How I made $91 per hour writing on Medium in my fifth month

My ludicrous hourly wage in Month 5 writing on Medium speaks to the power of viral stories and developing a large back catalog.

Even though I had one of my lowest outputs ever in my fifth month, publishing just 15 stories across 31 days, I earned more than $90 per hour for my time.

Sounds crazy? Too good to be true?

Let me walk you through it and give you some tips about how you can start earning real money online via writing on Medium too.

How I made $91 per hour writing on Medium in my fifth month. (Credit: James Gordon/Dall-E 2)

Earnings overview

Let’s start out by taking a look at my actual earnings in Month 5.

My month 5 earnings. 

As happy as I was to cross the $1,000 barrier for the second consecutive month, this actually represented a significant drop-off in earnings for me.

In December, I managed to earn $1,235 mostly on the strength of this viral story.

I’ve written about how I managed to create the viral article and the factors I think led to it taking off in a big way on multiple occasions, and I’d invite you to check those out (or the video below) if you’re interested in more of a deep dive.

As that viral story has died off (all of them eventually do), my earnings from it have started to dry up.

Here’s a look at my Month 4 stats:

My Month 4 stats

And now Month 5:

My Month 5 stats

That reduction in views, reads, and engagement was the main contributor to a -14.83% drop in my earnings in Month 5.

Am I disappointed in that? Maybe a little. As a content creator, you’re always chasing growth.

That said, you also have to accept that there’s going to be some variance in your earnings. You may put out a ton of work as a content creator, but it’s the handful of viral stories, videos, or whatever you’re producing that will make up the bulk of your earnings.

Plus, if I want to cheer up, I just need to take a look at my hourly wage in Month 5.

The power of compounding

The power of owning your own content is that it keeps making money for your long after you’ve published it.

Whereas when you submit a piece of freelance writing, you get your cheque and that’s the end of it, holding on to a piece of content you own is like buying stock in a dividend-paying company.

The power of having a large back catalog of digital assets like articles and videos is comparable to having a large, diversified stock portfolio. 

I do have a portfolio like that because I put every cent I earn on Medium into a tax-sheltered account and invest it in the stock market.

With more than 200 equity holdings, I get paid dividends almost every day the market is open.

With close to 200 stories published on Medium, I also get paid little dividends for those posts.

Let’s say you’re a year and a half into your Medium journey and you’ve managed to write 500 stories.

One story paying you, say, 6 cents per day isn’t going to move the needle much. 

Five-hundred stories paying you an average of 6 cents per day equals $30 per day in somewhat passive income.

You may not be rich from $30 per day, but it might cover a good chunk of your mortgage payment at the end of the month.

Put another way, $30 per day invested in dividend-paying stocks over the course of one year would suddenly give you a purely passive, income-producing portfolio worth $10,950.

Fewer hours, more money

Now that you’re starting to understand the power of owning your content and building a back catalog, let me explain how I managed to earn $90+ per hour writing on Medium in Month 5 despite the fact it was also my lowest content output month.

As I said, I didn’t produce much on my main account James Julian — only 15 articles. 

I put a lot of time into building two new blog sites and putting out a lot more content than usual on my YouTube channel and that limited how many hours I could give to Medium.

However, because my back catalog is large, my viral story not only gave my earnings a big boost, but it brought a bunch of new eyes to my old work.

Now people are making their way through my older stuff, which gives a bump to stories I thought were long dead.

I calculate that it takes me, on average, about 45 minutes to write a 1,000–1,300 word article.

Therefore, 15 articles x 0.75 hours = 11.25 hours of writing on Medium.

$1,032.96 in earnings divided by 11.25 hours = $91.81 per hour.

That’s pretty good for a part-time job I’d say!

Consistency is everything

I word of warning: If you want to try and make a sincere go at becoming a successful writer on Medium, it’s going to be hard at first.

Too many people log on here thinking this is some kind of passive income, get-rich-quick scheme.

Listen, if it were that easy, we’d all be reading about Medium millionaires in the newspaper.

What Medium can do is provide you with some pretty decent income as a side project. 

More importantly, it can serve as the foundation for all your other side hustles.

But you need to show up every day excited and ready to work.

The fact of the matter is, succeeding here or anywhere in life really comes down to two things: hard work and consistency.

The harder you work and the more consistent you are, the bigger your rewards get over time.

One of my favorite self-improvement books of all time, The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy (affiliate link), describes it like this:

Think of getting a playground merry-go-round going when you were a kid.

The more momentum you built, the less you had to push to keep it going at the same pace.

That, in a nutshell, is why I earned $90 per hour during my laziest month on Medium.

If you’re interested in how I got here and how you can too, I invite you to check out my just-published, 30-minute Medium tutorial here:

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