This is My 1000th Article on Medium. Here’s what I’ve earned, what I’ve learned, and what I’m doing next.
Turns out the secret to good writing was not what I thought it was.
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As milestones go, it’s a nice one. The number “1000” has a nice ring to it, and when you apply it to something like “articles I’ve written” it has a certain gravitas. My posts tend to average about a thousand words each, so that means I’ve written about 1,000,000 words that are now here on Medium.
What does a million words on Medium get you? Like most questions, the real answer is: it depends.
Full disclosure: I cheated a little with the on Medium part. Before I came to this platform I had a quaint little blog over at Love. Life. Practice. When I first tried writing for Medium, I took advantage of their import function to migrate several hundred of my articles all at once.
This is the first thing I learned: don’t do that. Yes, the content is there, but it’s not pretty; the careful formatting I’d done for WordPress had not translated well to Medium. I ended up in “curation jail”, and that was a pain. That first go-round of trying to make money on Medium was not pretty; the highest I got was about $18.
Then I took the Ship30for30 program with a bunch of friends, and things changed. I can write tiny articles for thirty days, no problem. Could I do more?
So I embarked on trying to write an article every day for a year. And I decided to do it on Medium, because hey, if there’s a chance to get paid, that sounds pretty good to me.
Spoiler alert: I got paid!
I broke into the $100 club in the first month. Then saw my income increase 50% the following month, and almost double the following two months! I was doing it! In March, Medium paid half my rent; it seemed that things were going great!
Then in April, the money dipped…and I didn’t know why. I hadn’t really changed anything. Suddenly things seemed a lot less secure — and on top of that, the time and stress of cranking out an…
