Lessons From My First $100 Article on Medium
From $5 to $200 in one month — If I can do it, so can you
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I get it. $100 is no big deal.
But, did you know that in the general Medium writer population, typically only 7%-9% of all active writers earn more than $100 in any given month?
This data puts me in the top 7–9% earners all across Medium in May 2020.
So, how did this happen?
I have been writing on Medium since 2017, but, I never considered it as a platform to earn money. In fact, when I enrolled in the Partner Program back in 2018, I didn’t have any hopes from it. Since that time, I have published 4–5 articles each month. Some of them would get curated, but never make much money. In fact, from July 2019 to April 2020, I had published around 100 articles and made exactly $81.25 (INR 6150 for 100 articles, which equals INR 61.5 per article).
Paltry, if you ask me.
But then, on May 14 2020, I published an article that went insanely viral.
Within a few minutes of publication, the article was selected by the Medium curators for distribution in Books. But then, as I mentioned before, several of my stories had been curated before and until now, the maximum I had earned from a story was $20. So, I had no reason to expect this article would perform any better.
Needless to say, I was in for a shock when I opened my stats page the next day. Before May 14, I had been averaging at 120 views per day, and because of one article, the daily views shot up to 900 on the first day and 1500+ thereafter.
My earnings skyrocketed too, and within eight days of publishing, the earnings from the article had already crossed the $100 mark. For someone who made $80 from 100 articles, you can imagine how much of a shocker earning…
