How to Make Money Blogging on Medium

While there are some clear benefits to blogging on your own website, blogging on Medium offers some benefits that you can’t find elsewhere. We personally love using Medium to grow our audience because it makes it much easier to publish articles and to rank those published articles on Google. Here is a step by step guide on how to make money blogging on Medium.

Step 1: Pick a Niche

While it is possible to make your Medium articles about a wide variety of topics, it will be difficult to build a consistent brand and build authority if you are not niching down. When selecting a niche we recommend that you consider the following qualifications:

• It is a topic where there is a large volume of people searching for information: For example, our blog is focused around the online marketing and SEO niche and there is no shortage of requests for information. People are constantly searching on Google to learn more about how to improve their SEO knowledge. You can identify if this is the case for your niche by finding a large blog in your niche and plugging it into a tool like SEMrush to see which keywords it ranks for. If there seems to be a decent amount of searches for “how to” types of keywords, then this niche is likely a good one. It also means that there is a good opportunity to monetize with courses and coaching services.
• People are spending a decent amount of money on goods and services in this niche: This is important because you want to be able to direct people to affiliate offers or to sell your own offers. In the SEO niche, for example, people commonly purchase various mico services from sites like Legiit and SEO software. We know this because we have spent a fair amount of money on these kinds of goods and services ourselves.
• At least somewhat low competition: While the SEO niche is competitive, especially because SEOs know how to rank on Google, there is enough search volume in this niche that we can rank for some longer search phrases. We recommend that you check the competition in a niche by seeing how many large websites are present in that niche. You can check this by using MozBar to check the domain authority of the websites in your niche and by using SEMrush to see how many websites are ranking for a large number of keywords in your niche. If there are less than 6 websites or so that are ranking for more than 2 thousand keywords and have a domain authority of more than 60 or so, there is probably room for you in this niche, assuming that there is a decent amount of search volume.
• It’s something you know or at least have an interest in: While this is not required in order to have a successful blog, it will probably help you write better content and be more excited about your work. It might also help you better connect and sell to your audience since you understand them better.
• It’s at least somewhat evergreen: Most people have a goal of creating a blog that will generate passive income for years to come. With most niches this is doable, but in some niches, content quickly becomes old and irrelevant. Ideally, you want to pick a niche where the content will last for a long period of time. That being said, while blogging about SEO fails this test, we still choose to do it because we know a lot about the topic and can create good content.
• It’s easy to create a community around: You want to choose a niche where a community can be formed and engaged with. Having an email list or a Facebook group is great for building deeper relationships and making repeat customers.

Step 2: Choosing to Blog as a Company or as a Personal Brand

While a personal brand has its benefits, we generally recommend branding as a company. This is mainly because a company can scale beyond just you and can be more easily sold.

Step 3: Keyword Research

There is so much to cover on keyword research and it is so crtical to your success that we could probably make a whole course on it, but we will try to summarize it below.

To begin, we recommend that you make it a goal to always have 10 or so keywords researched and ready. This is to keep you motivated and going, since you probably won’t make too much money from just 1 article. You want to plan to write at least 100 articles to earn a full time income from your blog. On average, we have found that with around 30 articles, you should be able to earn at least $400 per month if you are ranking and your content and monetization are good.

A great way to begin your keyword research is by using SEMrush. With it, you can analyze some of the competitors in your niche with low domain authority and see what they rank for. The reason why you should do this is simple: if websites can rank for these keywords with their relatively non-powerful domains, you should also be able to rank even higher with the high domain authority of Medium. With the results you obtain from SEMrush, we recommend picking the keywords with high search volume, low competition, and that focus around topics that you feel you could write an article about.

When choosing a keyword, you should also consider what the searcher’s intent is and how you can monetize. For example, when someone searches for “best mountain bikes” they probably have a high intent to purchase a mountain bike. That being said, you don’t always want to be focused on monetization. It is totally fine to create some articles that are just focused on branding and generating traffic.

After you find a keyword that meets the criteria above, we recommend that you use our on-page tool to see the content averages for this keyword. If the word count average is below a thousands words or so, this generally means you can easily rank by creating a more in-depth post.

If all of this sounds a little difficult or tedious, you can always hire us to create your content strategy for you.

Step 4: Create High Quality Content That Matches the Searcher’s Intent

While some writers consider themselves creatives, and write condensed and abstract content, when writing for Google it is important that you write an in-depth and organized response to the searcher’s intent for the keyword that you are targeting. We personally like using step by step guides, organized by headings and subheadings. At the same time, it is a good idea to still provide some character to your posts as long as it doesn’t get in the way of answering what the searcher is looking for.

Step 5: On-page SEO

After you have written your post, it is time to optimize it for the search engines. With our on-page tool that we mentioned earlier, this is actually quite simple. Use it to check the content averages of your competitors, then have your content match those averages to better your chances of ranking for that keyword. We also recommend that you use our long tail keyword tool to find similar keywords that you might want to sprinkle into your articles a couple of times. This will help your article rank for related terms.

Step 6: Let the Rankings Settle and Promote on Social Media

When you first start your Medium blog it will probably take some time to gain your initial traction. We recommend that in the first month or two you try to boost your traffic by promoting your content on other platforms.

YouTube

One simple method of promotion is to create a YouTube video around the same topic as your blog article and to link to your article in the description. You can then run the video as a paid search promotion, which in many cases will only cost you a few cents per view.

Facebook

You can also promote your article on Facebook by simply creating a page around your brand or by running your article as an ad to a relevant audience. Spending even as little as $20 on Facebook Ads will be enough to send some initial traffic.

Step 7: Backlinks

Backlinks are a major ranking factor when it comes to Google, and given the power of the Medium domain, your blog should respond well to link building. If you are not sure what a banklink is, do not worry because you can very easily outsource link building for a relatively affordable price. We cover the basics below, but for a more in depth look, check out our parasite SEO article. It should also be noted that after your blog gains some initial authority with links, social signals, traffic, and user signals, you should be able to rank your future articles just fine without doing much link building.

Build a link foundation

A link foundation is simply a bed of links that Google doesn’t penalize you for as long as they are branded to you. These links are similar to those that businesses build on their social media profiles. The links will help to give your blog some initial trust and will allow you to build stronger links with more optimized anchor text. We recommend purchasing this service to do it for you.

Make sure that when building these links you are using under-optimized anchor text. If you are not sure what anchor text is, it is essentially the text that a hyperlink is linking with. For these links we recommend using all naked URLs like “keywordsheaven.com”, generic anchor text like “learn more”, and branded anchor text: like “Keywords Heaven”.

Build power links

Power links include things like PBNs and guest posts, and help give your blog some authority in its early stages. While we would normally not recommend pointing PBNs directly at your website, it is totally fine to do it on a high authority domain like Medium. Just make sure you are not using a custom domain name that Medium offers.

Do not worry about spending money on these because they are going to do more than just rank one article. When we first started our blog, we spent about one thousand dollars on backlinks, and although it is hard to determine how much that single variable impacted our rankings, we believe it paid off. The purpose of the links is to power up your entire blog and provide you with enough authority so that you can rank your future articles without link building. We recommend using the following services for these links:

1. PBN links
2. Guest posts

When choosing the anchor text for these links we recommend that you make them about 30% keyword related, and very few, if any, exact match. We also recommend that you diversify your anchor text with many different variations to make it look more natural.

Step 8: Monetize

Once you’ve got some traffic coming in, which you can check via your Medium stats, it is time to monetize your content. You can do this in many different ways, including:

• Affiliate marketing: If you are recommending a product or service in your article, check to see if the provider of that item has an affiliate program. Usually you can check this by Googling “the product or service name + affiliate”. If they have an affiliate program, simply link to the item using your affiliate link wherever it makes sense.
• Software subscriptions: While this may not be for every niche, it is a good revenue source for some niches. In our SEO niche, we promote our own personal software as well as other people’s software as long as we find it useful and trustworthy.
• Medium partner program: While the income you earn from this will probably be negligible, especially in the beginning, it is fine as a secondary monetization source.
• Information products: As you publish more articles and as more people read them, you begin establishing yourself as an expert in the field. Some of the readers of your free content will be interested in learning more and will surely want more in-depth content. This why you should offer more detailed content, like courses, which you can create and host on a website like Teachable.
• Services and 1 on 1 coaching: Chances are that people searching for how to do things online either want to do the task themselves or want to hire someone to do it for them. You can provide both options to your readers.
• Ads: While you cannot put ads directly on Medium, if you have your own company website, and promote it in your content, you’ll eventually have enough traffic coming to it to generate income from an ad network like Google AdSense.

Step 9: Remarket

It is said that people interact with brands a minimum of 7 times before they are ready to buy. That is why you want to collect email addresses, cookie people, and direct people to a Facebook group where you can keep in touch with them. Although you cannot do most of these on Medium, we recommend adding remarketing pixels and collecting emails on your company site.

Step 10: Maintain Your Blog and Do CRO

Once you get traffic coming in, you need to do some upkeeping. This include things like answering people’s questions, fixing broken links, updating old content, adding promotions to old content, and more. To optimize revenue, you will want to see what works in increasing conversion and what doesn’t. That being said, we don’t recommend focusing on conversion rate optimization (CRO) until you have at least twenty thousand pageviews per month. Before that, you should be spending most of your time on things that will help you get more traffic.

How to Make Money Blogging on Medium Summed Up

Following the steps we describe above should allow you make an income from blogging. The amount you generate will vary depending on many factors and how much content you push out. Let us know of any tips or questions that you may have by connecting with us in our Facebook group or by commenting below.