How You Can Make $10K From Writing

Many aspiring writers come on to Medium hoping to start up a writing career and earn some decent income. It is not an impossible dream, but one that is filled with challenges, clouded with fierce competition and scares opportunities.

On Coffee Times publication alone, we have hundreds of active writers who churned out thousands of stories every month. Each one competes with countless others for views and reads from our daily pool of readers. Competition is fierce everywhere, and authors and their articles are often with low views and dwindling income. Everyone is trying to figure out the magic formula to making more money from their online writing hustle. Is it achievable?

Is it possible to make a 4 digit income from writing?

The simple answer is “definitely!”, the more pressing question is “how?”. There is no lack of writing tips out there that would offer you instant advice like consistency, write every day, get the right title, read more, engage with your audience, etc, etc. But none of these tells you the principal considerations that must be considered behind every step.

First thing first!

Your purpose in writing — This is an important step and the most fundamental. If you don’t get your objective correct, you won’t get your strategy right simple as that, and if your strategy is not correct, whatever you do subsequently will merely be leading you down the wrong path.

1. Why do you write?

You have to be truthful and be clear to answer the question. If you give wishy-washy answers, you’re gonna get wishy-washy results. To keep it simple, you should only allow yourself two answers.

Type A — Writing is a hobby, you don’t care about the money.

Type B — Writing is a profession, you want to make a living out of it.

If you say Type A, then you mustn’t measure your success on Medium by the dollar you make. Focus instead on your writing and write what inspires you, use the number of claps and comments as a proxy to measure how well your writing is doing with reference to your audience, work to improve your article engagement, and most important of all, enjoy the process. If you are here for the experience, writing on Medium can be truly fun and engaging.

But if you constantly found yourself checking on your MPP earnings or staring hard at your story stats wondering why they are not going up, chances are, you are not Type A.

Is it shameful to be Type B?

No! Certainly not. There is no reason to be ashamed for wanting to make money from your own writing. However, you do have to understand and accept the fact that when you write for money, it is not simply about doing the things you like anymore, it is akin to starting up a retail shop in a shopping mall. You have to do things that you won’t normally do in order to make enough money to survive, and you have to do even more if you desire to thrive.

2. Understand your customer’s interest and sell what your customer needs.

“Don’t try to sell a comb to a group of monks and complain that no one is buying. The problem doesn’t lie on them, the problem lies on you.”

As a new writer in the market, your options to make it big is limited and at such early stages, your best bet is to cater to the mass market. If you do not know who your mass-market customers are, or in this case readers, then your articles aren’t going to fly off the shelves.

Medium claimed that they have over 100 million readers on the platform. If you have been writing on Medium, it is not hard to figure out that only a fraction of that 100 million readers are paying members. Only reads from paying members will translate into monetary income for your articles. This is the mass-market audience that you should be targeting if you are a Type B writer.

Within the paying community, there are more writers than there are readers, and there are only 3 things this mass audience is interested in.

1) How to improve their writing;

2) How to make money from their writing;

3) What is happening to Medium that may affect their writing.

This is not to say other topics won’t work, they could, but if you want to take a chance at hitting something big, your chance is much higher if it can fit the needs of your mass audience. From my observation, 70% of all viral stories has something to do with writing, money or Medium, less of everything else.

3. Take care of your readers and your readers will take care of you

Understand the strategy of win-win. Help to elevate your readers to reach their goals and they will, in turn, help you to reach yours.

Hitting a viral story is nice, it would be a bonus that could bring in a good amount of money, but realistically, hitting a viral story consistently is impossible. You have to face reality and accept the bulk of your stories, like 99% of it, aren’t going viral. Even if they aren’t going viral, you have to maximise the number of people that will read your articles. How?

Always put your readers first, think about how you are value-adding to their needs. Blindly writing about writing, money and Medium isn’t going to guarantee you success because there are so many people already writing these topics, whatever you can think of, someone somewhere has already written it, there is no lack of articles on these topics for your audience to choose from. Why must they choose yours? What is the reason for them to read your article?

Create value takeaways for readers who read your articles or give your audience that special reason to read your work. If you can do any of the two, there will be readers coming to read your articles, time and again.

As a new writer, the reason you can offer is to be an active commenter and clapper on your readers’ articles. The more you comment and interact with your potential reader, the more reasons you are giving them to come and interact with you through your articles. The more support you give out, the more support you will receive. This is the basic law of reciprocity.

Seasoned writers on the other hand will have to do more because there is only so much you can read and comment. To grow your audience beyond a certain size you have to do more than just comment and clap. You have to proactively promote the work of others.

Established writers who regularly clocked over thousands of views have something in common, they do things that not many people can do (more on this in later paragraphs).

3. Titles are good to have, Habits are more important

I must confess, when I first came on to Medium, I was blindly following what everyone was doing, chasing after everything that can be used as a proxy to measure one’s success. From followers to top-writer, from views to claps. I have written a step-by-step guide to get 100 followers in 2 weeks. I have written articles on how I got 1000 followers and Top Writer in 7 weeks. I have articles on how to get 1000 claps, I have articles on how to make a >$1K from your writing, I have articles on how you could get more views and claps. I have… written a lot of other useless wisdom. Other than the 100 followers that qualify you for MPP, it is hard to measure the tangible benefits of the rest of the titles other than it looks good on your profile.

One thing I do want to emphasise though, the work and new habits that go behind achieving those goals are far more valuable than the titles themselves. Top Writer won’t earn you any benefit, but the writing habit you have built to earn you that title is something you must keep and continue to develop.

4. Do what others do not

Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

I often see people criticising new writers for adopting the follow-2-follow strategy to build their followers. The most common statement “followers gained through follow-2-follow strategy are not your real followers and they don’t care what you have published”. I do not know how these people came to that conclusion because followers, in general, don’t care about what you post. It doesn’t matter if it was gained through follow-2-follow or otherwise. People simply don’t care! Having 10K of so-called ‘genuine’ followers isn’t going to get you 10K views. In the end, it still falls back to the reason why your followers should read your articles.

If you want to do better than others then you have to do more than others, like rallying people of the same interest to write about a common topic. Be the leaders of the pack. The more you do, the better you become and the better you are, the more people will participate, each participant will then bring along their group of audience and you will benefit from the spillover effect.

Rallying involves asking, and asking often makes people feel uneasy because it requires surrendering control to someone else which create the fear of rejection. There are some people who really have a hard time being afraid that they’ll be shunned or rejected if they ask. They can make a lot of excuses for not making the request. The irony is that most often, people do want to participate. — Our most natural response is to say, ‘Sure, I can join you.’.

The other contributing factor is fear of being perceived as weak. We don’t want to be ashamed of our situation, or come across as unbecoming, so we work really hard to make sure people don’t see us this way.

5. Go where others have not

I have seen many writers saying they don’t do Twitter or they don’t do LinkedIn, but the reality is, the more you don’t do the more you will miss out. It is ok if you are Type A, but if you are Type B and you aren’t willing to explore, you are limiting your growth potential. I recently went onto WeChat to explore a new untapped market for my writings and to my surprise, many established writers like Zulie Rane for example, are already on it.

Established writers have a common trait, they are everywhere! They have several social media accounts and are active across a multitude of platforms. They don’t just write, they explore and research. They constantly try new things and write about their adventures that others can only marvel. They share insights into what they have learnt and write stories about what they have tried. This is the reason why many people like to read them.

Established writers have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. They also write on alternative platforms like Vocal Media, Substack, Qurora, Simily and Newsbreak.

As a Type B writer, you may not need to be active on every one of these platforms, but you must have at least checked them out and developed your own strategy on how you would leverage any one of these to reach greater audiences.

Understand the need to complement Medium with other sources of income.

Never be the one without a chair when the music stops

You should never depend on one single platform to generate more than 50% of your income. Medium has taught top writers this lesson very well in early 2021 when they suddenly changed their algorithm that saw many professional writers witness their earnings sky-dived from the high thousands to the low hundreds. The livelihood of these writers was inadvertently affected and it caused a massive exodus of top writers from the platform. This is one experience you must not allow to happen to yourself. So, how to prevent this from happening?

Create a safe house by building up your own email subscribers

The safest way to protect yourself from such a vulnerability is to build your own safe house by learning how to write regular newsletters and develop your very own audience. An audience that you can bring with you whichever platform you go to.

Newsletter writing has become the hottest topic in recent months. There are a multitude of platforms that offers a feature to write newsletter these days, with varying degree of control on the subscription and payment model. Medium, Twitter and LinkedIn all have the option to write newsletter. Having said that, Substack is the current leading platform for newsletter writing. Coffee Times is growing fast on Substack and they even helped 18 participants to kick start their newsletters on Substack through their Coffee Challenge 3.

What makes Substack different is that you don’t have to worship the tech giants and their rules. Substack allows you the freedom to make up your own rules. You can choose to charge your readers to receive a regular newsletter from you and it can be anything you like to write about. You have full control over it and you own the email list.

Now imagine if you manage to build up an email list and you charge a sum of $10/month, with one thousand paying subscribers, that is a comfortable $10K per month. And that is just the income from Substack, there is still the income from Medium. What would a few thousand subscribers do to your stats on Medium? What if you keep growing your list of subscribers?

The realm of possibilities is limitless. All that is needed is you reach out and try. Without you trying, nothing will ever happen.