Medium Earnings
I Earned my first dollar after 6 months of writing in Medium
Getting out of the gutter of feeling like a total failure in medium
I started writing in Medium last February. I wanted to share all my experiences in being an expat with a wider audience. At that point, my stories were not behind any paywall. I naively thought that people who are looking to move across countries and would miraculously find my content and start reading.
Few days passed and still, I had 0 followers and a single-digit number of views. These views are mostly me searching and reading my article from various devices, my personal laptop, phone, office laptop, etc.
Another couple of weeks passed, I wrote some more articles. I was still not getting any views or followers. So I started to address the problem head-on and start searching a little bit more on why nobody is reading my content. This is the time I fully learned how Medium works.
Fast forward a few months, I felt confident putting my stories behind a paywall and create a new publication and add my stories there. I was hoping that medium would someday curate my content to distribute and I would miraculously get thousands of followers and views. Well, obviously it didn’t happen. So I thought to take matters into my own hands. Here is what I did which helped me to get my first dollar. I was very surprised at how little time it took me after I started doing the following.
Submit to a well-known publication
All of my content was very niche. I was writing about living as an Asian expat in the UK. So I tried to find publications that cover expat life and found “The Expat Chronicles”. This was the turning point. I applied to be a writer there, got accepted and published my first post on “Hidden Cost of Being an Expat”, which got published.
I suddenly started seeing some traction on my stories and getting one or two followers. This was big progress after months of getting 0 views and followers
Use Facebook groups to reach new readers
I can’t remember where I found this trick. But I found this awesome Facebook group called “Medium Writers Boost”. Not only you can share your articles, but you will also find many articles written by others on various topics which you wouldn’t have found anywhere else.
Read, engage and follow
I feel like this is the trick that nobody told me when I started reading and writing in Medium. You can find a lot of awesome content in Medium covering a variety of niches. Being an avid reader myself, I used to read a lot, but not engage. Once I started seeing that people engaging in my content, I really saw Medium as a platform not solely one-sided. I started sharing my opinion, experience, feelings with stories that really resonated with me. I started finding new authors who don’t have a higher follower count but have amazing content. I think this is what Medium is really about. Providing people with a platform where they can express themselves freely and spark a discussion. For me, this was a mindset shift. I am no longer writing to a void, we are all in this together.
What’s next?
I sincerely hope that this will help any struggling medium newcomer to get to their first dollar.
Keeping the spirit of Medium intact, I would really love to hear from my fellow readers on their experience of earning the first dollar, what they did, what worked and what did not. Let’s help each other out.
