What I Learned Making $19.20 in 5 Days on Medium

I only published 4 stories and spent less than 5 hours on the site to achieve this.

Before I get into the nitty gritty, I want to introduce myself to people who haven’t been following my journey to make a passive income on Medium.

Here are the previous write ups within this series for writers who want to chart and see the rise.

Week One:

Week Two:

Week Three:

Week Four:

A quick recap for people who don’t care about the journey:

I’m a professional writer with credits in Rue Morgue, Terraform, Discover Pods, and more. I also edit professionally for authors and publications. So, I am skilled at writing, have a solid practice in place, and am here to see what the what is with Medium.

Last month was my first full month on Medium and I pulled in just under $40. You can read more about all that in my previous posts listed above. My goal for January is to make $93 or $3/day.

Making $19.20 in 5 Days

In last week’s post, I let readers and followers know that I would be pulling back from publishing multiple times every day. My focus was going to shift to reading more content and engaging with other writers and readers on the platform.

The idea behind that new shift was that by giving my time to others, I’d be opening up the gates for others to do the same to my work. While just under $20 in less than a week is something that a lot of writers would love to achieve, my gut dropped when I saw my calculated earnings for the week.

How could I possibly have only made that while spending time reading other people’s writing and publishing 4 quality pieces, a majority of which were curated?

My stats had taken a turn for the worse. I wasn’t making more money through the new strategy, but less, in my opinion. Last week’s posts were all pieces that I thought would do well, and technically, they have, just not to my liking.

See for yourself:

What I Learned

Not even the highest of high earners on Medium spend time reading other people’s work on this site. I make enough of a splash in places to be contacted by some high earners in the 1% of writers on this site.

What I learned from talking with them is that they don’t read or engage with other writers. They focus on engaging with other professionals on their level or above them. Engagement is an eye roll topic with them.

To the high earners it’s all about curation and publishing a shit ton.

My recent attempts at focusing more on engagement then publishing tends to prove them right. In fact, the 1% earners on Medium rarely share or engage in the Facebooks geared toward Medium writers. The ones who are loosely active on those pages don’t read your work.

They skim it, highlight a random phrase, and leave some claps. That’s it. Barely a minute spent on your story and they are off making thousands of dollars on this site. They don’t even respond to comments.

I don’t want to be one of those writers who doesn’t connect, who is so far out of reach with their audience they sound like a robot regurgitating SEO keywords and phrases.

But I wanted to see if I could get away with that type of disregard for my fellow writer and reader. For my top articles this past week, the ones on Facebook and character development, I tried to do the strategy of the top earners.

Those two are my better earning ones of the week and of all time in the sense that they got a lot of reads on their first day, have readers spending more than a minute on them, and are positioned to continue earning for the future.

What I lost though was follower engagement, email sign ups, and my own sense of connecting with Medium and its writers. I wasn’t crushing it. I was faking it.

So, I stopped. I started engaging and posting again toward the end of the week. That actually started bringing my stats out of the low 80s back into the hundreds. More people have started following me again and I am on track to break 1,000 followers before the end of the month.

Just engaging hurt my scores. Just publishing helped only slightly. The two coupled together is what really works for me.

Yeah, you can publish tons and engage with no one and make some money on this site. But I don’t want to just make money. I want to:

• Grow a following
• Garner loyal subscribers
• Build my network

To do that, I’ve learned, you have to do both equally.

Moving Forward

In December, I published a minimum of 5 pieces a week and often exceed that by double or triple. I wanted to pull back from that, though, because I felt that some of my pieces were getting lost in the rabble of all my publishing.

By the end of last month, I had 60 stories published and 700 followers. My upward trends were making me seasick with excitement.

This month, that seasick has turned.

Like any good creator or businessperson, instead of letting this little setback bully my perseverance or confidence, I am going to change my practices.

In the past 5 weeks, I’ve changed my strategy multiple times and have made clear correlations to what actual works and doesn’t. With this in mind, my new strategy is one that I will steal from one of my favorite writers on this site, Christopher Kokoski.

Christopher is a new writer who earns and engages. He works at his craft and gets better in each post.

His recent write up of earning $50 so far this month:

I will be posting two times a day during the week, once in the morning and again in the evening. I’ll still be reading and engaging throughout the site with writers who follow me and who I follow. My aim is to stick with publishing in publications while crafting a couple articles specifically for my own publication:

Your Takeaway

If you read nothing else, read this:

Earning on Medium comes down to:

• Publishing multiple times daily
• Garnering more views through publishing in publications

Growing Your Craft and Audience, however, takes:

• Publishing multiple times daily
• Garnering more views through publishing in publications

AND

• Engaging with writers and readers in your niche
• Writing knowledgeable content aimed at bettering others

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black SFWA, HWA, and Codex writer. She was listed on the honors list for the Otherwise Fellowship award for 2019. Her work has appeared in Tor Nightfire, Rue Morgue, Terraform, and more. She offers a writing craft newsletter to people who want to become better writers and publish quality pieces.