How Medium Fits Into My Strategy To Make $10,000 Monthly Writing Online
A little backstory…
I have been an avid reader on Medium since 2016. When Medium started the MPP in 2017, it became more and more difficult to read articles I liked.
Everything was behind a paywall. I held out as long as I could, consuming and reading available free stories until I couldn’t anymore. I became a paying member because I wanted to read a story from Nicholas Cole.
Later on, everyone started talking about making thousands of dollars every month on Medium.
When Shelby Church released this video on how she repurposed her YouTube content to articles on Medium as a case study on how profitable Medium was.
In this video, she disclosed she made about $6000 from her Medium case study.
Coupled with other testimonies of how people made thousands of dollars writing on Medium. I was sold.
I took writing on the platform seriously and kept researching how to make money writing on the platform.
Shortly after, I got a decent-paying job, and writing on Medium took the back burner.
I wrote an average of 3 articles a month on Medium and earned between $0–$2 on average, and my highest earning month was August 2022, at $143.
Towards the fourth quarter of 2022, I lost my job. I tried to get another via Upwork, but it was not happening, so I looked to Medium to keep the lights on.
And whatever I made so far on the platform is just enough to keep my Medium membership going.
With ignited fervor, I ramped up the articles I wrote on the platform. In June, I wrote about 15 articles, the highest number I have ever written in a month on Medium.
But it did not make any difference. I made $1.24.
According to the Web Tribunal, 70% of Medium writers earn money, only 6.4% earn more than $100 monthly, and I reckon these statistics were valid three years ago when Medium had about 700,000 paid subscribers.
This is not the case today. Medium recently celebrated 1,000,000 million paid subscribers, and I can wager that many of them are writers.
With the recent inclusion of 77 countries in the MPP.
You can see how ridiculous it is that the over 200,000 writers on the platform want to make over $100 a month from the program alone.
This is not to say I will not still put some of my articles I think might go viral behind a paywall, but who knows what might go viral these days?
It begs the question…
So How Medium Will Help Me Make $10,000/Month Writing?
After spending hours perusing Reddit posts on making a livable wage from Medium, I can confidently say it is Herculean.
Can you make coffee money from Medium? Yes. Can you make enough to pay your rent? Yes, but not through the Medium Partnership Program.
You see, marketers on the platform know that Medium.com is one of the strongest domains on the internet today. There is hardly anything you will search for on Google that there isn’t an article about on Medium.
If I want to make a sustainable wage writing on Medium, it won’t be through the Medium Partner Program. Instead, I funnel some of the traffic I garner through Medium to my newsletter.
Take, Paul Rose for instance. Their content is not behind the paywall, but they make over $1000 writing on Medium talking about side hustles, and selling their digital products on the platform.
There is also Hazel Paradise who makes money writing on Medium and selling digital products on Gumroad via the platform.
I have read testimonies of how writers have gotten thousand-dollar gigs as ghostwriters for prominent persons.
There is also making money through affiliate links, as Victoria Kurichenko does.
Tying Everything Up Together
I want to use Medium to generate traffic to my newsletter and sell access to my upcoming paid community for writers.
Content I publish on Medium would funnel leads to my email list. Chances are I will sell some digital products or memberships.
If you’d like to follow along on everything I am doing trying to make money writing online full-time, consider subscribing here.
Thank you for reading, and I will see you in the next one.
