Lessons From My First $1,000+ Earnings Month on Medium

From $0 to $1,000+ in 67 days — here’s what I learned

I joined Medium on Jan. 21, 2018 — 67 days ago. I’d never regularly blogged or engaged with social media before then. I earned $1,069.90 for my writing on Medium for the period Feb. 25 — Mar. 25. I want to tell you succinctly and clearly how this unfolded because I know many of you want to make money writing on Medium.

Before I get into this, let me just acknowledge the following: you’re god damn right there’s some humble-bragging going on here. I mean, why not? I feel pretty good about this. Plus, I’m in favor of general financial transparency as an important aspect of a just and egalitarian society, so I’m doing my part.

Note: This post follows-up my Feb. 3 post summarizing my first week on Medium — I included a little background there. So, you might want to read that first because I don’t want to repeat myself here for the sake of avoiding redundancy.

Alright, so here’s a screensnip of my earnings history for proof:

Okay, so what did I learn? Well, other than the fact that getting stories “featured” by Medium dramatically increases engagement with those stories (duh…), I’m not really sure. I didn’t have any engagement plan. I didn’t aim to write in specific “Tags” or share a specific message. I wrote all kinds of stuff (look at my history, you’ll see). I’ll try to relate my experience as best I can here for you.

First, here’s a screensnip of my top-earning stories for the period. The vast majority of my earnings are attributable to the two articles that Medium featured:

I don’t know what to make of the fact that those two top-earning stories got featured. They’re quite different. However, there is one general similarity: they are structured as stories. That is, I wrote those pieces with a progressive narrative built on story. The problem in interpreting why they both worked is that the types of stories I told in each piece are very different. One (Evidence-Based Lies) was a historical and empirical story about biomedical science, and the other (The Importance of Getting Distracted) was personal perspective story about productivity.

My two most-successful stories got featured Sunday, Mar. 18 and the following Tuesday, Mar. 20, which caused a huge spike in my views. After that, the views dropped off a lot but remained much higher than before my two featured stories:

What my n of 2 study on getting featured by Medium seems to imply is that the pieces should start by laying down the story context, then building interest to one crescendo before lulling back to context and then again to another crescendo. (Repeat as many times as the story needs.) This is hard to explain, and easier to experience — it can be done in many different ways. I hope you writers out there will get what I’m trying to say here, but if I’m doing a bad job of articulating what I’m thinking, have a read of these pieces and try to figure out for yourself why they worked:

Now, I guess we can talk about subtitles because I just realized after pasting both of those stories up there that their subtitles are actually quite similar. Each of those subtitles is an interesting and rapidly progressing short sentence. Indeed, they are complete sentences, and both are structured like this: [long subject]>[short verb]>[short object]. What’s the significance of that? Hell if I know. The subtitles both fit on one line though, at least on the desktop monitor I’m looking at — maybe that’s something.

Perhaps the most important part of all of this is that I wrote a lot of content. I wrote every day and published most days. The few periods where I didn’t publish something every day were when I was working on more detailed or research-based pieces. Interestingly, the piece that earned me the most (Evidence-Based Lies) was the one that took me the longest to write. I had to do a lot of research for that one.

Let’s do some Q&A now:

How do I have enough time to write every day?

It’s totally doable. I work a demanding 50+hour-per-week job and manage people all over the world, so my working hours are often all the time because of time zones. I am also taking college courses, and I have a three-year old daughter and an infant son. My wife is finishing her doctorate right now and she also works full time. On the surface of it, you’d think there’s no way I could have time to write every day. But it turns out there’s a lot of time that most people waste: I write early in the morning before my family wakes up; I take breaks during slow periods at the work office and write then; I write after my family goes to bed. I write on my phone while I’m taking dumps — seriously, there’s no reason you need to scroll through Facebook while you’re dropping a deuce, you could be writing, Medium makes it easy. I don’t watch television at all except in the background while cartoons play for my daughter. I also do the vast majority of the cooking in my household, and my wife and I divide and conquer the childcare — she’s not picking up my household slack so I can write. My point is, there’s time. Just do it.

What writing tips do I have?

That’s too much to get into in this post, but I guess my number one tip would be to keep the story moving and don’t include phrases that don’t move the story along. For instance, saying stuff like “in this post I am going to tell you how to” is bullshit and useless — get to the point. Don’t tell people what you’re going to tell them, just tell them.

Could I suggest a resource for leaning about how to write?

Yeah sure — Stephen King’s On Writing is the best book about writing I’ve ever read. That being said, the best learning tool is writing itself. And reading. Read and write a lot, you’ll be fine.