“I made $.10, and I’M SO EXCITED!”

That was one of my students the other day. I know it may not look like much to scoff at, but it was progress.

“I made $1 my first month, $20 my second month. $40 my third month, and $100 my fourth month on Medium.”

That was another one of my students recently.

So, how much can new writers make on Medium?

The truth is that earnings can vary student to student depending on a variety of factors.

Let’s say you do everything right your first month, though. What then?

Well, I’d say you could make $50–$100 if you did everything right. Absolutely everything.

Some students of mine write one article, it goes viral, and they make $7,000 on their first try. I had one student do that. Crazy sh*t.

But overall, $50-$100 is the high end of that spectrum. How can we accomplish such feats? Well, I’ll give you a few ideas from my online course..

1. Write A Few Times Per Week

This is where it starts and ends for me. You won’t make $100 your first month on Medium by writing 4 articles (one per week). You need to write a lot. Honestly, you need to write 10–15 articles in my opinion.

You’ll have a few duds, sure, but you’re looking for that one silver bullet that’ll get 1,000+ views. You can make $10-$20 per 1,000 views if my calculations are correct.

And when an article gets 1,000 views on Medium, it tends to keep getting views. Even if it’s just 30–40 per day for a few months. Well, that’s an extra $10-$20 right there.

Some articles are BETTER than others, but get less views. It happens all the time. Trust me. Every writer on Medium knows that feeling and scratches their head the same as you.

Just keep writing, and something will pop off for you.

2. Write About The ‘Right’ Topics

Cats. We all love them (except me). They’re awesome (eww). They’re so loveable (gag), but writing about them isn’t exactly the path to Medium riches.

Do you hear me?

Stop writing about fucking cats.

Unless you want to get 4 views and make maybe one cent with that article, stop it right now.

I understand that writing about cats is more fun than writing about literally anything else, but the problem is there’s not much of an audience for it on Medium specifically.

The audience here is all about Tech, Personal Development, Life Lessons, Relationships, Politics, Writing, and Creativity.

Imagine a bullseye. A bullseye with all the topics you could write about on Medium. At the center of that bullseye is not a picture of a cat (Even though I’d love that for target practic — AHEM — I mean, yeah, it’s not at the center).

Me and my dogs.

At the center of the Medium bullseye are all the topics I wrote above. If you want to make the cheese, you gotta shoot for those topics. If you don’t want to, that’s fine. But if you don’t want to AND you also want to somehow make $10,000 your first month, maybe Medium isn’t the place for you.

Note: I’m sorry if you’re a cat lover. I’m only joking.

3. PUBLICATIONS, PUBLICATIONS

Even though I literally spell this out about 15 times in my online course, it seems not many people who take my course understand..

You need publications to make money on Medium.

Imagine a Facebook page that has 400,000 followers with me.

Now imagine Karen’s personal Facebook account that has a total of 200 friends.

If you shared a video on both pages, which would get more views?

OBVIOUSLY THE BIGGER PAGE.

Great. So the same thing is true of publications. They already have a lot of followers. You’re piggy-backing off their followers to get more views, thus more money. I cannot stress enough how important it is to get into publications.

If you simply publish something on your personal page, that’s a wasted blog post in my opinion.

Those three things above are pretty much the non-negotiables if you want to make $100 on Medium in your first month. Obviously learning how to write headlines that get clicks and content that excites readers is a whole other thing, but that’s why I teach that in my courses.