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Two Years, $30k, and 507 Articles on Medium. Here’s What I’ve Learned.
Every blogging success and mistake over the past 24 months laid out
I wrote my first story on Medium on September 12, 2018. Two years later, this is my 507th story on the platform. I honestly never thought I’d come this far.
I’ve earned nearly $30,000 in my spare time over the course of two years. My best month was $3,311.31 (May 2020); my worst was 1/1000th of that at $3.32 (Sept 2018). And I honestly believe the best is yet to come.
If you prefer the video version, you can check that out here:
My Learning Curve on Medium
People will have you believe Medium is a linear journey, that success means every month you earn more. It’s not true. Every month you learn more, but those lessons don’t necessarily correspond to more money.
Here’s a visual map of my journey on Medium, as illustrated by stories published and money earned per month. The blue bars are stories published, and the green line is money earned.
You can see a few months in, I quickly realized the more I wrote, the more money I earned. But I didn’t see the promised accumulation — it felt like I had to keep writing in order to continue earning that amount.
This led me to becoming a content mill, shamelessly recycling and republishing content in my frantic race to continue earning $1,000s per month. I knew some authors were making more by writing less, but I couldn’t figure out how.
You’ll notice a pretty precipitous drop about a year in — I started a new job, which didn’t let me write nearly as much — and I was tired. You’ll also see, however, that my earnings didn’t spiral down. I was writing less, but I cared so much more about every story I wrote. This…
