How To Earn Your First €200 On Medium
Quantity over Quality. (But don’t forget quality)
Medium is a great platform for writers who want to earn a few extra bucks every month. But maybe you’ve started and expected more? How do you gain an audience, and how can you make sure the first growth is as fast as possible? I will try to answer these questions and give some simple tips along the way.
Choose a topic with lots of followers
All articles can have up to five tags that describe the content. For me, this is almost always something along the lines of ‘programming’, ‘javascript’, ‘web development, and so on. These topics have a lot of followers which will increase the chances of someone seeing my articles.
In the case of programming, the topics that will get views are wide apart and can be fairly specific in certain fields. For fiction or very specific topics, this may vary. So try to focus on a group that regularly browses Medium and choose the proper tags for your article.
If you can, publish to a publication
To extend on the last chapter, a topic with lots of viewers will have a lot of publications that might want to publish your article. This will make sure you get views from your tags and the followers of the publication, which can easily be a few hundred thousand in certain bigger publications.
Publications may ask to add you to their publication with your first article, or maybe your 10th article, but either way, when you can, add it to a fitting publication.
Write a lot of articles, not one very long article
This is a tip that helped me earn my first few bucks on Medium. I wrote a few longer articles every few weeks and didn’t notice a lot of views. Even if I did add it to a good publication. I might get a few hundred views, but I wasn't satisfied so I tried something new. Writing at least one article every day of a month.
The first month I tried this, everything came very quickly. Bigger publications became interested in my articles, I gained more followers, and I gained more views, which resulted in a higher income for that month.
After the first month and a half of writing articles, I could slow down and still be satisfied. I could take my time for better articles and I could take a break from writing altogether.
Do not forget basic quality
Good Medium articles will still be well written, have a minimal amount of mistakes, and might have images, code blocks, or basic markup to get across a certain point.
- A cover image at the top is an easy piece of quality that will make your article stand out a bit more. You can find free-to-use images on sites such as Unsplash.
- Grammarly is a great tool to quickly fix common mistakes and writing errors. And it is free. Just download the browser extension.
- Medium also offers basic markup such as italic text, bold text, links, and titles for a reason, try not to overdo it and it will increase the quality by a lot.
All these tiny pieces of increased quality can make it a lot more fun to read your articles, and easier to scan through them. It will only take a few seconds when you get used to it all.
Conclusion
My number 1 tip to start making money on Medium is: Write a lot for a few weeks and try to get a feel for writing. Writing is a skill that requires time to learn, so take that time.
Thank you very much for reading and have an exquisite day.
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