What Happens if You Publish Only Five Articles in a Month?
In May 2020, I earned 134 dollars on Medium because I published every day. Here I will tell you what happened in the following months.
After I had earned 134 dollars in May, I thought that I was on a good way. I assumed that I would only have to continue publishing every day to increase my income gradually.
So I continued to write in June as before. But at the end of the month, when I only had $85 on my dashboard, I was frustrated.
My articles hadn’t gotten any worse, and I had continued to do everything I could to promote them. So there was no understandable reason why I suddenly earned almost fifty dollars less than the month before.
But I did not want to give up too soon. Maybe it was the summer, I thought. People travel, even in times of Corona, or they’re just more outside instead of sitting in their apartments and reading articles.
That’s why I kept up my workload in July and still wrote an article every day.
I finished the month with an income of 66 dollars. That was almost twenty dollars less than in June. I was really pissed off now.
In August, I only wrote eighteen articles because I thought my time would be better spent on other projects.
My thriller series on Amazon had to be continued, and I also started publishing erotic short stories under a pseudonym. The short stories already earned me over 100 Euros in the first month. It took me almost a year at Medium.
My thrillers are earning me well over 2000 Euros every month. That, and the fact that my income on Medium fell instead of rising, made me very thoughtful. I knew that you need a lot of staying power on Medium to be successful. But I had underestimated how hard it is to keep my actual business running while producing useful articles every month.
In September, I decided to focus on my Amazon publications for the time being. I would return to Medium later in the year for a fresh start.
So in the whole month of September, I wrote only five articles.
I was able to watch my views and reads drop steadily over several days. I expected that my earnings at the end of the month would not be much higher than maybe ten dollars. But then the numbers stabilized at a level where they would not drop any further.
So what did I really earn in the month that I only wrote five articles?
It was a little over thirty dollars. So, compared to the previous month, my income had dropped by another fifty percent or so. And yet that thirty dollars was still almost a quarter of the 134 dollars from May.
The catalog counts
By the time I stopped publishing daily, I already had nearly three hundred articles on Medium. The Medium curators had selected Thirty-seven of them. That puts my curation rate at over ten percent, which is not too bad.
Six of the ten most financially successful articles this month were old articles that were curated months ago and are still generating a steady income.
If I hadn’t had such an extensive catalog of published articles when I reduced my activity to almost zero, my income would certainly have dropped to nearly zero in September.
Medium can, therefore, generate passive income. But the road to this is rocky. You need hundreds of articles, and many of them should be curated so that the readers find us even in times when we can’t be so productive for some reason.
What will happen in the coming months?
I only started writing articles again a few days ago. So October could be weaker than September.
From November on, I’ll try to write daily again to expand my catalog. If I can earn $30 today in a month when I’m almost not working, one day, it could be 300, 600, or even 1000.
Medium has not demotivated me in the long term. Now I want to know even more.
René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.
Receive weekly updates, and don’t miss any of my articles.
subscribe here http://bit.ly/ReneJunge
Read also: