do what I’ve done. As long as you create quality content and you’re willing to roll with Medium’s punches as they themselves explore how to show the best content to the right reader, and how to reward writers for those words, you’ll be successful.

I began writing thinking I’d be a cat blog, but now I’ve earned a literally life-changing amount of money. I’ve discovered my own style of writing, I have a YouTube channel, and I found freelance clients.

Medium is the best place on the internet to make money writing about what you love. I’ve been living that truth for the past two years, and I’m looking forward to many more.