Episode 95: How I Created a $1,000 Medium Post (Full Breakdown)

Speaker 1 (00:00):

You are listening to episode number 95 of inspire your success podcast. On today’s episode, I’m going to take you through my first thousand dollar medium posts and how you can crush it on medium to coming up.

Speaker 2 (00:17):

Hi, I’m Michael Leonard and I built a full time online writing business that offers me the freedom to never go back to a cubicle in a nine to five if you’re like most people, you want to make more money to pay off debt, have more freedom, travel, and actually enjoy your life. Whether you want to earn $500 per month as a side hustle or scale writing business to five figures per month and quit your job making money as a writer has never been easier in this podcast. I want to inspire your success as a freelancer and show you how I 10 X my income in one year and made $20,000 in one month as a freelance writer. If I can do it, I know you can too. Thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 1 (01:01):

All right. Welcome back to writer Wednesday edition here of inspire your success podcast. This is your host, Michael Leonard. And as always, thank you again for being here with me today. So today I really wanted to take you behind the scenes and show you the first post that I’ve ever had on medium actually make over a thousand dollars. So it’s honestly pretty hard for me to believe, um, that I’ve had that kind of success, which is one post. And I’m sure a lot of writers have have done that. Um, but sometimes the medium, you just really never know. I mean, you can think you created the best piece of content ever. Um, and then you, you know, hit publish and then maybe publications don’t even take it or it doesn’t really go good and it falls flat. Um, and then sometimes you can just, you know, share a story, um, not really think anything of it and then all of a sudden it can go huge.

Speaker 1 (01:54):

So that’s exactly what happened here. And this, uh, post that we’re going to talk about today. But before I get into that, I do need to share my one random fact. I realized the last episode that I did not do it. So I needed to get back to that. Um, so my one random fact for today is that I’m obsessed with dogs and specifically corgi. So if you follow me on Instagram, you know, I got a crazy little corgi named munchie. Um, she’s actually laying here at my feet as I’m recording the podcast. She’s been a little bit of a clinger today and, uh, it’s just, um, one of my why’s actually. So one of my whys of why I started an online business and why I want to be an entrepreneur and make a billion dollars is cause I want to help animals. I really love helping out.

Speaker 1 (02:38):

I volunteered at the shelters. We always try and donate to our local, uh, dog shelters here. And it’s something that’s really passionate for me. I hate to see animals get abused and have things happen to them and all that. So I really want to be financially stable to where I can always help, uh, those animals in need. So that’s kind of a random fact about me and I am a huge lover. Uh, those little legs are just hilarious. But let’s get back into the medium topic. I could talk about corgis all day, but I’m sure that’s another podcast. So, uh, um, just want to kind of show you again what it really took to create this. And I really like to break this down. So actually it’s going to be a medium post. I don’t think it’s it published by the time this came out yet, but I wanted to kind of summarize and figure out why I was able to create this kind of post and so, and figure out, you know, what it was, because again, you know, with medium a lot of times you can again publish this thing you think is Epic and no one reads it or vice versa.

Speaker 1 (03:34):

You can publish a good article and it can go viral and other publications can pick it up, you can get paid or you can even get a book deal from it. Like you never really know. And that’s kind of frustrating with medium, but it’s also kind of exciting. And so, you know, I have, uh, had some posts, like I said, make five, $10, and then other ones like this one, um, has made over a thousand dollars. So it’s pretty weird how it works. I’m trying to like figure out what works and what doesn’t so that way I can obviously spend more time creating content that’s going to rank and um, get people reading and make money from it. And again, obviously inspire and help people. So the article today that we’ll link to in the show notes is the, uh, the title of it is my 2, $250 writing day routine.

Speaker 1 (04:19):

So this is just a personal story where I just kind of take you through my day what it was like to make that much in one day, the exact schedule that I had. Um, and it’s, it’s just kind of a different story. I really just wanted to share what my writing routine was. Um, at this point it has over 8,000 claps. Like I said, it’s over a thousand dollars in medium partner earnings and it just keeps getting it. I mean, I published this thing back March 3rd and it’s still, it’s like coming back at like comes back every once in a while, like every few weeks and then it’ll really, um, start to grow. And it really helped me actually get a lot more new followers. I mean when I started writing on medium again in January of 2020, I had like 530 people following. Now I have over 3000 and a lot of people find this article and then start following me and it has like a hundred plus comments.

Speaker 1 (05:14):

I mean it’s just crazy. But um, I kind of broke it down. So I wanted to share some of the details of the story and why I think again that it’s made over a thousand dollars. I can not tell you specifically, medium has an algorithm. Um, a lot of stuff, I don’t know, kinda like saying, Hey, here’s how you write posts that rank on Google. You know, we can do our best guesses, but at the end of the day when we’re not inside that algorithm figuring out what ranks and what doesn’t, but the story itself is 1,750 words. So that’s pretty much most of my stories. If you follow me on medium, uh, that seems to be a pretty good area. I think it’s like a six or seven minute read is how they kind of break it down. Um, so that’s usually pretty good.

Speaker 1 (05:55):

I think much shorter than that. It’s kind of hard to really get a point across and too much longer than that. People kind of check out. So again, that’s what I’ve found. Works. Medium’s always changing. It could be shorter content, it could be longer content in the future. But for this one it’s been a, was 1,750 words publication wise, it, uh, got featured in better marketing. So if you’re in the entrepreneur space or you have any sort of business writing that you do, highly suggest that you publish inside better marketing because all my stories that get published in there do a lot better. I’m with the medium partner program than most other stories, like if I publish in the startup or um, some of the other ones out there. So if you can submit a better marketing, you know, obviously follow their guidelines, do all their things, um, but you can really benefit a lot from getting featured in publications in general.

Speaker 1 (06:46):

Um, but definitely with certain ones. And like I said, better marketing has been really, really helpful for me. So, um, that’s something that I want to share with you there. So again, it was 1,750 words published in better marketing and then let’s just kind of keep breaking it down so it, uh, the average read time. So, um, inside medium you can actually look at your stats and you can kind of see what works, what doesn’t. Um, and they have, it’s kinda like a Google analytics if you will. So view wise, this thing has been read 19 point 1000 times, excuse me, 19.1 a thousand views, nine point 1000 reads, it has a read ratio of 48%. So that means 48% of people actually read it. And then over a thousand fans and let’s see here guys. So it also got curated. So that’s a big thing too and we’ll talk about that in a second.

Speaker 1 (07:38):

Um, the average read time though was two minutes and 48 seconds, which is actually pretty long. Um, compared to most of my stories on there. And let’s see here. Like I said, over a thousand dollars, the member reading time, this article has had over 354 hours of people reading it, which is absolutely insane. Um, and then it was in five different tags. I think two of them got curated. Um, it looks like it got curated in the writing and the productivity tag. So again, if you’re new to medium, I really recommend that you use your five tags wisely just because basically the stuff you submit your tags in really will determine who reads it. And you always of course want to put your article in the right tag so that way you can get it in front of the right audience for people that follow certain publications that are more likely to read certain tags, things like that.

Speaker 1 (08:29):

But again, you have up to five tags, so make sure you always use those. Um, and again, this one again got curated in two of those. So that’s something to remember. I think that that’s a big thing. Um, is of course always trying to get your stuff curated. So follow mediums, guidelines there you always want to get your stuff curated if possible because again, that will get it out in front of more stuff and medium will kind of favor it more when they’re showing articles to other people. So that’s another thing. Uh, one thing I just wanted to kind of breakout is like links, uh, you know, is it linking to other articles? And so this one actually links to zero external articles, um, and it had two internal links. So it went to two other medium stories I’ve had. Um, traffic wise it’s had 80%, 86% of it actually came from medium itself.

Speaker 1 (09:17):

And really most of it, um, it was all for medium. It’s not really ranking high on Google. So it’s pretty interesting. This story has done so well and it’s only been on medium. So if it ever does rank on Google for maybe writing day routine or something, um, it could be a big hit and or even bigger. So here’s kind of the, now that you kind of understand like the, the numbers behind it, here’s why I think it worked. So of all like the 70 plus stories I’ve created on medium, it’s funny, this is the shortest title yet, so that’s something I might kind of experiment with. Um, but I think one thing you’ll, you’ll hear a lot of people talk about is, Oh, you should use a headline tool. And so if you don’t know, like CoSchedule has a headline analyzer tool and it basically tells you if your headline is good or not good or has room to improve things like that.

Speaker 1 (10:04):

This title, actually the only score is 62 so I didn’t even check it in there. I just thought, Hey, this is a good title. And clearly it worked. But it’s just kind of funny because a lot of people think, Oh, I need to get it to a score of 70 or higher. And that’s actually not really that important. Maybe, I mean, again, I think you obviously want to think about the experience because if people don’t have a good headline, they’re not going to have people read it, things like that. But again, I just was experimenting with that. So the biggest thing I’ll say with headlines is to constantly test and experiment, see what works and see what doesn’t. So again, I just trusted my gut and that felt like the right one. And clearly it’s worked out pretty well. So, um, image wise there’s just a picture of a guy laying in bed drinking coffee, looking at his laptop.

Speaker 1 (10:47):

Um, again, it’s nothing specific, but I will say the image itself does have, um, you know, a, a person in it. So that’s something that I learned from Dr. Benjamin Hardy who was back on the show a couple of weeks ago, which I highly suggest you listen to. Um, top writer on medium seven figure entrepreneur, just a phenomenal human being. And he taught me that it’s really important to have people in your medium posts, but also to have faces because people tend to relate. Um, and they tend to, uh, kind of see themselves in the image and they’re more likely to read and click through. So something to think about there. It is also a paid photo that I got through deposit photos. Um, so that’s something to think about is not some just generics thing because if you ever on medium you see some of the same images circulated over and over again.

Speaker 1 (11:35):

And so that’s kind of boring. So I like to mix it up, um, with that side of things. But to me the real reason this has done so well is because it’s just a story about my crazy writing routine. So at the end I do give kind of some lessons and takeaways, but honestly if you read this story and you’ve listened to the podcast episode about it, I literally just tell you exactly what I did for a day. I talk about waking up, doing a few writing sessions, going to the gym, going to yoga, writing the rest of the day, taking a break, writing until seven o’clock. And basically just checking out after that. Like it was a pretty boring day in the scheme of things. But you know, obviously it made a lot of money, which was cool. Um, but at the same time it made for an interesting read because I think people are always trying to understand, um, what a writing day routine looks like for everyone because everyone kind of has different routines and strategies, things like that.

Speaker 1 (12:28):

And you know, one of the things I talk about inside freelance at 5k and with all my students is to have a writing routine because you gotta have something to teach you to get in a flow state, to be able to write faster, to get more done in less time and just to eliminate distractions. So I think people enjoyed my story because one, they saw that it paid well. Obviously I made $2,000 in a day, but they started to actually see the ins and outs of it. I mean, I talk about what I was taking my supplements for the day. I talk about what I ate that day. I mean, I literally just, it’s nothing crazy. It’s not like this brilliant piece of writing that’s like deserves an award. It’s just me being raw and real and trying to share with people. So, you know, when I look at it, you might be thinking, well, Oh, that’s nothing special.

Speaker 1 (13:15):

That’s the thing. It’s like you just never really know what you’re going to get with medium. It’s kind of a crapshoot, and not to say it’s a bad thing. Um, but it’s, it’s one of the reasons I don’t specifically just write on medium because it’s very hard to control your income. Uh, you know, that’s why I do a lot of freelance writing with other clients and I have, uh, different online courses and coaching because medium, you know, is hit or miss. I’ll make $200 the, you know, a few months ago, and then I made over a thousand dollars and then $500 or $800. It just kinda fluctuates a lot. Um, and so that’s why to me, medium isn’t the most reliable site, uh, to create consistent income if that’s your goal. Um, but if you just wanna earn 500 bucks a month or a thousand bucks, something like that, and you don’t want to have clients and you don’t want to build a, an online business and you just want to write, you know, the medium’s a good spot for it.

Speaker 1 (14:03):

So kind of looking back on it, you know, here’s some of the biggest takeaways that I had. So first off again, write about stuff that you have a good story about. I think that’s so important. Um, people don’t want generic advice anymore. They want to know what you’ve done and how you’ve used that advice to better your life or if you failed and you learn from it so that way they can avoid it. Um, if you read any of my stuff on medium, I’m always sharing what’s worked and what’s not. I talk about failing at blogging. I talk about failing and online business, talk about getting credit card debt. I just openly share all that stuff. And so I highly suggest you do the same. Share your stuff and then don’t just tell people what to do. Talk about how you use something in your life or how you used this, you know, for this example, this writing day routine to make money and people can kind of grab bits and pieces of it.

Speaker 1 (14:54):

So I think that’s one of the first things. Um, the second thing I would say is to have it be a good length. Um, I also invested in a Tim Dennings. Uh, he’s a top writer on medium. I invested in his ebook, uh, and he talked about this seven to eight minute read tends to be a really good length for, uh, for writers on medium. So, you know, that’s the second thing I would say, make sure it’s enough that where people can really get some value from it and it’s not just like too thin. Um, but at the same time it’s not super long and like boring because again, people want to, you know, have a good length of time, so where they can kind of scroll, get some bullet points, things like that. Um, and then again, if they really like it, they can read the entire thing.

Speaker 1 (15:32):

So that would probably be the second thing. The third thing is that I talk about a lot is to get featured in publications. Because like I mentioned, I only have like 3000 plus followers and I, I love every single person that’s following me. I’m grateful for that. Um, but I think the biggest thing for me is that the reason I’ve been able to have, uh, some moderate success in the first few months on medium is because I feature pretty much all my stuff inside of publications that have massive audiences. And so I talk about that a lot inside the medium checklist that I have. So you want to download that as well. You go to inspire your success.com, forward slash medium. It’s a free download. You can go right on there and just have a checklist. So make sure you take a look at that because I talk about how, uh, getting publications can really, really help you, um, because again, it’s going to maximize your reach, it’s going to maximize your medium earnings, and again, you’re going to help people with your content.

Speaker 1 (16:29):

So, um, and then another thing that I would say, I think the reason this article did really well is just that I have like a, a takeaway section. Um, I do that actually. Probably I should do that a little bit more. Um, but I think that’s good because you can tell a story, but sometimes people aren’t always going to get the biggest lessons out of it. So as a writer, I feel like it’s up to you to kind of pull out those golden nuggets and real highlight them, put them in bold or sub subtitles and, and make people get very clear about what you want them to learn from this. So that way they can speed up success in their relationship or their business or whatever you’re writing about. Um, just because I think it’s really important because like I said, you know, people skim, uh, at the end of the day, most of your articles only get one to three minutes of read time.

Speaker 1 (17:15):

And you know, if it’s a seven minute read and people only read three minutes of it, they’re clearly not reading the whole thing. So it’s up to you. To, uh, have some takeaways, make it easy for the reader. Um, I think that having good formatting and things like that, you know, kind of go with it as well. Um, but again, make it skimmable make it fun, light. Um, you know, you don’t want long sentences, things like that. But having that takeaway section is really, really important. And I would say the fifth and final reason I think this story has turned out to be a thousand dollar hit is just the title. Um, I test titles, I’ve seen kind of what worked, what hasn’t. Um, when I go into my medium stats and for me, um, the big, the best titles have numbers in it. So pretty much all of my titles have a number in it because they just perform better.

Speaker 1 (18:00):

Um, the subtitle usually doesn’t, but it’s the title itself does. And so this one again was my shortest title yet, but it worked. So again, there’s really no one way to do it. There’s no like, headline hack or certain formula. It must follow. Um, you know, of course you want to, uh, have some curiosity and some emotional words and things like that in it. But for me, again, I’ve used numbers, um, that really helped. Good. And I would say if I had to pick one thing though, guys out of entire episode here is that I just wrote about something that is in my life. Um, and again, I didn’t try and sound like an expert. I was just like, Hey, here’s what I did. You know, it worked. Like if you want to take any of it, great. But like, I just wanted to kind of share behind the scenes and the public response to this has been absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1 (18:47):

I mean, I respond to like every comment on medium, which isn’t probably the best use of my time, but I love that people are reading and taking from this. And this thing has like, I want to say like over a hundred comments, which is so cool. And like 99 of them are really good. There was like one troll on there. So I mean like, people loved it. And, uh, you know, I love responding to it. Yeah. This thing has 75 responses at the time, this recording, so it’ll probably have 80 or 90 by the time it comes out. Um, but it’s pretty cool. And so that’s just kind of funny to me that uh, you know, so many people have responded, but I respond back and I have no idea if that triggers the algorithm at all. But you know, for me, I just want to be a good writer and engage with my readers.

Speaker 1 (19:29):

And so I learned from people, uh, from there and it just gives them inspiration. Um, and again, I can learn what’s working and what’s not. So at the end of the day, guys, I wish I could tell you, Hey, do X, Y, Z and you’re going to get your first thousand dollar article, but I can’t. And you know what, if anyone says they can, they are full of it. So just remember though, it’s just a numbers game. You know, it’s really all about pumping out high quality articles repetitively and eventually you’re going to get a hit. I mean, if you are submitting to publications, getting curated and creating really good content that helps people change their lives, it will happen. But you have to stay patient and you have to take consistent, when I hit publish on this thing back in March, I was never thinking, Oh, two months later I’m gonna have a thousand dollar hit that this thing just continually surges sometimes and he gets all these views.

Speaker 1 (20:16):

I would never think that. I just was like, Hey, I want to share my story and we’ll see what happens. That’s the attitude that you need to have to really become a successful writer on medium is you just have to be consistent. Um, be honest, be vulnerable, be kind of raw at times and find what works for you. Your style is going to be different than mine and mine’s even different than yours. So be yourself and be your authentic self. And I think people really will attach to that and that’s how you start to create those raving fans. And, um, you know, I know a lot of people from medium me, um, and then found my podcasts and things like that. So it’s really cool because you can do so much more with medium other than just making money with the partner program. You can create genuine relationships with people.

Speaker 1 (20:57):

And uh, if you found me on medium, I’m super grateful for you and um, just thank you again for following me on there. So hopefully you guys got a little bit of kind of background and again, just some best tips on why I think this worked and hopefully you can use some of these tips to make your articles pop and hopefully you can get your first hit as well. So again though I have a gorgeous checklist that we created to help you increase the likelihood of a viral hit. Again, I can’t promise anything, no one can, but I have really found what’s worked for me and a lot of other people and I created a one page checklist that you’re going to want to download. It’s a hundred percent free. You can get it right now. If you go to inspire your success.com, forward slash medium just download it, print it out, put it next to your computer before you actually hit publish on your medium stuff.

Speaker 1 (21:46):

Go through it, make sure it kind of follows most of those if not all of them. And let me know what works. I think it’ll be kind of a nice framework for you so that way you won’t have to try and figure this out on your own. Um, because again, always try and just grab some clues from what’s working for other people so that way you can speed up success and start to crush it on medium. So thanks again for listening. I’m always appreciate you guys and if you have any questions about medium or anything else freelance writing related, please let me know. Shoot me an email over at support, at [email protected] and finally, um, again, we are really on a mission to get as many reviews to the show as we can because that really helps Apple show it to more people so more people can tune in and learn all this valuable content.

Speaker 1 (22:33):

So if you haven’t left me a review yet on Apple podcasts, it would mean the world to me. Uh, it just takes a couple of minutes. You can go over there and leave a five star rating and review, uh, let people know how you found it or why you liked the show. And I would just mean the world to me because I love, uh, producing this stuff. Um, and I want it to be in front of hundreds of thousands of people if not millions in the future. So, um, all that helps, uh, on my end. If, if you can help me out with that review. And again, I just appreciate you tuning in and being here with me today. So as always, I hope you have an Epic day.

Speaker 2 (23:09):

Thanks for listening to this episode of inspire your success podcast. If you’re the kind of person who likes to help others, please leave a positive review on iTunes so more people can learn about the show. Also, if you have any questions about freelancing, I’m here to assist. Please email [email protected] and I may even use your question for a future episode topic, and if you want more inspiration and freelance writing tips to build your business, follow me on Instagram. My username is at, I am Michael Leonard. Finally, if you’re ready to learn how to make your first thousand dollars as a freelance writer, check out my free seven day [email protected] forward slash

Speaker 3 (23:52):

thanks again for listening.