How I earned $109 on Medium, by mistake 😅

Hey 👋

In June I published an article on Medium, and I've been earning money from it ever since.

It's only $109, but I was totally surprised, and thought that by sharing my experience I might be able to help other IHs out there.

Here are 6 things that I didn't expect from Medium's partner program. ✌️

1. Growth slowed but didn't stop. 🐢

I thought the shelf-life of a Medium article would be really short, like, maybe a week. But I'm 6 months in and it's still going up to reasonable peaks.

There is definitely a downward trend, but it didn't drop off a cliff.

2. You don't need as many views as you'd imagine to earn $100. 💸

Maybe you'll disagree, but to get $100 for less than 4000 views feels pretty reasonable. Say you have one article pop off and get 100,000 views, you could earn a couple of thousand dollars.

Note: I don't know if this is scalable, or if you read a payment ceiling.

3. I relied on 'internal promotion'. 🤔

85% of my traffic came through Medium itself (not my network).

This is listed as: "Views from Medium distribution, including our homepage, app, emails, and social media accounts."

I suspect that this element is luck—how much does Medium think people will like your article, and then promote it.

But the good news is that you don't need to have loads of followers—which I assumed you would.

4. The monthly Stripe payments work well. ✅

You literally get a Stripe payment every month, and it's always on time. It's a really nice little surprise.

I don't know what I expected, but it's certainly not difficult to get paid. You don't need to 'cash out' or anything. You could write an article and forget about it—like I did.

5. I made a few fans. 👋

Now, presumably this is totally dependent on the content you write, but I was surprised that I made about 100 followers through this article.

This is exciting because (in theory) it should give my future articles a slightly better chance of doing well. The first 1000 fans will be the hardest to find.

6. The 'publications' really help (probably). 👌

I published under BetterMarketing, which I had no prior relationship with. My steps to getting them on board was:

1- Find a few publications that post similar content.
2- Really read their guidelines and tailored the content.
3- Submitted a fully-written article.
4- Waited, like, a week.

This is niche depending, but there are some great publications for start-ups / business / companies.

I don't plan on writing on Medium very frequently, but I imagine that if you could write an article a day, with a bit of luck, you could have a pretty liveable income stream.

Especially if you had a niche, mine is UX, or a topic that Medium's internal staff loved / promoted.

It's probably worth me adding that I'm not affiliated with Medium in any way. I'm just sharing my experience in the hope that it helps motivate some of you to get writing!