from February 22nd to March 22nd, 2021, I wrote 15 articles on Medium, and today I'm going to tell you the results of that and everything that I learned. First off, some of you might be wondering, what the heck is Medium? So, in one sentence, it's generally regarded as a blog host or a blog platform that launched in 2012 with articles from a hybrid of amateur and professional writers and publishers. I also just like to simply call it YouTube for blogging. And with that said, I'm just going to dive right in here. So, of those 15 articles, I wrote 12 were accepted by publications, two were self-published, and one is off being reviewed right now. So, in total, I was published, or what they call curated, by six different publications. My most common publication was Making of a Millionaire, which curated six of my articles. So, what is a publication? Well, look at them as sort of mini magazines. People that run publications accept submissions that a publisher can choose to accept or reject, and if accepted, they'll post.

curate your article with their sort of branding on top of their main page, where they're likely to have a lot more followers than you do as an individual, giving you exposure to a larger audience than if you were to publish it yourself. So, your writing gets published under their umbrella, so to speak, their brand. If you want to be successful with Medium, you're gonna need to know the ins and outs of publications, but more on that when I get to the tips. By the way, I'm going to pepper in 10 tips throughout this video today, and of course, stick around until the back half of this video where I'm going to reveal my income from Medium with full transparency and give all my thoughts on that. Was it worth it, and will I keep going? So, a moment ago, I mentioned two of my articles were self-published, and this is sort of true. I actually decided to start my own publication in early March, just sort of for fun, I guess, as a learning experiment. It's called The Money Resolution, of course, and I submitted these in all my older

self-published articles to my own publication, and now technically 100 of my articles have been curated, so to speak. So, I first learned about Medium a year ago or so, and I watched a handful of videos about it before deciding to give it a go myself. The trouble was, I had zero time that I could commit in the back half of 2020 to it because I launched my second book. I was making a video a week on YouTube, and I created a whole entire course. All in all, though, I did publish 10 articles from June through January of 2021, and I actually had help with about half of those just because of time constraints. It felt overwhelming, to be honest, to create original content on YouTube and Medium again, especially after working on a book for 15 months. But then I had this light bulb moment that I want to actually share as tip number one: Your articles don't need to be original to Medium. You can republish your own original work here, let's say from your own personal blog.

for example, I took some of my most popular videos from YouTube and condensed them and refined them into easy-to-digest articles. And this is a concept called repurposing content. For two articles, actually, I even took small sections from my book and I remixed them a bit, and I published them. In fact, this video on screen here went from a hack in my book to a Medium article, and then actually became a YouTube video. So, it can definitely go both ways. And that's how you can turn one piece of content into three pieces of passive income. That's a big personal secret I just gave away. And I actually have nine more tips for you guys. So, tip number two. When you're just getting started, or maybe in general, don't make your articles as long as mine were. At a glance, you can see mine were about eight-minute reads each. I think 1,500 and 2,000 words on average. And funny enough, my second most finished article, reader-wise, and second most engaged with article was a three-minute read. My most clapped for was a five-minute.

read by the way claps over on Medium or sort of like likes here on YouTube. It's social currency, a virtual high five. But another thing I should explain before going further is the Medium Partner Program, and I'm going to explain this as tip number three: Join the Medium Partner Program. Technically, you don't need to be a paid Medium subscriber to join the Medium Partner Program. Once you're in the Partner Program by filling out a bit of personal information, including taxpayer information, you can start to meter your articles. You're going to see stars, by the way, next to these articles once published so you know that they're metered and available to earn revenue. And now it's actually a good time to explain how you can earn income as a writer, sort of how monetization works on Medium. Essentially, when you're a paid subscriber, five dollars a month gets spread around to other writers depending on what articles you read to completion. As you can imagine, this works the other way around. As a writer, you get a tiny portion of other people's

membership fees from people that read your articles and interact with them. Tip number four: before you spend a ton of time writing, get yourself approved as a writer for publications. And here's a little insider tip, one tip that I learned about getting published is actually to delete little rejection private notes if you get them because I read an article written by someone who reviews articles for publications and they said that they can actually see these private rejection notes. You would think that they'd automatically sort of downgrade the article in the reviewer's mind because they know that they weren't the first choice for publication. There is one article in my data though that I want to call out because it explains this funny looking tall bar in my data on March 15th. The reason for that is actually super cool and made my day. So I noticed that there was one article taking off, so I clicked into the data on that article and I scrolled down to traffic sources. That's when I saw Twitter on there and actually discovered for the first time that some sections

in here are actually clickable. And upon clicking that, I actually found that my article had made the rounds on Twitter because Medium themselves tweeted about it. So freaking cool. Now, obviously, this was a bit of a lucky break, but actually, I can use this moment to give a tip that extends beyond Medium. Tip number five here: good things happen when you do research and you show up consistently, regardless of your initial success, or maybe I should say lack thereof. Right before this, I was actually on a dry spell, and I couldn't even get five views on a single article. And this is why you don't give up. You never know what's around the corner. I'm talking to YouTubers too. I mean, look at this new subscriber view in YouTube Studio. I could have given up right about here. Instead, I showed up every week, and this eventually happened. But back to the tweet. It wasn't all good. The tweet itself actually had a handful of negative comments that didn't feel so good personally to read, which is a perfect example of why I don't do

twitter but most of those views also weren't very engaged. I only had an 18% read rate and only two people clapped for that article out of the 300 or so that clicked on it, so that was a bummer. And here is your first glance at income from Medium. That article that was highlighted by Medium themselves earned me a whopping 2.41 cents. Now the positive spin is that that's more than I made all of January and February from Medium combined. By the way, I'm documenting all my passive income monthly, so be sure to subscribe here so that you can be in the know when those videos come out. Tip number six, keep track of where you submit your articles, write it down, keep a document so that you don't accidentally submit it somewhere twice. I made this document you can see on screen to get my bearings in the beginning here, and I honestly stopped updating it once I got a handle on things, but it was very useful to know which publications were easier to get accepted into.

and which were more difficult and thus definitely made me more determined to get my article in those difficult publications. Post-grad survival guide, the startup, and the ascent became my mission. I did finally check off the first one after six attempts. Tip number seven: be patient. It can take as long as five to seven days to even hear back from some publications, and sometimes you don't hear back at all. After seven days or maybe even five days, just assume it's a rejection, remove it from that publication, and try again elsewhere. And I know you're going to want to get your articles published as soon as possible because you worked so hard on them, but patience is key. I regret not being a little bit more patient with some of mine. Tip number eight is to learn how to format. Now, the good news is it's already super aesthetically pleasing overall and super easy to use. The formatting tools that they provide are also very minimal, which I think is a good thing so that you don't face analysis paralysis and overthink this.

there are little tricks to learn about though that you should get familiar with. Things like clicking this quote button twice to make quotes look pretty like this. Oh, and also how to make bullets. That's not an auto selection here, so you got to know the hotkey, which I'll put on screen. Tip number nine, just like with YouTube, and I learned this the hard way. Your title and image are extremely important. In fact, on Medium, you can also write a subtitle, so take that equally seriously. I honestly spent about an hour perfecting my titles and picking the perfect image. If you want to know the tools, by the way, that I use and other resources I recommend for this and more, you're going to need to go to themoneyresolution.com/medium tools. Fill out this quick form, and I'm going to send you my top free resources that I personally use to optimize my Medium articles for searchability, tags, images, topic ideas, and a lot more. Seriously, this is really good stuff, and it's going to help any creator, whether you make YouTube videos.

write books and so on. Tip number 10 is: it sounds obvious, but it's important. Read a lot of other articles on Medium. Think about what's making you want to click on those articles. Look at the stats on those articles, you know, the claps and the comments. If they're successful, try to figure out by looking at that article why. A great hook, for example, that's very, very important. Today, my hook is to stick around so that you can see my income reveal, but being brief is also very important. As a bonus aside here, don't be spammy or over self-promotiony in your articles. Medium isn't friendly to articles that are littered with URL links, so keep those to a minimum. And publications, by the way, could just outright reject your article for having too many links or being too self-promotiony. All right, so here we go. How much money on Medium did I make after writing 15 articles in 30 days, while getting 12 of them curated and one of them tweeted by Medium? Here's the

data on screen, which you can get to by clicking on your profile, then Medium Partner Program. And this data is showing just March, and you can't create custom date ranges yet, which is unfortunate. And I'm recording this part days later so I can give you a more full picture of the month. Since I'm recording this on March 31st, the revenue you see on screen now is 30 days of revenue in March. And if you take this $39.83 and you divide it by 30, it comes out to $1.33 a day. Keep in mind the first week of the month was very slow for views and revenue, and it's really scaling recently. I've actually noticed that it's gone from pennies a day to 50 cents a day mid-month, to a dollar a day about a week ago, and now closer to two dollars a day. So I should end March close to $42. Of course, I have had to keep pumping out articles every few days to keep the

momentum steady because older articles can fall off quickly, and some are just duds on arrival. But roughly 40 dollars so far is roughly two dollars and sixty-five cents an article on average, and I do spend about two hours, I'd say, on each article. So that is roughly a dollar thirty-three per hour of work. Now, there is one article, though, in particular that stayed steady and is getting healthy views daily. It's earned nine dollars and two cents so far, and there's nothing I can find in the data as to why. But most of the views are internal, so I'm guessing this one is being supported by the medium algorithm in some way, shape, or form. I earned at least one dollar from 11 of those 15 articles, and six articles made at least three dollars. Keep in mind, I earned a whopping 5.21 cents in total from November 1st through February 28th with 10 articles total, eight of which were metered. So, I've earned nearly eight times my grand total in just 30 days.

by committing to an article every other day, I have more than 10xed my best month, which was December. Which is crazy, honestly, because I'm still very new to the platform and learning medium. So was this worth it? Absolutely. Again, I could stop writing today and just like with YouTube videos, these articles will hopefully continue to get some reads and earn income over time. But the best part is, it provides excellent exposure for me, the Money Resolution. I mean the brand here. I subtly, very subtly, plug my books, my course, and my YouTube channel in almost every article, at least at the very least in my bio at the bottom. So that's nearly 2,000 eyeballs being exposed to the Money Resolution in March. And it's hard to tell here, but I think I gained around 50 followers. I can't remember what it was in the beginning, and their metrics are a little bit of a struggle, so I'm going to guess to me. I'm going to earn about 75 followers by month's end. Check out Medium as a

platform. Though in general, if you haven't already, link in the description down below to medium.com. And also my articles if you want to read some of those. Medium, by the way, has an awesome app that I love - super minimal and clean. And there's a handful of great articles that are unmetered that anyone can read. And yeah, honestly, I like Medium so much as a user that this has become my go-to app when I find myself a little bit bored or just sort of in need of a break from work. I'll click on Medium 10 times before I'm gonna open some mindless social app that takes me down an infinite scroll of sadness. Just kidding, only Twitter is guaranteed sadness. Tell me why I should give Twitter a chance if you think I'm wrong. More importantly though, do feel free to ask a question down in the comments. I try my best to respond to everyone. Thank you for watching as always. I genuinely appreciate your time and I hope I was able to provide a ton of value for you.

today my name is frankie. Like if you like this video. Subscribe if you loved and you want to hang out more often. Have an awesome week or weekend ahead, and I hope to see you again, friend, in a few days on the next one. I mentioned passive income videos that I've been doing. Here is my first one, and here is my second one. And the question becomes, do I repurpose this video into a medium article? You bet your bottom dollar I will. What's a bottom dollar? Your last dollar, that's what it is, I think. See you guys.

Can you make money on Medium? I wrote 15 articles in 30 days. Here's what happened...

Resolve to get good with money! All things personal finance with actionable, up-to-date tips to help you save money, invest, manage debt, travel on the cheap, plan for early retirement, shop smart, earn passive income, learn about early retirement and lots more! New videos uploaded weekly!

I spent a year learning all things “money” from scratch and documented my best personal finance tips in my self-published book “The Money Resolution.” Grab a copy on Amazon and stay tuned for helpful advice, how-to tutorials, personal stories and reviews. 

Created by Frankie Calkins
Contact: frankie@themoneyresolution.com
Instagram: @themoneyresolution
Find The Money Resolution on Facebook!

Can you make money on Medium? I wrote 15 articles in 30 days. Here's what happened...

Scripts