How Many Fans Do You Need To make at Least $100 a Month on Medium?
Use Other Writers Income Reports to Boost Your Earnings
It’s sort of a perverse pass time to read other writers' income reports. I think we kind of do it out of a combination of wanting to see what’s possible to make on Medium and a way of beating ourselves up because we aren’t making anywhere near that kind of money.
The thing is, there is valuable information located in writers' income reports that can help you achieve the success you’re looking for on Medium. So why you shouldn’t care how much another writer makes; you should care how they made it.
When I first started on the platform, after learning how to publish articles and other formatting tips, I wanted to know how writers were paid. At first, I thought it claps were what mattered.
After more reading, I realized it was fans that determined how big our Medium paychecks would be. While there were other factors, if no one clapped, nothing else mattered.
Once I had that information, I quickly realized that ultimately, Medium is a numbers game.
The more paying members (fans) clap for your work, the more money you will make. Now getting those fans is definitely not easy with Medium so deep behind the paywall and most outside efforts at marketing increase views, not fans.
However, once you know how many fans you need to reach the financial goals you’ve set, you can create a content plan to hit your monthly engagement numbers.
The Research
First, you need to know how many fans it takes to hit whatever monetary goals you’ve set. And the way you get those numbers are through writers income reports.
Once I knew fans were the magic money number, I being to look to see if I could figure out how many fans I needed in a month to clear $100.
Why $100?
Less than eight percent of active Medium writers in any given month make $100, so it seemed like a good goal to have for my first month on the site.
Now that I knew I wanted to make $100 in a month and I needed fans to do it, I looked for Medium writers who had recently made $100 in a month and wrote about it.
It was important that I found writers who were writing income reports in 2019 and better still if they were from summer 2019 because that’s when the most recent changes on Medium went into effect.
After a bit of digging, I found the perfect case study in Michael Bellman, who posted his income report for July 2019:
For July these were Bellman’s stats:
Views — 1423 Reads — 1021 Fans — 246
And for the month he earned $170
I then looked at his Month 2 income report:
For June Bellman’s stats were:
Views — 2041 Reads — 1459 Fans — 427
And for the month he earned $135
And finally, I looked at his stats from his first month on Medium:
Views — 417 Reads — 304 Fans — 138
And for the month he earned $46.29
Next, I took the information from his three income reports and compared it to other writers income reports I found on Medium. I then poked around to see if I could figure out how much a single fan was worth.
After some reading, the consensus seems to be that, on average, one fan is worth 50 cents. While sometimes fans may be worth as low as 20 cents and as high as 70 cents, I kept with the 50 cents figure when trying to determine how many fans I needed to make $100 in my first month.
After I completed my research, I came to the conclusion that I needed to have at least 300 fans in my first month to make at least $100.
So now I just needed to get 300 fans.
The Plan
To get to 300 fans in my first month, I decided on the following plan:
- I would write at least one post a day
- I would follow 125 paid members a day
- I would comment read, clap and comment on at least five articles a day
- I would market and engage in Facebook Medium communities
I should have added publish in publications to the list, but no one is perfect. If you’re designing a content plan, add publish in publications to the list. It’s the quickest way to monetize your writing on Medium.
The Results
So how did I do?
Did my calculations work out?
Well if you’ve read this article you know I made $135 dollars in my first 30 days on Medium:
However, for the sake of looking at numbers from the same month, we’ll look at my first four weeks in September which is my first full month on Medium (I started on the site on August 11):
Week 1: 140 fans Week 2: 124 fans Week 3: 140 fans Week 4: 145 fans Total Fans: 549 Total Income: $169.19
Interestingly enough, I crossed the $100 mark in the 3rd week when I had 404 fans; week four was just a bonus.
My making a $100 in my first month on Medium wasn’t an accident. It was based on a well thought out and well-executed plan backed up by research to get the results I wanted.
Final Thoughts
If you think about Medium as a big puzzle that needs solving, it becomes a lot easier to maneuver. Getting views and fans from paying members is still tough, but with a bit of research, you can at least know what engagement numbers you need to hit to make the money you’re looking to make each month.
