Take My Advice: Be Careful Whose Advice You Take About Medium

Why are you reading this? Is this not yet another in an endless parade of personal stories about how someone got started on Medium and achieved some modicum of success in a relatively short time? Do you honestly think reading about my experience is going to be of any help to you whatsoever? If so, you may be right. Then again, you may not because...

Nobody knows anything

The fact is, everyone’s experience on Medium is going to be different because we’re not all writing about the same things, we don’t all have the same goals, and what works for one is not going to work for everyone.

I cannot give you the “Top Ten Ways” or the “Five Best Strategies,” or the “Only Advice You’ll Ever Need” about making it on Medium. All I can do is tell you what has and what hasn’t worked for me and hope that there’s something here you can use.

I’m not making any promises, though, because, as screenwriter William Goldman so famously said about the film industry, “Nobody knows anything.”

February made me shiver: the first two weeks

I published my first story on Medium on February 13, 2020. Actually, I published several. They were all poems I’d written over the last few years and posted on my Facebook page during the annual 30-day April poetry challenge.

I did not submit any of my poems to Medium publications because I had no idea what a Medium publication was.

As might be expected, nobody read them. It was a little discouraging.

March madness

In the first week of March, I published four opinion pieces with a political theme and posted the Friend Links on Facebook. I also emailed Friend Links to some of my friends. (Okay, they were my relatives.) Luckily, it turns out that some of the people I contacted subscribe to Medium, so my Stats page started to get some action.

In the second week of March, after reading a few articles like this one, I signed up for Amazon’s affiliate links program and embedded links to books and products that I mentioned in a story I wrote about how to liquidate a comics collection and two stories about growing tomatoes. I also joined Facebook pages specific to these topics and posted Friend Links to my stories there.

(Update: As of April 20, 2021, I never made any money from Amazon affiliate links, so they dumped me.)

On March 10, I hit 60 views for the first time. Unfortunately, 99% of my readership was external. In other words, all fame no fortune.

I read more articles like this about succeeding on Medium and decided to revisit my poems and submit them to one of the smaller publications.

On March 12, Weeds & Wildflowers published my poem “Spring Fever.” (Many thanks to Dennett for patiently explaining about draft links and giving me my big break.) In the next 11 days, I published four more poems in Weeds & Wildflowers.

At this point, I was pleased to be getting published. People gave me some claps and nice comments. Someone even occasionally highlighted my text.

This is all very encouraging, but poems are short compared to other stories (I’m not writing “The Odyssey” here), so my earnings were in the single digits. (That’s not dollars but cents.)

I read some more articles on making it on Medium and decided to tackle one of the most popular subjects: writing. Realizing that it was important to find an angle that hadn’t been overdone, I wrote about my experience scanning books and documents to convert them into e-files.

On March 23, much to my surprise, The Writing Cooperative published my story “To Scan or Not to Scan,” and wonder of wonders was distributed by the Medium curators in Writing.

The Writing Cooperative has close to 200,000 followers, so I was certain this story would be very lucrative. Unfortunately, only 57 of them have read it, earning me a total of 55 cents to date. Apparently, my angle was so unique; nobody was interested in it. (Update: As of May 24, 2021, it’s earned me 79 cents. Whoot! Whoot!)

However, what people were interested in was another story I wrote for a publication with fewer than 3,500 followers called History of Yesterday. Coincidentally, my story “The tangled tale of the Seven Sutherland Sisters” was published on the same day as my piece for The Writing Cooperative. My reads jumped from just one on March 22 to 323 on March 23.

The Sutherland piece has been my most successful by far, with lifetime views of 2,600 and lifetime earnings of $40.58 to date. It was also distributed by the Medium curators, this time in History.

The moral of this story is that the number of followers a publication has isn’t as important as you might think and curation, though helpful, is no guarantee of success.

(Update: As of May 24, 2021, the Sutherland Sisters story has earned me $244.37. It is no longer my most profitable story on Medium, though. That would be this one. It has earned $1598.55 since the end of October. I know!)

April foolish

In April, I really got busy. I published six poems, two essays (about cookbooks and COVID), two how-to articles (obituaries and selling online), a personal story, an inspirational story, a piece about designer Natacha Rambova, and a history of Roman vomitoria.

For my pains of jumping all over the place, only one of those stories earned much of anything: the one about vomitoria. (Update: As of May 24, 2021, this story has earned me $98.83)

What’s the dirty low down?

My first three months on Medium were a learning experience. Here are the key things I learned that are still true for me today:

1. Distribution matters more than what publication your story is in.
2. A great photo and title are essential to going viral.
3. My stories about history tend to earn me the most money, but that’s me. It’s not going to be true for everybody.
4. Publishing poetry on Medium is a waste of time if you want to make money. The feedback is wonderful, though, so I do it anyway.
5. Marketing helps, but the time put in doesn’t necessarily translate to more money. Do some, but write more.
6. It’s okay to write whatever you feel like, but it’s nearly impossible to build a brand if your content is all over the place. Focus on what you do best. It doesn’t have to be one thing, but one thing should be the main thing.
7. Take advice articles with a grain of salt—even mine.

Happy writing!