it's been almost four years since I started on medium and in this video I wanted to put together this kind of a complete guide that I wish I could send back in time to when I was starting on the platform I have used the strategies that I'm about to show you in this video to write this story that has gotten almost 400,000 views and which is one of the most read stories on the entire medium platform during 2024 and I also consistently reach up to 200,000 monthly views to my stories so this is the video
on how I would start to write on medium right now if I had to start all over again so getting started on medium is super simple and intuitive you just need to head over to their website and sign up and by the way the first thing you want to do is make sure that your profile looks professional or at least that it looks like you or represents you the way you want to express yourself so what I recommend doing is using your own name using your own profile picture and writing a short bio and you
don't have to overthink this just spend like a couple of minutes on it and then move on then the next thing you want to do is you want to write your first blog post and by the way these are called stories on medium I recommend writing a short about me page or about me blog post to your medium blog and basically this is also a step you don't have to overthink just literally describe yourself and why you decided to join on the platform be honest you shouldn't try to act or behave differently than what you
would do so just let the audience know why they should follow you and by the way if you don't know what you want to write about on the platform just let the audience know you can refine the about me page or the about your blog page page later on and the same goes with the bio as well so you don't need to know what you're going to write about this is not like a make or break thing now here's where it gets interesting so as a medium writer you can earn on the platform and I
have made from The Medium partner program alone I have made up to $2,000 per month and I have also made over $10,000 at my best months outside of the partner program from my medium stories and I will show you these strategies in this video as well but for now it's important to know how the medium partner program monetization works so the medium partner program monetization works in such a way that if you write a story on medium and if you publish it and if these paying medium members read your story you will earn a portion
of their monthly medium subscription fee and this is calculated basically based on how much time this medium member that is reading your story reads your story versus all these other stories so if we for example keep somebody on your pages for like an hour and they spend 10 hours in total on the platform you will earn like 10% of whatever the fraction is that Medium is sharing with the Publishers and by the way it is not about reading times anymore so it's all about engagement so if you just get reads that might not be enough
you also need to get some likes or these are called claps on medium and you also need to have some comments in your posts just to show that your stories are actually worth reading and people enjoy them so this is what makes the difference and moves the needle when it comes to earning on the platform and to get accepted into the medium partner program you need need a couple of requirements so the first thing you need to do is you need to have a medium account well that's something you probably already set up but then
you also need to have at least one story published on your medium profile and you also need to be in one of the eligible countries and most importantly you need to be a paying medium member and by the way I think that costs about $5 per month and here's a funny little challenge for you which is something that I did when I started so when I realized that okay I have to pay on the platform to be able to earn from it I wanted to set a goal that during the first month I will earn
more than I paid to join the platform so for example it is $5 I think I made something like $15 or $20 or something like that and um during the first month so I was able to earn my membership fee back from medium but then and this is something that I would kind of like to make a separate video about but I thought that I would bring it up because this is such a huge earning Factor on medium as well so if you're not in an eligible country you can still earn from medium stories by
doing what's called affiliate marketing and I'm not going to dive deeper into the depths of the affiliate marketing thing but I have left a link to a free course in the description that I am hosting that say 5day free email course where I teach both of these medium earning strategies but if you're not in an eligible country you can start doing affiliate marketing on the platform as soon as you join and here's a funny little fact I earn most of my income through affiliate marketing on medium so in fact I'm not even earning that much
from the partner program because I'm earning with the affiliate marketing strategy so there are kind of like two lanes on medium so there is this medium partner program Lane where you can earn your stories when they go viral on medium and when medium members find them and then you can do affiliate marketing which is another Lane where your stories basically rank on Google and target people that are close to buying something and just to give you some kind of an idea of what you can earn on medium I have my best story on medium that
has been earning from The Medium partner program that has earned about $1,200 and it has about 300,000 views and I have a bunch of stories that have made over $100 and some of them make even like close to $1,000 and then when it comes to affili marketing which is an entire different strategy as I said there I have actually earned up to $110,000 per blog post so that is an epic strategy right there but okay hey now that you understand roughly how the monetization works on medium then it's important to understand how to get reads
to your stories because that is a key metric that drives the income so when you start on medium you only have zero followers and that is very intimidating because at least I thought that I would need like tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers to consistently get like tens of thousands of of reads and to make a couple of100 per story but you don't need any followers if you want to see success on medium in fact I had my first nearly $1,000 story when I only had like a couple of hundred followers
but let's start with the smallest audience group on medium at least for most of us so that is obviously your followers so whenever you publish a story it will get pushed to your follow so when they are scrolling through their feeds they might see your story and they might click on it and read it so this is the tiniest audience group for most of the writers on medium then we have medium Publications and these are kind of like sub mediums inside of medium so these are like smaller spaces like quote unquote smaller because these might
have like a couple of hundred th000 followers or some like 10,000 followers and these people are interested in some topic so for example they might be interested in business coding marketing writing and whatnot and the thing about these Publications is that you can publish your stories there and that is especially useful if you have zero followers because these Publications might have tens of thousands of followers that are directly interested in your topics but the thing with these Publications is that you need to apply to those and by the way you can get started even if
you have zero followers and the I would say that the only hassle with these Publications is that you really need to apply in a separate way to every single publication so sometimes you have a submit or apply button sometimes you need to send an email to one of these authors sometimes you might have to reach them out via LinkedIn sometimes the only hope is that they reach out to you you might need to fill in a form you not also might need to submit a story while you're applying so there are like at least 10
different ways and that's actually one of like the most one of the biggest hassles and hurdles when it comes to starting on medium so the application process to Publications is very daunting because it is not consistent but if you spend a couple of hours on it that will not be a big issue that would be something that I recommend you to do right after B so once you have published just like a couple of stories and you already see what kind of topic you want to write about just start to apply to these Publications so
then once you are in a publication and you submit a story to the publication and they publish it it is not only going to go to your followers but it's also going to be pushed out to the followers of the publication and this is what I saw the best results with when I was starting on the platform but here are the good news you actually don't really even need Publications to succeed so medium has this kind of a recommendation system that all these social platforms have and the way that it works is that once you
publish a story even if you have zero followers your story goes out there and then the medium recommendation system comes it takes your story it finds the Right audience for your story so it could be soccer it could be marketing it could be tennis it could be Arts science whatever it is and medum will locate the Right audience group in their vast ocean of members and they will push your story there so for example if you publish a story right now medium takes it finds the audience and it might feed it to let's say 10
people in that audience segment and then if nobody reads that through nobody gives you a like or a comment or a follow then medium is probably going to be like okay we're not going to push it any further so they are just going to leave it at that and then you will only have 10 reads to your story and by the way this number is just something that I made up so it is not something you should quote me on because that's just like to demonstrate how it works and then if your story performs well
with that initial group of people then medium might expand it a bit so so instead of just recommending it to 10 people it might recommend it to 100 people and so forth and so on so that's the process of going viral on medium so medium recommendation system comes and takes your post and finds the Right audience to it and it will push it out to broader and broader audiences until people seem less interested in the eyes of the algorithm and for example this year I published a story that got over 300,000 reads which is quite
a lot because I only have 20,000 subscribers so you can see that and I didn't publish it on a publication so you can clearly see that like 90% 95% of the readers are not my followers so people just found it through this recommendation system and this is wonderful news because in theory you could write your first story and that first story could go viral so that's just something to keep in mind so if you have zero followers that doesn't really tell anything about the success of your story because the medium recommendation system will find the
audience to it so the audience layers inside of medium goes like this you have your followers then you have these Publications that usually have a lot of followers and then you have the medium recommendation system which in theory could recommend your story to the entire medium audience and that's what happens inside of medium but medium only has like 1 million paying members so that is not a lot because if you wanted to get like 100,000 read to our stories that would mean that like 10% of the entire population on medium should read that story so
that's quite a bit but the good news is that these medium stories do not only reach out to people inside of medium but it actually reaches out or those reach out to the entire population of the planet because those also tend to rank on surge engine results pages so that is like the strategy that you can use on medium so you can publish a story it might do well on medium but it might also start to rank on Google when people search for something and in theory you could reach out to the entire audience of
that particular topic so for example if you wrote a story about how to lose weight and it ranked on Google you might get millions and millions and millions of reads to it outside of medium and this is the strategy that is usually what I use with affiliate marketing so I also might write these medium stories so that they target these people that are doing Google searches before they buy something and then I show them something related to that product whether I recommend it or not or for example five good Alternatives or 10 best products related
to their needs and then I slip in these affiliate links into these blog posts and then if somebody reads my story clicks my link I will earn a small reward and that happens outside of medium although these stories are published on medium so these companies that I partner with are something that I have to or these Partnerships are something that I have to tie outside of medium it's it has nothing to do with medium and that's the affiliate marketing strategy that I mentioned earlier so you're not only able to grow on medium but you can
actually Target people outside of medium and you can tie these relationships with companies and different kinds of products out outside of medium and Leverage The Power of medium to reach out to people that are interested in purchasing these products that this companies offer so okay you have your medium audience and then you have the entire world because your medium stories also rank on search engines like Google but what on Earth should you write about well here's the thing most of the time you might imagine that as long as you become a good writer you can
write about anything but that is so far from the truth I would actually say that 99.9% of the topics are very bad ideas because people simply don't care you need to write something that provides value to your audience so for instance if I now went ahead and wrote a blog post about today's disc golf round that I took before I came to the office people would would fall asleep and nobody and I mean absolutely nobody would care even though I have like 20,000 followers so that's something to keep in mind so when you write on
medium you need to meet the demand with your content so for example when I said that you might have a story about how to lose weight that is a good topic because it solves a problem for your audience of course that is also a competitive topic and you would probably not get any reads for that so you need to be careful with that as well so you can't just pick random topics that are in demand because those might be too competitive so you need to kind of navigate through this narrow Gap where your stories are
about topics that people care and that have the potential to go viral and that are not too competitive and to this end I usually use like this kind of a virality blueprint strategy so if I want to get a lot of reads from medium and if I want to earn from medium partner program I need to maximize my chances of my stories of going viral on medium and to do this I can just basically look around and see what's working right now so for instance one year two years ago the AI was a huge thing
so it seemed that almost any kind of an AI related story would get a huge push from The Medium algorithm because there were these new AI products and there was a question whether AI would replace us or not and whatever it was so it almost seemed like whatever AI your blog post topic was about you could get a lot of reads to it and I've used this kind of a virality blueprint strategy when I have written on medium so basically like 3 years ago when I used this medium virality strategy the most I saw that
whenever I publish a blog post about coding where I share programming related tips and tricks those did Super well so when I whenever I shared stories about my personal project some random coding language syntax things and like subtle details like that that would get absolutely no traction at all so I would get like 10 or 20 or 30 reads to my stories but whenever I publish stories about programming languages where I would share these tips and tricks it always seemed that medium pushed it to a broad audience because I only had like a couple of
hundred followers yet my story's got like 10,000 20,000 even 50,000 reads so you need to find this kind of a blueprint or template that is working right now and that requires some research work and by the way I'm going to show you that in a way greater tutorial on the free course but um for now it's important to understand that you just need to see what's working right now what kind of a topic has this kind of momentum going on so what are these topics that other Publishers have had success with so you can search
for different topics on medium you can search for different Publications and people and you can see their top performing stories and not like in general but during like the past couple of months or so but as I said before this medium virality strategy has its drawbacks because in my opinion this is a bit too hard to sustain consistently so let's say that your goal goal is to make like let's say $1,000 per month on medium that is indeed possible and I was able to reach that pretty quickly but that was not consistent because that always
meant that I always have to have at least a couple of stories going viral on the platform which is something you can never guarantee and it took at least 50 blog posts for me before one of them went viral so you can only imagine how many stories you need to write if you want to have a couple of them go viral every single month of course if you use this blueprint strategy that I just laid down for you the foundations of then you can find success with like a much higher accuracy but it's still not
something you will do every time or every second time but more like every 10th or every 20th time or something like that so for me I quickly realized that okay 1,000 $500 $2,000 was the earning ceiling for me so I couldn't really get past that because when a new story go went viral the older stories went down and that is an issue if you're like a serious business person you don't want to start a business where your earning ceiling is at like $1,000 but this is why we have two lanes where we publish content so
the one is this medium strategy where you publish for medium members and medium readers and medium will pay you based on the reading reading engagement and Views and whatnot but as I mentioned before we also have this affiliate marketing strategy where the audience is not only medium but actually the entire world so on medium you only have like 1 million paying members which is great for the platform but it's not great if you want to have a lot of views because that million readers is like kind of the maximum that you can get so when
you write affiliate marketing content you're not really trying to go viral on medium but what you're trying to do instead is you want to Target people that are making searches consistently from search engines like Google so for instance I just wrote a blog post about these these best AI head shot generator tools and those list these AI products that clone yourself and create professional images that look exactly like you and I'm currently making like 2,000 or even up to $3,000 from that story every single month passively because people search for that on Google and my
story ranks on Google and people find that blog post they click on one of the links to the products and if they make a purchase I will earn a commission which is about $10 right now so that is a crazy good strategy I earn with one story I earn like $2 to $3,000 passively and it will probably continue to do so at least for the next couple of months or in the best case scenario like half a year or even a year and to do this strategy successfully you kind of need to flip the switch
so it is entirely different than the medium virality strategy so instead of trying to come up with a catchy headline and trying to come up with a story that people are going to share on the internet and some like that you need to throw that out of the window and you need to instead think about what people are searching for on Google before they make purchases and then outside of medium you need to tie these Partnerships which basically happens these days by just simply applying with a form so it's very simple these days but nonetheless
you need to do the work like kind of outside of medium so you come up with topics that people search for on Google before they buy buy something you find these affiliate programs where you can join to promote products to the audience that is searching for Solutions and then you will earn money whenever people read your stories where you recommend these relevant products to your audience so it's an entirely different strategy it has really nothing to do with medium you're essentially just using Medium as a platform to help you rank on Google and this strategy
is something I really don't want to talk about more in this one because it would take a really long time for me to cover all the things because it's an entirely different story but that's why I have left a link to the free course because there I will teach you that strategy in a way greater detail and now when it comes to becoming a successful writer on medium you need to put in a lot of time in it just like in any other business so I see all these tutorials and these guides where people teach
strategy with with which you can like make a couple of ,000 with just a week of work or something like that let's use common sense here let's say that you wanted to start a new sport today well would you expect to make your first let's say $10,000 per month next month well probably not it's is going to take years and years and years and years to out grind and Outlast your competitors and that's pretty much exactly the same in the online business world so you can't just hop on a plat platform you can't just like
start Drop Shipping or affiliate marketing or search engine optimization or going viral on Tik Tok overnight you need to do that for years to see great results and that is like something that I can't emphasize enough so if there was only one takeaway in this video it wouldn't be one of the monetization strategies it wouldn't be how to customize your profile or how to write these blog posts it would be to not give up too early if you're not seeing great results even after a year do not give up because it's pretty normal for me
it took at least 50 stories before one of them got over 10,000 read and 50 stories is a lot I think I spent at least a couple of months pretty much full time writing those stories out so if you have spent 500 hours on your medium stories and none of them have earned like more than $20 there's nothing to worry about and now let's tie it all together so starting on medium is very simple just sign up create a profile and you're good to go if you want to earn from your stories join the medium
partner program and publish at least one story and then start writing stories strategically about topics that are working right now for other authors and publish them on a publication to get some initial traction if you don't have any followers and also don't worry if you don't get accepted to the publication because the medium recommendation system will take care of promoting your stories if they are good and speaking of becoming a good writer you need a lot of repetition you need to write tens or even hundreds of stories like I have done to see great results
but don't only rely on medium because medium is at the end of the day just a website that you can reach the entire world with so you can write stories that go viral on medium but you can also write stories to Target people that are looking for information from search engines to make some affiliate income passively so instead of having a wirel light Spike where you have a couple of 100 or couple of thousand reads per day for a brief moment you can have a story that will make you $1,000 or $2,000 per month for
the next year at the best case scenario so that's it when it comes to starting on medium remember to keep on pushing hard and remember to check the free course because there I will teach you everything that I laid down for you on this video in a way greater detail
