You Can Earn Your Own Damn $500 Base Pay Writing on Medium with Just 13 Stories

Here’s my analysis of the kind of story you need

So you missed out on the somewhat-secretive Medium base pay plan, huh?

No worries. I did some math, (it was painful) and have your solution. You only need 13 high-quality stories, each earning $1.25 per day on average. That comes to $37 for each story in any given 30-day period, for a total of $481. Add in your earnings still trickling in from previous stories and fillers, and Bingo! You join the $500 club.

Wait, don’t go. You can do this. I have done this. I’ve got a full analysis of several $37 stories and examples to get you started. First things first. I am never going to talk about views, reads, or member read time. People who claim you need x number of hours of member read time to generate x dollars are stupid. Stop reading that crap.

Nobody knows the formula because every topic is different. Every damn story is different. Def look at those numbers, but don’t waste precious writing time trying to make sense of them. The main things that matter on your stats page are earnings, external referral percentage, and average read time.

Here’s the brief picture of why those three things matter

• Earnings matter because, well, you’re aiming at $1.25 per day (slide the cursor across the chart to see what each day has earned) or $37 per month.
• External referral percentage matters because as much fun as SEO writing is, it only helps boost your story to Medium members a teensy bit. If your ERP jumps above 30% the first month, you’ve got a story that will be well read, but it ain’t going to get you more money. Lesson: spend less time worrying about SEO.
• Average reading time matters because it’s your only clue to your bounce rate. If you have an 8-minute story with an average read time under 3 minutes, you are losing people in the first half of the story. Learn from that and do better next time.

Now for the news that’s hard to hear

There are far too many people on this platform telling you how easy it is to earn money. I’m not going to do that. It is not easy. It is hard. Oh, sure, there will always be one-hit wonders who pop up with one or two not-really-viral stories that bring in a hundred here and there, but consistently earning $500 a month or more requires w-o-r-k.

As piddly as $37 sounds in the big scheme of things, if you aren’t earning that on your stories yet, you’ve got some grinding ahead of you. Maybe it’s your writing. If you fear that’s the case, start here.

Or maybe you don’t have very many followers yet. It’s okay to start with a handful.

Spoiler Alert: Your fellow members of the $500-a-month-club are not relying on huge followings. The reason is that $37 stories are not self-published stories anyway. Every last one of them are published in publications with followings of more than 50K.

How the heck do I know that? It’s simple logic. For the top earners on Medium (you know, the ones earning way more than $500 a month), a $37 story would be a huge fail. You think Tim Denning is reading this, going “yeah mate, tell me how to write a $37 story”?! Oh hell no.

And Tim and his compadres in the upper realms of the platform aren’t ever going to coach you on how to write one, either. Cuz they don’t know how.

The logic then, is this: If you need to know how to write a $37 story, you def don’t have enough followers of your own to get you there. Therefore you absolutely must rely on someone else’s followers. Find a publication or three and start learning how to write for them.

Bigger spoiler alert: Once you start writing $37 stories, you’ll get the followers. People start to feel your strong vibes and WANT to follow you.

The hardest to hear of all the things I have to tell you is that with a few exceptions, your work needs to be distributed (aka curated). That distribution is the lifeblood of most $37 stories. Hell, it’s the key to a $15 story most of the time. The exceptions are stories like this one where we help each other figure out Medium.

But even as I sit here smugly typing this Medium meta story, I’m going to warn you that they are not the kind of $37 stories you need. They might earn big for a few days, but they have a tendency to fall off the cliff never to be seen or heard from again. You absolutely must have a deeper repertoire than endlessly writing about Medium. Remember, you need 13 of these babies every 30 days to get the ball rolling.

The good news

Once you start kicking that $37 ball down the road, it starts to roll by itself. You start by aiming at 13 hefty stories every month, but they aren’t going to suddenly stop earning on day 31. Quite often $37 stories turn into $237 stories, with earnings continuing to trickle in months after you wrote them. That means once you have enough $37 stories floating around, you might be able to ease up and write 10 per month or 8, and still hit your $500 target. At that point, I’ll sing Hallelujah with you!

Before we check out the examples, you may want to review the checklist for $15 stories, because all those things still apply. I’m mostly going to talk about the things that pushed these stories beyond the $15 mark.

Alright, let’s dive into the analysis of some $37 stories

Wait, So You’ll Sell Yourself, Your Course, and Your Book, Just Not the Platform You Write On? I’m including this one on the list, even though it’s a very recent story. It has lots of non-Medium advice, but it’s still essentially a Medium meta story and will reach a cliff at some point. I wanted you to see what that looks like.

It surpassed the $37 point on day 6 of publication, mostly because it was promoted by the editors of Start It Up on their Editor’s Picks Page. Without their continuing boost, it probably won’t do much beyond month one. The key is to be aware that you can include this type of story in your roster of 13, just don’t rely on residual income next month from them. They are fun, but will add to your work load going forward, rather than subtract from it.

My $30,000 Article Explains How NFTs Might Work for Writers Okay peeps, this one is what you are really looking for. It earned an easy $37 in both its first and second months before it topped the hill all good stories eventually reach. It currently earns a few extra dollars every month, with a total payout well over $100 so far. As you can see, it was published in The Startup, made their home page for a day or two, then hit their Top Ten Page, which gets tweeted and goes out in their newsletter, undoubtedly having an influence on the outcome.

The headline contains a huge number which is drawing card, but it’s real. You can’t throw around five digits in your headlines to attract attention and not have the goods in your story that back up the title. So hey, if you’ve got a five digit story somewhere in your life, shout it to the world. It might be worth $37. (Surely you see the humor in that, right?)

Stop Wasting Your Creative Time and Energy Producing Social Media Posts for Your Content I’m including this story here, even though it was originally a $60 story (which, if you do the math, could get you into the $1,000-month club if you manage to string enough of them together.) It cleared another $37 in its second month and still has residual income trickling in, for a total of over $200. The key thing I want you take away here is that this story was published two weeks before the NFT story above.

Both stories benefitted from the stacking.

Read that line again; I’ll wait. It’s probably the most important principle of this story. Every time you get a story with lots of eyeballs on it, every other thing you’ve written in the previous few weeks, as well as what you write in the subsequent weeks will benefit. That, my friends is how this whole $37 plan will work.

You have to stack your best stories on top of one another. Even slightly lesser quality pieces are going to soar if you put them in close proximity to your big wins.

Takeaways:

I know we all have those lazy days when we fling rewarmed hash on the screen and hope someone reads it. That’s a habit worth breaking. (Hmmm, I think I just found my next story title.)

I know I have found myself putting out work I would never submit to a freelance client, all in the name of meeting some stupid self-imposed Medium deadline. Hell, I’ve posted stuff here I wouldn’t even put on NewsBreak. And guess what I got for my efforts? Nickels.

Think for a minute about how many nickel stories it takes to earn $500 in a month. I’ll do the math for you: Ten thousand. There aren’t that many stories left in my brain.

From now on, my Medium mantra is write better, earn more. Are you with me?