I’ve been blogging for years and Medium is a game-changer. Seriously.
Check out Making Medium Work For You on Gumroad for more information.
I started writing on Medium in 2019 but never took it all that seriously. I one article on SEO that did pretty well and that was encouraging.
When everything changed in March 2020, I started working from home. It’s not like I was worried about losing my job, but you never know. I wanted to have a backup plan for some income, so I started thinking about starting up a few niche websites and getting back into affiliate marketing. Not that I ever stopped affiliate marketing, but I hadn’t done a whole lot ever since I shut down my DFS review site.
Working from home has a ton of upside for me. I live in the DC area and the roads around here are insane. Even though my office is only about 13 miles from my house it can take me anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to commute.
Working from home means no commute, so I instantly got back between 5 – 10 hours a week.
I started working on websites, then started planning some link-building campaigns.
Blogging on Medium was part of my link-building strategy.
The more I read on Medium, the deeper I went down the rabbit hole. There is some awesome stuff on there.
Even though you can write for free on Medium, I subscribed to Medium ($50 a year) just in case there is some dark magic that is provided to subscribers vs. freeloaders. I don’t think that’s the case, but $50 a year for a killer blogging platform with that kind of reach is worth it to me.
Then I started reading about the Medium Partner Program (MPP). The MPP is how you get paid on Medium. When you publish your articles you can select to have them included as part of the MPP meaning they are metered and behind Mediums paywall. The bottom line is that you earn money based on the reading time of your article.
I started to think about writing on Medium. Would anyone be interested in the stories I have to tell?
Only one way to find out: subscribe to Medium and start writing.
My first real moneymaker on Medium
So I wrote a story about how I started a business with some coworkers:
That article took off like a rocket and is still generating revenue every month.
That’s right, you don’t get paid just once for your work, you get paid as long as people are still reading. Royalties are a wonderful thing.
One Hit Wonder?
I was thinking that must have been a fluke. No way I can repeat that. But I kept writing and then in August 2020 published the following story:
That one did pretty good too, and like the others that are still being read on Medium, they are generating money every month.
Making Money On Medium
Here’s the bottom line: you have to write articles that people want to read and that will get curated by Medium.
Give the people what they want.
Getting Curated.
Curation is the process of Medium selecting your article for further distribution. This means that it meets Medium’s standards for quality and they will include your article in their marketing and distribution process. Your article must be curated by Medium for it to have a chance to appear on the Medium Homepage, emails, or any external marketing they do. You can read more information about Medium’s distribution system for all the details.
There are no secrets to getting curated, in fact Medium tells you exactly what you have to do in their curation guidelines. Pay close attention to this article, in fact you should read it several times just to make sure you internalize it.
Medium’s Distribution Standards: What Writers and Publications Need to Know
Keep in mind that Medium is a platform owned by someone else. You are a writer there but they control the platform.
You have to play by their rules, and doing so will give you access to their membership.