How to earn substantial money on Medium
Success secrets to high earning on Medium is revealed.
Photo by Omid Armin on Unsplash
You can read this post on Medium.
In this post, my goal is to answer a frequently asked question by new writers on Medium who have little or no experience.
Since I established ILLUMINATION, I met around 3,000 writers on Medium.
Over 500 writers asked me: “WHAT IS THE EASY AND BEST WAY OF MAKING MONEY ON MEDIUM?”
I waited for a while to answer this frequently asked question to gain more insights and validate my findings. I recorded my observations, analyzed them, and created interesting patterns. I simplified those patterns to make practical and useful for Medium writers.
My purpose is to inform our writers based on facts rather than opinions.
Before providing my observations, findings, and experience on how to make money on Medium, I want to point out two caveats.
As the first caveat, this story has nothing to do with ethics, my personal preference, and motives about money. Making money on Medium is not my goal and motive. I have different views on content creation and money. I exclude this aspect in my story.
I also want to highlight that while how we make money is public information, why we earn and what we do with money are private matters, so I want to exclude these points from my story too.
My value proposition to my readers in this story is based on my observations and findings through interactions with accomplished writers who make substantial money and comparing them with those who cannot make any or little money. The patterns I discovered revealed the differences.
I want to share these findings with practical points without bias. I emphasize “bias” because, like many other writers in this platform, I have mixed thoughts and feeling about how to make money from content creation. I refrain from my personal opinions and choose to reflect reality. So don’t shoot the messenger!
Before introducing the ten steps to earning good money, I want to point out three controversial points which can help digest the content better.
Three controversial points for consideration
My first controversial yet a realistic finding is that quality articles do not necessarily make money on Medium. I know this claim may be criticized harshly, especially when such comment comes from an editor. I am not advocating to write non-quality content by any means. Far from it, my goal is to increase the quality of content from all angles.
However, my next controversial finding aims to extend the previous point. Quality can be in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there are some commonly accepted norms for quality content, but the overall quality is a subjective matter in the end. A scientific paper written with rigour and academic quality standards is not necessarily a quality story to a reader who purely enjoys pop culture. I read several stories about how a celebrity chewed gums gaining myriads of readers on Medium.
I found out that most earning Medium writers are not highly qualified or specialized individuals. But they have specialized traits covered under the ten headings below.
My third controversial finding is if you are a scientific or technical writer you have little or no chance to attract the attention of a reader for the pop culture and no opportunity to get substantial reading times from that type of audience. The same applies to a writer wring for pop culture, who try to gain reader base from the scientific or technical audience. There are, of course, exceptions, but my focus in this story is for the majority.
What are the implications of these three points?
It is all about our fans.
In the next session, I want to share my critical findings on how to make money on Medium. I don’t want to go to the details; instead, provide you with a high-level point of view under ten crucial points to keep the story in a reasonable size and add value to my readers.
10 CRITICAL POINTS TO MAKE MONEY ON MEDIUM
1. Aim 100 fans at the minimum!
Based on my experience and observations, I found out that we need 100 fans at minimum to start earning money on Medium.
Anything under this number won’t be substantial.
We don’t earn money from our followers. We make money from our fans on Medium. I observed writers with thousands of followers who earn very little money and writers with only a few hundred followers who earn substantial money.
The main reason for this difference is Medium pays based on reading time and total engagement on our stories. Followers on Medium do not necessarily produce reading outcome; however, fans do.
We need to turn our followers to our fans. As this is a broad topic, I plan to discuss how to create fans on Medium in a separate article. I have compelling findings on this interesting point.
You can read the rest of this post on Medium.
I am founder and leader of ILLUMINATIONpublication on Medium. If you are interested to join my publication as a writer, please leave a messageon this web link.