Want to Make Money on Medium? Start Here

To hone your Medium strategy, you have to know which Medium ecosystem you’re living in.

In his groundbreaking studies on the mammalian reinforcement and reward systems, father of Behavioral Psychology B.F. Skinner showed that it is the promise of reward that stimulates our brains to fire off a microscopic doses of cocaine (aka. dopamine) and not the reward itself.

There are myriad implications of this basic fact of the human brain, but for those of us trying our hand writing on Medium, we may feel that we’ve stumbled into paradise.

Launched by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, Medium plays an essential role in the 2020 Social Media landscape. It is the place for sharing fully-baked ideas with grown-ups, in a way that is social. But the game-changer of Medium is that it trades in more than just likes. The dopamine hits offered here aren’t just social, they’re financial. That makes this environment very enticing.

Success on Medium requires strategy. I’d like to share mine with you.

Before we begin, it’s important to note that to make it on Medium, you must know the history of the platform. If you don’t, you’re playing this game blind. So, before we go any further, read Casey Botticello’s thorough treatment of the topic.

To understand Medium, you must understand what it is and what it is not. It’s not your friend nor your employer, and even though it’s part of the Social Media ecosystem, it works hard to NOT be your Social Media outlet (have you noticed how hard it is for writers to talk to one another on the platform?).

Medium is a platform. Its revenue stream is eyeballs. All eyeballs. But, especially paying eyeballs. That is the company’s interest. It’s not you. It will never be you (except in that if you’re reading this, you’re behind the paywall, aka a paying set of eyeballs).

What that means for those of us navigating the wild and tempting world of this platform is that we have to know which Medium we’re a part of, because this platform comes in all shapes and sizes. It is designed to be as user-friendly and appealing as possible, to the maximum number of eyeballs, whether they’re readers but not writers, professional writers, presidential candidates and everything in between.

Think of Medium like Amazon.

Blogging was books, 10 iterations ago, at least. As a writer on the platform, you need to know if you’re swimming through the Prime video section of Amazon, home goods, or electronics, because each nook and cranny of this word-moving eyeball ecosystem is different.

To make Medium work for you, you have to know which Medium ecosystem you’re swimming in.

Just like Medium, if you’re here to make money then you too are in the business of eyeballs. Medium pays writers for user read time (=eyeballs!!), so to make it here, you need to write engaging content that is just the right length, and you need to succeed in getting that content in front of the right eyeballs, so that they’ll stare at your words lovingly long into the night.

The ingredients for Medium success, as reported in every how-to article on the platform are: 1) Good teaser words (title and subtitle) 2) Good image (kosher or you don’t get curated) 3) Interesting and well-edited words 4) Eyeballs who choose to read them, ideally very slowly.

If you have these four ingredients, you’ll make some money here. If you don’t, you won’t. Period.

The first three ingredients for Medium success are skills; you don’t need to be on the platform to hone them. Take a class. Get some coaching. Be a professional writer. Whatever. They are your prerequisites to success. Go get them.

It is the 4th ingredient — Eyeballs who will choose to give their time to your words — that requires some strategy.

To choose the right strategy for success on Medium, you need to know which Medium ecosystem you’re living in, as each one merits its own strategy for success. What is more, as you succeed you’ll likely move up the Medium food chain, and would be well-advised to alter your strategy as you do.

Here are the five basic Medium ecosystems, for writers who want to get paid on the platform:

The Holy Grail

The Holy Grail of Medium is for all-star authors, many of whom likely imported their 50k followers from Twitter back in the Medium good ol’ days (did you read Casey’s article that I shared above?), Social media sensations, and other generally viral folks. I’m talking about those lucky Medium writers who have more than 5k followers on the their personal publications. These are folks like Shannon Ashley, Emma Austin, Shaunta Grimes and umair haque. They get to live in the Medium Promised Land where they publish instantaneously, unencumbered by Publication Editors or curators, and have their words reliably displayed to their abundant followers.

Many of these folks also know how to get curated, as they’re smart and are good at what they do, but curation does not make or break them. As a user, in that I follow both their personal profile and their publication, the Medium algorithm will display their work when I open the app/site. These all-stars have something better than curation. They have direct-access to the readers who are most likely to take the time to read their work. Lucky bastards!

In the Club — Fast-track access to publication on Medium Pubs

Not far behind the cool kids in Ecosystem #1 are those writers who have earned the right to be regularly published in publications linked to curation. This includes all of the Medium pubs (Human Parts, Forge, GEN, Zora, Elemental, the Ascent, the Startup, but also their kid siblings, P.S I Love You, Sexography and others).

I bless you with the sweet bliss of writing a Medium story that is so good that your Publication editor says to you, “I’m going to make an edit to help out curators,” followed by the double win of publication and immediate curation. Short of a story going viral, it’s really one of the sweetest Medium highs, and it does happens. Publications and curators are both looking for great content, and they collaborate. (I’m convinced that some actually wear both hats, but that is one of Medium’s juiciest and best-kept secrets).

The reason that Ecosystem #2 is specifically fast-tracked access is because like Ecosystem #1, the folks in this universe also know that their words, well-crafted, will be offered to thousands of eyeballs in a timely manner.

As a writer, it makes all the difference in the world if we get to write for the moment, or if our only hope for wide distribution is for non-time-bound material.

Especially in 2020, many paying Medium eyeballs want to read words that pertain to current events, and only the folks in Ecosystem #1 and #2 get to meet that need and know that their words will be seen.

Of course, all writers can write for the moment on Medium. That’s part of the ingenious design of the platform. But, if you are not in ecosystem #1 or #2, you have to choose between impressions and expediency, and that’s a hard choice to make.

The Sweet Spot — If you’re not a professional writer, this should be your goal

If you’re not a professional writer (ie. being paid outside of Medium to write), and you have less than 5,000 followers on the platform, your goal should be access to wide distribution Publications, with reasonable response times for your submissions.

A wide-distribution publication is any pub with more than 5,000 followers, though there are certainly some publications that have more active readers than others. For example, as I write about sex, among other things, I can tell you that my Sexography articles outperform my non-sex pieces, even when they’re widely curated. Ah, dirty eyeballs…

Until you have 5k followers either on Medium, or on the Social Media handles you use to promote your Medium articles, you are dependent on publications for access to eyeballs.

The challenge with wide-distribution publications is that they’re run by overworked humans. They vary widely in their response times and writers can often wait weeks before being awarded prized access to the Pub’s readers.

Nonetheless, while building your own follower count, as a growing writer on Medium who is interested in making money, wide distribution publications are the best way to find your readers while steadily earning along the way.

The Huddled Masses — Build Your Pub Portfolio

Of Medium’s 60 million active users (July 2020), less than 6% earn more than $100/month on the platform. Most write for personal enjoyment and have not refined their voice or their style. They have not mastered Medium’s formatting tools, have not settled on their pro-grammar checker, and are generally lost.

(Many also don’t understand that Medium is a platform, not a club or a job. But, we can help with that).

The drudge work of making it on Medium comes in the long haul from where you are to Ecosystem #3 (then onward to 2 and 1. I believe in you!).

Once you know how to write, title and subtitle your pieces, choose compelling and kosher images, edit and format your work, you must invest the time to find the best fit for each article and gain access to that publication. This can be slow goings, and many writers get frustrated at this stage.

Here’s the good news…

If you do the hard work of learning a publication’s style, applying to write for them and submitting, you will grow tremendously as a writer. Publication editors care about great content and are generous with their time and feedback. They are Medium experts and they can help! Working with them just requires patience.

And, there is always ILLUMINATION, which welcomes all forms of writing.

Beginner’s Luck

Whether or not you believe in beginner’s luck out in the real world, it definitely exists on Medium. Because Medium is a platform for writers, whose business is eyeballs, the company is highly incentivized to offer new writers (who become members, if they know what’s good for them) positive reinforcement within their first few weeks on the platform. This positive reinforcement often comes in the form of early curation of self-published stories.

As a user, all I can do here is guess, but my suspicion is that one of the things that Medium means when it says “Our curation process relies on both human judgment and technology” is that the work of new users is displayed to curators with higher priority than that of non-curated older users, in the hopes that as many worthy folks will get curated early on in their Medium lifespan.

If I’m right and if you’re a brand new user, then there are two important takeaways for you here. First, take that Beginners’ Luck and work it! Submit your very best work in your first five posts. Take your time. Edit and re-edit. Ask a fellow writer for feedback before you submit. Your Medium journey will be an arc and turning your Beginners’ Luck into early curation sets you up for long term success. Second, DO NOT VIOLATE CURATION GUIDELINES IN YOUR EARLY POSTS. I did, and I lived to regret it.

Curation Guidelines are the user manual for Medium writers, and if you want to make it on the platform, they should be studied not skimmed. My mistake, and this was back when claps contributed to earnings, was that I missed the clause in the Curation Guidelines that forbid asking for claps. I thought I was helping my reader by explaining how the platform worked, but I violated a guideline and I paid for it.

Medium is a platform. It's a place for computer programmers to share code fragments and underage kids to write erotica. Obama, Biden and Harris have all published on the platform in the last month, alongside every Google MD this side of the Mississippi. A winning strategy on Medium depends on knowing which part of the Medium ecosystem you’re living in.

To figure it out, ask yourself:

1. Have I found my voice?
2. Have I found my Medium niche?
3. Do I have at least 1k followers?
4. If not, do I have a relationship with a high-distribution publication for each genre in which I write?
5. Am I still in the window where I can earn curation with my Beginner’s Luck? If not, how can I make my work so excellent that it will be chosen for curation on its merits?

To make it on Medium, you need to find the right eyeballs who will choose to give their precious time to your precious words. Happy writing!