I rejoined the big money $1000 club on Medium in Month 7
In my 6th month on Medium, after posting consecutive $1000+ months on the platform, I saw a face-melting 40% percent drop in earnings.
While I was confident I could get things turned around, you never know for sure until the rubber hits the road, right?
Distracted by side projects and, to be honest, laziness and poor planning, for two consecutive months, I finally paid the price in February.
My earnings at my main account
dropped from an impressive $1,235.40, my biggest month ever, to $1032.96, and then all the way down to $543.13. Ouch!
As I wrote here and explained in the below YouTube video, I knew this reckoning was coming.
Still, it wasn’t fun to experience.
I’d come to enjoy the extra money, which I immediately plow into a tax shelter and invest in the stock market.
So, how did I turn my crappiest month in ages back into this:
Well, let me walk you through the factors I think got me back on track and what I think you can learn from them.
Two factors contributing to success
I think the turnaround comes down to 2 factors.
Factor 1: I got off my butt and started writing again.
In each of January and February, I’d written just 15 articles.
In March, having just posted my worst earnings month in a while, I pledged to myself that I would do better.
And I did! I published 23 quality articles, many of which did better than average in terms of views and reads.
I’ve preached over and over in these articles that consistency is everything.
Unfortunately, for a short period of time anyway, I wasn’t following my own advice. And, again, I paid a price for that.
As I wrote in this piece, I also stopped wasting so much time on work that didn’t pay well.
I also talk about that in my latest YouTube video if you’re interested.
These efforts not only added to earnings from my new articles but also brought more eyes to my older work.
That led to…
Factor 2: viral story reignites
Those helped to wake up a story that had previously gone viral and then quieted down.
Powered by this gem, things really took off, and my consistent writing helped produce consistent results. If you look at the below image, the second large spike begins in early March.
I’ve heard that YouTube star MrBeast says a great piece of content has the potential to pay you forever.
Well, I can attest to that. This one viral story is the gift that keeps on giving.
In fact, that one story alone, written four months earlier, accounted for a huge chunk (20%) of my Month 7 earnings.
If you’re interested in learning 6 lessons I gleaned from writing that story, check out the YouTube video below.*
This is one of my lower-viewed Medium videos on YouTube (people tend to skip to the earnings ones), but honestly it may be the one that’s packed with the most valuable information.
*Note that, since I published it, the story in question has doubled those earnings.
I feel it’s important to remind you here of the 80/20 principle.
Where earnings come from
The 80/20 principle, or the Pareto Principle, holds that 80% of outputs are caused by 20% of inputs. That is, most of the results come from a small percentage
This is true of content creation as well.
I write a lot of posts — 204 over at
as of this writing — but the vast majority of my earnings come from a small handful of them.
In fact, my decision to embrace the Pareto Principle and start writing less about stuff that doesn’t earn or get read to the end is continually pushing up my estimated revenue per 1,000 views.
I estimate my RPM is now around $70/1000, whereas it was closer to $40 just a few months ago.
It comes down to this: the more darts you have, the more chances you get to hit a bullseye.
That doesn’t mean you should be posting garbage all the time in hopes that something will magically catch fire.
Quality of work matters. A lot.
There are no shortcuts
Again, if you’re reading this thinking you can glean insights that you can then use to make money using AI, you’re in the wrong place.
Also, people are just selling you a fantasy with that crap.
If you’re a good writer, you work hard, and you put in the effort, you can make some really decent money here.
But it’s up to you.
I see so many people crying about how the algorithm doesn’t like them or they saw a big drop-off in revenue after they stopped writing for a while (duh).
Yet these same people are completely unwilling to put in the work required to have some success.
It always comes down to this: control what you can control.
If you aren’t a great writer yet, there are a million resources to help you. And you need to get the reps, too, which means writing as much as possible.
And, above all else, control this: write and publish consistently.
It’s a lesson I had to re-learn.
Whether it’s Medium or YouTube or whatever other content creation dream you have, know that algorithms reward consistency.
If you’re just going to write 10 articles and quit, don’t even bother starting.
But if you learn to love the process and are inspired by the idea that you can always get better at something, the dollars will take care of themselves.
OK? That’s my advice for life, too.
Good luck, and keep writing!
Any questions? Hit me up in the comments!
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I always enjoy reading your insights into Medium. Thank you for sharing your experience.