You Can Make Money on Medium 💸

How I Made ~$3,000 in Less Than 3 Months

You Can Make Money on Medium 💸

How I Made ~$3,000 in Less Than 3 Months

Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on UnsplashI normally get a “wait…what?” or “I had no idea” or “seriously?” when I tell people that you—yes, you who is not a professional writer—can make money on Medium. Not as some sort of exclusive program where you’re hand-selected from thousands of other writers. Not as some sort of secret agreement with the editors. Nope. Literally anyone who publishes content here can make a little extra cash. And sometimes…a lot of littles add up to a lot.

Here’s how it works:

Medium has a program called the Medium Partner Program. It’s essentially a system that allows for you, or anyone else for that matter, to begin earning money for the content that you share on this platform. *Why would Medium pay you for your content even if you’re not a professional writer or some famous person? *Because content is king and if Medium can share a small portion of their revenue with you to incentivize user-generated writing that adds substance and diversity to their platform, that’s a small price to pay for a much larger library.

Then, the Medium cura—well, you know what, let them explain it:

Sounds easy enough, right? It is.

Back when I was writing daily for 100 days, I noticed this little checkbox every time before I published a post.

I thought, “why not!” And clicked it.

Now the bolded section might turn you off, but don’t let it. Even if you publish a post with the checkbox clicked and it goes behind the Medium paywall, you can still share what Medium calls a “Friend Link” to your social channels, your friends, etc. when you want someone to read the post without having to be a paying subscriber of Medium. It’s a brilliant, and frankly very kind gesture by the platform to address one of the most obvious inhibitions about publishing behind the paywall.

Taking a step back for a moment, because Medium has a $5/month Premium membership tier of readers, *those *are the ones that are paying for unlimited access to content like yours when you click that little checkbox. An average visitor who is not subscribed will be able to access up to 3 “premium” posts before they hit the paywall (unless, like I described above, they get to the post via a Friend Link).

How I Made ~$3000 From A Few Posts

Now, I don’t want to make this sound too easy—because the fact of the matter is that you do still need your post to hit some traction before you start raking in the serious dough. That said, Medium is by far the easiest platform to have a “big hit” in large part because their curators do such a good job of scouring the new user-generated content library on daily basis and featuring posts they like to larger audiences.

For example, the most popular post I wrote during the 100-day experiment was about iPhone location tracking:

Your iPhone Has A Hidden List of Every Location You’ve BeenIt’s called the Significant Location list, and you probably didn’t know it existedonezero.medium.comThe inspiration for the post was constant conversations I had with my coworkers about how they had no idea this “Significant Location list” existed inside their iPhone and was tracking their every movement. The post is a a simple step-by-step guide to find that list and adjust the settings if you so choose. Nothing more.

The post started to immediately take off.

Within a few weeks, it had over 100K views. The Medium curators had reached out and asked to feature it in one of their new publications, One Zero, and I was thrilled.

Quick Step-by-Step Guide

1. Write a post on something your passionate about.

2. Tag it with the top Medium tags. (see here)

3. Check the “Make my story eligible” box before publishing.

4. Promote across your social channels. (tip: LinkedIn drives the most visits)

5. Sit and wait for the $$$

At the end of the day, the main goal of this post is to inspire and empower you. Everyone has something important to say and writing is the most effective method of translating the nebulous thoughts in your head into articulate points of view. Medium has found a way to help incentivize each and everyone of us to practice that articulation and be paid for it.

So go try it out! And tag me so I can read your work, too. ;-)

Originally published on Medium, October 29, 2019