What Happened When I Stopped Writing on Medium for Nine Days
…and how you can benefit from my $250 loss
Last week (nine days, actually)I took my first sabbatical from Medium since I started writing here over a year ago. We also just had a new payment plan established, so I was curious what would happen under the new algorithm and read-time plan. The results had both positive and negative consequences. I’ll share them both with you here.
We all know if we want to do well on Medium we’ve got to write consistently.
If we want to make significant income here, we’ve got to publish daily — sometimes multiple times per day.
Well, I published nothing for nine days. I wanted to see what would happen to my stats… and my income, if something happened and I couldn’t write. The end-results both surprised and pleased me.
I thought my presence would drop from the Medium sky, like grabbing a hot pan with no oven mitt.
While I did lose about $250 in income, which I would’ve earned had I continued to write (I do about $500 a week now), my income didn’t fall to zero.
It appears as though the new Medium algorithm is a good mix between new stories, and seasoned, curated stories. So, It’s true. There is passive income to be made from your Medium stories.
I earned money will I wasn’t writing. I continued to grow my email subscribers. My stories continued to get read.
While the traffic dropped by a third, towards the end of the experiment, it didn’t disappear. This is great news for Medium writers. No one wants to feel like their on an endless hamster wheel of content.
Yes, Medium has a big hamster wheel element. If you don’t publishing novel content frequently, your traffic (and your income) will drop, but it’s not a doomsday situation.
If you’re sick or on vacation, your older stories will keep earning reads for you.
The more of a back-catalog you write, the more stories you’ve got earning money for you in the background.
This is where curation matters a lot.
Only curated stories will earn you passive income. You can earn good income from non-curated stories, but their shelf-life is a few days (compared to years for curated writing).
I suggest you try to get your writing curated as much as you can.
I purposely go after non-curated topics as part of my writing strategy (like writing about Medium, for example), but I know I need a mix of quality, curated content as well, if I ever want to take another nine days off.
The lesson:
- It’s OK to take some time away from Medium if you must. You’ll continue to earn money from curated stories, but your income will be cut, significantly.
- Medium loves current content. If you want to grow your profile, you’ve got to publish daily and work hard to get curated in case you need to fall-back on number one.
The other part of my semi-passive income stream comes from my tribe. If you’re a prolific Medium writer, it’s important you start building an email list. You never know when they’ll change the payment rules again.
Email is a personal insurance policy against having your income taken by a platform you don’t control.
Tap the link below. Join my Tribe 1K email masterclass.
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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.