I did this one thing and doubled my Medium paycheck in one month
I set out last month to earn one dollar. Isn’t there a saying, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a step?
Well, the journey of making $1,000 a month from your laptop begins with a single article. I didn’t even come close to my goal, but failure, as it often does, taught me a very valuable lesson. I needed to make a change.
I haven’t quite managed a huge payday on Medium, but I’ve made money. A single money.
I’m a professional writer, with career earnings somewhere in the neighbourhood of $250,000. I’ve been published in two of my country’s most read newspapers several times. But like I doubled my earnings, there is a catch: it took me seven years to accumulate that kind of money, and only in the last two have I managed to get bylines in major newspapers.
Here’s the one thing I did that helped me double my Medium earnings in one month:
Write for free.
But do it for yourself. Every self-improvement post will offer this advice, but that’s because it’s the only thing that separates writers from non-writers. Writers write. As soon as you stop writing, you’re not a writer.
I write every day for work, but trying to change gears and find Medium content, I realized I needed to try something different. I’m not out of practice but I was out of focus. For the last month, I set aside about 20 minutes every day, whenever I had time, to journal. At first I just summed up my day, logged any observations or interesting facts I learned.
But then, I started doing something unconsciously: I started retaining ideas. I might have a good idea at work and immediately entertain in, but by the end of the day it would get swept under the rug. By writing every day, I found I’d either come up with more ideas during the day and write them down, or I’d be going over my day, and remember the idea I had, and add it to my entry for future reference.
It’s been great, I’ve come up with a podcast idea, a long-form pitch, several stories for my nine-to-five writing.
Last month, I felt perpetually out of ideas, but each afternoon that I sit down to journal I manage to find about 750 words to explain my day and explore thoughts, feelings, and ideas. A novella is 40,000 words, which means I could write my first novella in less than two months. But let’s be realistic:
The first draft of anything is shit.
I might be able to write 40,000 words in two months, but about half of them aren’t going to be very good. A writer trick no one tells you is that most of what you write and most of your ideas are garbage, if you don’t write, you’ll miss great stories, and if you only write when you feel inspired, and your idea falls flat, you’ll feel discouraged.
Write every day for yourself. It’s a few minutes of your day, and it will give context to your journey. Plus, you’ll polish some rough ideas into real gems, and some great ideas into diamonds. Maybe you pass on an idea today, but in three weeks, you stumble across a concept that clicks.
It’s not much more complicated than that. It’s very intimidating to read hundreds of posts each month about people who have earned entire mortgage payments with a few simple tweaks to their writing. If you’re struggling to gain traction, before you apply to write at Medium’s publications, or write your first e-book, or design your first course. See if you can entertain yourself, if you can write half a novella in your first month, you’re well on your way to writing compelling content.
So what did I earn in my second month of writing for Medium consistently?
$0.04!
