What You Can Learn From Shelby Church’s $6,000 First Month on Medium
By: Hay Di
Tags: Writing, Making Money Online, Working From Home, Médium, YouTube

What You Can Learn From Shelby Church’s $6,000 First Month on Medium

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

Shelby Church is a YouTuber with 1.5 million subscribers. Some of her most popular videos are videos where she experiments with different ways you can make money online. Recently, she decided to experiment with Medium to see if you can actually make money on the platform as a writer and if it’s worth your time.

The first thing she did was talk to Casey and Zulie, two successful Medium writers who make a decent income on Medium. They gave her some insights and advice on being a successful Medium writer.

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

One day one, Shelby signed up for the free Medium Partner Program which she described as an easy process, create an account with Medium and Stripe, link your bank account, fill in your tax information, done. No approval needed, unlike YouTube’s Partner Program.

Next, came the hard part, brainstorming and writing interesting articles that people would actually want to read.

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

After some thought, she decided to transcribe some of her most popular YouTube videos into article form because they were already doing really well on YouTube. So she figured, why not? It would probably do well in article form too. In total, Shelby created four high-quality articles and hit publish.

Written articles:

Are “Factory-Built Prefab Homes” The Future Of Housing?

I Tried the $1,500 At Home Fitness Mirror For My Quarantine Workouts

This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me for My 1,000,000 View Video

7 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Got a Tesla Model 3

Shelby decided to wait a couple of days to see what would happen with no promotion.

“I want to see if this was just searchable, and people on Medium would find it like within the platform, so I didn't really share it anywhere.”

The results?

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

None of her articles got curated and she received less than 100 internal views and zero dollars in revenue.

“Clearly, you can see that wasn't the case. So my strategy of just releasing a couple of articles into the wild did not go so well.”

After some really sad analytics, Shely decided to promote her articles externally across her social media platform including Twitter. She only made four cents.

You’ll think she'll make more money because of her huge social media following, but she didn't. The reason was that most of her followers were not paying Medium members, so their views and reads did not accumulate to actual earnings. Also, her articles were not curated at that time, so she wasn't getting a lot of internal views either.

After more sad analytics, Shely took another approach, submitting your articles to Medium publications. A golden piece of advice she took away from talking to Casey and Zulie.

She did some research to figure out which publications would best fit her articles and ended up submitting them to The Startup and Onezero. Both publications approved her submissions. Afterward, her articles also got curated and distributed by Medium in the app across selected topic pages and emails.

A month later, let’s take a look at some of her stats:

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

In the first 17 days, the article did not make much according to the graph. Onezero accepted the article on April 20 and Medium curated it on April 21st. That’s when things took a turn.

Image by Shelby Church on her YouTube video

As I am writing this post in June, Shelby’s Medium overall earning has hit over $11,000 in May. Wow! Her experiment shows that writing for Medium is worth your time.