Why Medium Shouldn’t Be Your Only Source of Income

Life bites us when we rely too much on one thing

For the past 20 months in a row, I have made at least four figures from writing on Medium. Less than 7% of writers make more than $100, so it’s reasonable to assume I’ve been in the top 0.1% of earners for a while.

Sometimes, people email me and say: “This is amazing. You have the best life. You just write what you want and get paid a lot for it. How do you do it?”

Lately, “sometimes” has turned into “all the time” which is why, unfortunately, I can’t answer all of those emails anymore — but here’s what I would say.

First, I would thank them and agree that, yes, indeed, I have “the best life,” but it has little to do with this seemingly magical job that I have and everything to do with some of my general attitudes toward life: Whatever the day asks of me, as long as I’m healthy, there’s no drama, and I can enjoy the little things — some sun, a cup of coffee, good company — I’m grateful and try to make the most of it. Happiness is loving the boring days.

Second, I would tell them that, “How do you do it?” has a two-fold answer, neither fold of which they’ll enjoy hearing but will definitely need to.

For one, I was writing on Medium for three years before the Partner Program even existed. That’s right. November 19, 2014. Go check. It’s there. My first article. So by the time you realized there was an opportunity to make money on this new platform, I had already practiced in public and tried to master that platform for more than 1,000 days.

This is an advantage you can’t make up for, and while it’s still possible to arrive on Medium in 2020 and go from zero to full-time income within the same year, that accomplishment is reserved for people who also already know what they’re doing. They may not have written on Medium before, but they definitely have been writing somewhere.

Starting from scratch on a big social network and expecting it to pay your bills within a matter of weeks or even months is the equivalent of walking into the building of a company you’ve read about in the news and asking for a senior management role. You know what you get when you show up at BMW with no experience? You get shooed out the door. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an un- or lowly paid internship. That’s it. Arriving on Medium is no different.

This isn’t meant as discouragement, it’s supposed to level your perspective. You need to get your vision straight. If you can clearly see the target, even in the far distance, it’s much easier to be patient as you slowly trot towards it. Many people want to sell you the side-view mirror version of success on Medium. “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” No. They’re not. They’re much, much farther away. That’s okay. In the long run, repeatedly finding out you weren’t as close to your goal as you thought you were is much more discouraging than just expecting for it to take a long time to begin with.

The second part of the answer to “How do you do it?” is equally as brutal, and it’s that this comfortable life I supposedly have is not that comfortable at all — because I never “just write what I want and get paid a lot for it.” I write what I want, and I get paid what I get paid — it just happens to be “a lot” aka four figures most of the time. However, within that four-figure range, there is a lot of variation, which is why I have never relied on Medium alone to pay my bills. As a result, I also do a lot of other things, and my workday is pretty packed most of the time. Nope, no margaritas on the beach at 2 PM just yet.

My best four-figure month on Medium was nearly $8,000. My worst was about $1,000. You can’t depend on eight-fold increases and 90% drops in the source of income that’s supposed to keep your lights on. These fluctuations are normal, but it’s not normal to depend on such fluctuations. That’s just being reckless, and you’ll likely get the bill for it sooner rather than later — pun intended.

When any social platform introduces performance-based payments, volatility abounds. Who gets how much at what time can change overnight based on cultural trends, decisions made by the platform, and your ability to perform. If you get sick, if fidget spinners aren’t cool anymore, if the algorithm de-prioritizes crypto content, your income will suffer. Your job is to alleviate that suffering, not endure it.

The key word here is diversification. It’s easy to look at my profile and think Medium is my main gig — my only gig, even. While I do prioritize Medium above all else when it comes to work — it’s the most fun place to write and the best one to grow in terms of skill — I never prioritized it in terms of money. When I went all in on the Partner Program two years ago, I did so as a way of diversifying from other, existing income streams, like freelance work and my website, Four Minute Books. In that same year, I also launched a writing course. The next, I began working on Better Marketing. Throughout all this time, I kept writing on Medium and, of course, I was hoping for my income to grow (it did) — but I never once relied on this crazy rollercoaster of a payment graph to put food on the table.

Diversification is tricky. If you don’t put a lot of effort into one thing, it won’t work out. Usually, that’s the fastest road to get something going. Once you’re up and running, however, you need some sort of fallback. That’s when it’s time to diversify. Then, you have to ask yourself questions about risk tolerance, paranoia, and how many backups you need to feel calm. How many income streams is enough? When does it become too much to handle? The one thing you shouldn’t do is force Medium, this new, elusive, volatile thing you don’t quite yet understand to provide for you and maybe even your family.

Work hard. Show up. Have some staying power. But never rely too much on any one thing. Life has a way of biting us when we do.