I make a few hundred dollars a year from writing on Medium, something I’ve been doing for about seven years. As well as a writing side hustle, I’ve also found Medium useful as a research tool, portfolio, and archive.

Over a couple of articles, I’ll look at how to get started, and how to start monetising your words on Medium more effectively.

Medium: What and Why?

Medium is a very user-friendly platform for sharing your writing with a large audience. It was launched in 2012 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams as a space for thoughtful medium and long-form writing (hence, the name).

While some content on Medium is tedious and repetitive – especially those thousands of articles with titles like ‘How I made $XYZ on Medium in two days’ – there are lots of very valuable articles on every possible topic you can imagine.

Lots of important articles started life on Medium, such as ‘I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at amazon. This is My Story’ and a number of COVID-19 whistleblower posts by doctors and scientists early in the pandemic. Many prominent people have used Medium to share their views and messages, from Barack Obama to Jerry Seinfeld to Jeff Bezos.

You earn money on Medium by getting engagement from your articles in the form of claps, highlights, responses and read times. To start making money, you really need to be part of the Medium Partner Program and getting into publications, which can give your content a much bigger platform. More on this in part 2 that will appear in next week’s FundsforWriters.

Getting started

The first thing to do is set up your account, create a profile and start following some writers. You can opt to receive email alerts from writers when they publish a new article too. All this benefits them but will often lead to reciprocal engagement.

People often advise you to find your niche when you get started on Medium. But the great thing about Medium is that you can have lots of different niches. For example, I publish pieces on digital copywriting and content marketing as well as short stories, humour, the craft of fiction and other articles I just want to write.

You can also upload things you’ve published elsewhere (always check if you have those rights), things from defunct titles that you can give a new lease of life, or things you never managed to publish elsewhere.

Your pieces all stay up there, where they can be discovered by people searching or browsing. Some will continue to make money for you long after initial publication.

First stories

The interface for writing or uploading a story into medium is very straightforward. Medium’s own guide is here, so I’ll just highlight a couple of things.

Headlines (titles) are all -important, of course, with a catchy subtitle (this will default to a preview snippet, which can be edited). There’s a really handy way to embed link snippets to other articles. As with all web writing, scannable subheads, bullets and snappy paras go a long way.

Every Medium article should have at least one headline image. These can be downloaded free from Unsplash – choose from the rights-free options when you search, and make sure to credit the photographer and avoid the many over-used images. To be more lateral, I often use animal or abstract images.

Every article can have up to five tags, which should be a mix of broad (eg ‘creativity’ or ‘AI’) and more niche (eg ‘brainstorming tips’ or ‘fuzzy logic’). There’s good advice on tagging in this piece. In fact, you’ll find there’s huge amounts of advice on every aspect of publishing on Medium – much of it on Medium.

So: start writing and publishing pieces. Get familiar with the platform, and learn how to do things like embed links to other articles of yours. Start using the stats dashboard so you can see how your pieces are doing. Here’s a good intro to getting started.

Also, start noting the publications of articles you like. Get to 100 followers as quickly as you can, because then you can join the Partner Program and start monetising your content, which I’ll cover in more detail in part 2.

BIO – Dan Brotzel’s latest novel is Thank You For The Days (Bloodhound Books). He also writes widely on Medium.