Writing

Why Can’t You Earn More, By Writing More On Medium?

Every story that you write, allows you to be paid. But if that’s the case, writers should be paid highly for generating more content.

Honestly, it is rarely so. Why?

Writers Are Not Paid Per Number Of Articles (Or Followers)!

You're mistaken if you think you can become a content-generating machine so Medium can become a money-printing machine for you. That’s not how it works.

There are thousands of writers who write every day, yet they don’t get paid as much. There are many writers who have a massive following too (above 10k), and their monthly income doesn’t even exceed $100.

You must be thinking, why so?

Because Medium doesn’t pay you to ‘write’. It pays you to write ‘quality content that people read’, and there’s a difference between the two.

When you only generate content mindlessly, there might be many stories that are just worthless because they give the reader nothing.

No insights. No experience. No emotion. No joy. Not even information. Such articles are known as ‘fluff’ stories, in content writing (don’t confuse it with fanfiction, where fluff means stories with happy endings!).

Fluff pieces are the ones that have nothing inside. Hollow.

Doesn’t matter how many stories you write in a month or even a day, you will not be paid enough to leave your full-time job.

This has been my own experience with Medium, as I’m writing for over 3 years on the platform now, and not once have I earned as much that I can convince myself to become a full-time Medium writer or freelancer.

Everything takes time, and I know someday Medium might even become a full-time job for me, but today is certainly not that day.

Don’t write fluff.

If you want to get paid serious money on Medium, stop writing fluff that people will not even click on.

Headlines and titles are important, but the content that you write inside should be pure gold. Something that people don’t scroll past.

It should give them something to stick to. It should hook them till the last word. That is the only success secret of highly viral and popular stories on Medium.

The second common element in popular stories is — the flow. The writers don’t deviate from what they started with. They stick to the topic till the end.

Pick any story of any genre and any category, another common thing that you will find in them is — mind-blowing and unputdownable content.

Stick to these three things, and you got yourself a very high chance of getting a story popular, or even viral.

But let me also be honest about another thing —

Keep your expectations low.

Articles getting viral is something that is not guaranteed. Despite writing amazing content, there are many writers whose content does not get distributed, or who don’t earn enough on the platform.

They are as talented as the popular writers, but even then they’re not as successful as them. They don’t have a massive following like them, and they don’t have stories repeatedly getting viral.

The only thing that you can do is — write without expecting much. Write to the best of your abilities, without considering that your piece will get viral.

Some of my most viral articles were the ones that I wrote within minutes, while the most researched and well-thought-out pieces did not even manage to get over a thousand views in their respective lifetimes.

The secret of earning more

The secret of earning more is definitely not ‘writing more’. There are insanely popular writers who publish hardly 4–5 times a month, and they get massive views, comments, and reach on their stories.

The reasons can be many.

Either they have a big following already and are popular among their fans. Or their content is something that provides a lot to the people, and their readers actively look out for new content from those writers.

Whatever the reasons may be, they write less and get paid a lot more than any other average writer on Medium who writes as much as them.

Hence, there is no right thing that you can do that might ‘guarantee’ you success on Medium. But one thing that you can continue doing is — writing without expecting much. One day you will surely see success!