How MEDIUM Pays You (Debunked)
By: Aryan Gandhi
Tags: Growth, Writing, Life, Success, Finance

Now obviously, now that you generally know HOW medium pays you, the goal is to generate income. It is time for the second part of this article!

How to make $100 Per Month or More on Medium

Without Curation

An extra $100 a month is a cool 1.2 grand a year. A definite nice addition to any other income, but far out of reach for many writers. Well, today we are going to create a plan to achieve this goal. I specifically mentioned without curation as that is not in our hands. This way, if your article is curated, it provides for extra bonus income.

Let us begin…

Quick Calculation

For all of you math haters, I am sorry but this has to be done.

A $100 a month divided by 30 days = $3.33 per day.

This is the tricky part, but using some calculations that I have done which have via my stories to assume that you need about 2–3 hours of member reading time. How do I know this? I promise you I’m not full of shit, here are all my calculations laid out step by step:

Now that we know all of this we can get started!

The Plan

I realized early not that submitting to those major publications where you see stories get thousands of claps is not worth it. I got published in The Ascent, and curated in startups and leadership. These two are some of the largest topics on Medium, yet this is how my story performed:

The Overview

They also take forever to look and respond to your stories, so we are not going to use these methods.

First, you need to get followers. Like anything, writing on Medium is an investment.

Go follow other people!

Comment on their work!

Highlight key parts!

The more you interact with the community, the more followers you will get. Remember, this is not SOCIAL MEDIA, it is not a question of popularity and ratios but of interaction and connections.

You are going to do this for around 30 minutes a day. It can be during your lunch break, before you go to bed or when you are taking a shit. The timing doesn’t really matter as long as you get it done.

The good thing about being a writer is that you really do not need a specific topic. As long as you can write to keep the readers attention, you are golden. How do you do so? I’ll cover that in the tips and tricks section.

Once you have decided on your topic, the goal is going to be to crank out a nice 5–10 minute article every two days. Remember, we have determined that member reading time is key, so short articles will not cut it.

Still, don’t write 30-minute articles because the chances of people are reading them fully are very slim.

Tips and Tricks

Once you have cranked out this 5–10 minute article and proofread it and such, we need to meet the member reading time requirements to make $6.67 every two days.

This means we need 4–6 hours of member reading time,

INTERACT. External views DO NOT count toward money, so while it is good to have them, we are going to focus on members. If you are interacting with people’s posts for 30 minutes a day, we can usually count on 25–30 minutes of time to be covered form there. As you interact more, the time will increase that people check out your articles. Join medium Facebook groups. Doing so will allow you to post, and if you interact with others, they will definitely interact with your posts. We can get another 10–15 minutes from here. Submit to smaller publications. If you write a banger of an article, then go ahead and submit it to a large publication. But, these articles may not be published for DAYS. On top of this, I got 55 cents from being published in The Ascent. The problem is not with the publications, but the sheer volume of submissions they receive. Before y’all go hating, I started a publication called Never Fear, and will try to get your story at least 30 minutes of member reading time, as well as published under 4 hours. You can read the story here:

We have now reached about an hour, which leaves 4 more that we need.

Creative Steps

Tagging authors. If you spam authors, they are not going to check out your content and add reading time. Also, you will soon run out of authors to tag and this strategy will not work. If you read content like yours, then I would say try to tag 4–5 authors in your story with a sentence two describing why they are there. Fit them in, don’t force them, and this will get you around 30 minutes. Post on Linkedin, and use LinkedIn groups. I don’t think this an option that is used much, but people on LinkedIn are usually interested in topics about the field they work in. Form connections in that field and you will get a lot of viewership. I would say with 500+ connection I have I can get a solid 2–3 hours of member reading time. For people just starting out, it can be around 30 minutes to an hour.

Our total now is 135 to 165 minutes, which is around an hour shy of our goal. The rest is up to your own methods of getting viewership, but don’t worry.

You see, the numbers I gave you above are rookie numbers. As time goes on, this begins to compound with more followers, more posts AND the old articles bringing large amounts of in revenue.

If you do want to become a writer for Never Fear, fill out the google form below and I will add you!

Also, if you think you are not good enough, we take a look at ALL submissions, and you are most definitely a better writer than you think.