Putting My Stake in the Ground on Medium

What do you do when you want to make more money on Medium?

Photo by VisionPic .net from Pexels

In October of 2020, the year the world fell apart, I will have been publishing on Medium for two years. In those two years, I’ve made as much as $600 in one month (due to a piece in Human Parts), but my average has been about $300 a month. At least, that is the barrier I can’t seem to get past.

I know a lot of you are wondering how I can complain about an extra $300? Well, let’s just say I’ve always expected to make more.

When I signed up in October of 2018, I had big goals for myself — and an ego to match. I knew if there were people making thousands from the platform, I could too. I had a very high opinion of my writing coming from an adulthood of freelance writing and blogging.

I thought I was the shit.

My fall from grace started six months later when several of my peers were already making thousands, and in one case, 10K, and I was having a hard time breaking $100. I wasn’t getting curated, and readers weren’t coming in droves to read my work.

I started reading the work of the people who were making money, and I started seeing differences:

1. Where their voices were strong, and their words flowed smoothly, my voice was weak, and my flow stunted.
2. They wrote about themselves as I did, but they always seemed to add value to the reader. I whined and complained, but failed to share lessons that could help others.
3. Their writing made you feel something strongly, while mine was dull and lifeless.
4. They weren’t boring, but I was.

There were bright spots for me — pieces where I had broken barriers and wrote like a man on fire. Those pieces were getting views, reads, and claps. People were commenting and having conversations with me about it.

But, I had no consistency.

So I put a stake in the ground and vowed from that moment on that I would become a better writer — one with a voice that wasn’t boring, and a style that everyone would know was mine.

So I started reading the greats, both in literature and on Medium, to figure out how they did…