How To Make Money on Medium: Write Now
By: Celine Lai
Tags: Productivity, Medium, Medium Tips, Writing, Medium Help

Building up an Active Following

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I have observed some heated dialogue on the Facebook Groups related to Medium, about whether one should write every day on Medium or not.

Obviously, the “tonic” or the solution to how actually to make money on Medium is individual or specific to each person

Hopefully writers who aspire to make money through the MPP understand this. You can try out tips by those who have made money, keeping in mind that the world is multi-layered, and so any one tactic by itself just won’t “cut the mustard.”

You can publish a story every day but unless people find your stories through your active followers, through the search function, or through you and / or Medium promoting your content, your stories won’t be widely read.

A search on Medium using Tags doesn’t give the option of searching by latest stories. How is a brand new writer’s excellent story that I would love to read, if I could, going to be found? I’m not going to drill through the layers of searching, just because Medium removed the “Latest Stories” tab.

Because I don’t have a large active following of people who read all or most of my stories, I would like my stories to be found by other means, including a straightforward search on stories by Tags in date order, via a “Latest Stories” function (search tab).

I share some of my stories on Facebook Groups, but sharing on the FB groups is having less and less traction, as more and more share there.

Before anyone reading this says that the reason why most of my stories are not read is because the stories that I write don’t appeal to my followers, let me say this “a lot of Followers on social media are like cows” (no offence to either cows or people intended).

They are just browsing and after they have sampled, they will move on.

A follower may follow you in order to bookmark you, “just in case.”

The trouble with “Just in case” is that after she/he has signed up to follow hundreds of people, s/he will forget who wrote what. On top of that, the new stories that are shown on one’s personalised homepage appear by the “luck of the draw”.

For example, if you are following me, the story title of this story you are reading now may or may not have appeared on your Medium homepage.

Keep in mind that the story titles on the homepages are refreshed or change often, so what you see now may be totally different to what you would have seen if you had looked at your homepage a few minutes ago.

Tip: if you see a story title that you’re interested in, on your homepage, but don’t have time to read it then, right-click and open in a new tab and Save it to your reading list. You can do this by clicking on the little ribbon (Save story) next to the 3 little dots at the top right corner above the story content. Keep in mind that if you click on a story title on your homepage, then go back to the homepage the story titles will have changed. It would be great if Medium let us SAVE stories in the top section of our homepages, as they do for stories below this top area, by clicking on the ribbon next to the story title.

A question to Medium: Can’t the story titles in the top section have “little ribbons” to bookmark them as do the stories in the lower section of our homepages?

Keep in mind that your Followers will see your story under “New from your network” only if they click on “All from Following” under the pictures of the writers’ Avatars at the top right of their homepage, then click on “People” until you write another story.

Screenshot showing Avatars of some people and publications that I am following. Current at 2/12/2020

In other words, it depends upon the date that they use this way of finding your stories, if they do, as to which stories they will see.

If you’re following me, this story you’re reading now will appear as “a latest story” under my name under “New from People you follow” only until I publish my next story.

I don’t know about you, but I forage titles under “New from People you follow” until I see a title that I’m interested in. If I’m not interested in someone’s Story Title I won’t think “I’ll just go to their Medium Profile Page in case they wrote something before that I am interested in.”

I have observed that unless your Followers are those who know you or care about you, or who love your work outside of Medium, and thus read much of your Medium writing, your followers may not read much of your work.

One of the tips given by experienced Medium writers is to focus on one or two niches or topics only, and to publish in those niches often.

It is logical that having the same sort of content published, i.e. consistently writing on the same theme or topic, may maintain the interest or readership of people who favour that theme/topic.

More readers seeing what they like to read leads to more reads

This brings us to how to build up an active following. Despite what some Medium writers may say that we all started with zero followers and anyone can build up many followers, just as those who reap thousands of dollars a month on Medium, have done; the devotion of those followers matter.

If you start on Medium with zero followers but you have one hundred friends, family members and supporters who you bring over to Medium as followers (meaning you give them your Medium profile URL and they sign up as paying members and follow you and read all of your stories), then good for you.

You “get the ball rolling” and a rolling stone gathers no moss (hopefully).

In other words, if your readership and connections are already established outside of Medium and you are able to rapidly build up an active readership on Medium in this way, and through interacting with other writers, and through having your work published in a Medium-run Publication and having your stories curated, then of course you have more eyes on your work.

Think about it.

Do you have a big network of people you know who love your work and read most of your stories on Medium?

Do your stories get regularly curated?

Have you ever got your story in a Medium-run Publication?

Do you have 100 people you can tell that you write on Medium, who will join Medium and tell their friends about you, and all of these will become paying members and read most of your stories?

My answers to all these questions is “No.’

Fortunately for me, a few of my stories have been curated.

That’s only because I asked Medium to curate them (so they decided to curate one of them, and since then a few more have been curated) back in those days when you could ask Medium why weren’t they curating your worth-while stories.

I have submitted to Forge, Human Parts, Zora, and Elemental, and even submitted this story to a Medium anthology “For the Record”, but not been accepted into any of these.

Let’s face it.

It’s a tough gig for some (maybe most) of us to make a lot of money on Medium.

Consider that I read in an article on the internet somewhere that Medium was confident that in 2020 it would have one million paying members.

Consider that a short while ago I found that 49 million signed-up people were following “Medium Staff”.

Obviously I’m not saying that 49 million plus people are paying members or write on Medium, but the stats all point to a hell of a lot of writers on Medium.

You can view the heck of a lot of writers on Medium as “competing” for reading time, whether the authors want to make money or not.

You can take the angle that hopefully the Universe will collaborate with everything so that a person who benefits from your story WILL find it.

To build an active following and get more eyes on your Medium content, without having your stories curated or distributed (see my Publication “Curation Matters”) you need to purely and simply WRITE.

Over time your number of followers will grow and the percentage of them that read more of your stories may also grow over time. Even if this doesn’t happen, one more follower who reads just one of your stories is, of course, adding to your total reading time.

So, take notice of the tips on writing successfully on Medium that make sense to you, or resonate with you, and tweak them to fit in with your lifestyle and aspirations, to build up your active following.