My $4.99 Medium Membership Paid for Itself

How I Paid Off My Monthly Fee — by Writing

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When I signed up for Medium I didn’t expect to make any money right away — not one penny.

I figured that it would take weeks, if not months of strenuous work to make my first cent. After all, that’s been my entire experience with online income sources, in general.

As it turns out, when it comes to Medium I was wrong. Really wrong.

Within the first 48 hours of being accepted into the Medium Partner Program I made 41 cents. (That’s exactly 41 more cents than I was expecting!)

By my third week in the Partner Program I had already made enough money to pay for the entire cost of my Medium Membership.

That’s right, I made over $4.99 in just three weeks.

Here’s how I did it:

Medium Membership

I think I’ve mentioned before that becoming a Medium Member was a really important step in earning money with the partner program.

To sum up, when you join the partner program you get paid based on the amount of time that Medium Members spend reading your articles; you don’t get paid when non-members read your posts.

Because of the way this system is built, it may incentivize authors in the Medium Partner Program to seek out and engage paying Medium Members. It’s easy for them to do this too, they just look for the little gold stars on members’ profile pictures.

Keep in mind that more engagement usually equals more potential follows, claps, comments, and reads. While this doesn’t necessarily a guarantee success, over time it can contribute to more growth.

On the other hand, I’m also a firm believer in full participation. Call it morals, ethics, whatever you want— I believe that if I’m expecting to get paid from the program, I should be paying my fair share into the program too.

Finally, at only $4.99 per month, it just seemed like such a small price to pay for so much potential.

So if you, haven’t signed up for a Medium Membership yet, I highly recommend it. By doing so, you’ll help support me along with thousands of other writers — and you might just help yourself in the process too.

Consistency

You probably hear this a lot, but it’s not a cliché — it’s the truth.

Consistency is key.

To keep earning here on Medium, you need to keep writing and keep engaging.

The more friends you make, the more readers you have, and then you begin to gain a loyal following.

Sure, there are one-in-a-million success stories, but for 99% of people that’s not the case.

Consistency is a huge piece of the puzzle.

Engagement

It’s not just important for you to receive engagement, it’s also really important for you to consistently engage with other authors on the platform too.

Reading other’s articles, clapping and providing genuinely thoughtful comments is critical to your success here on Medium.

Unless you already have a large following that you’ve brought over from another platform (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc.), then you likely won’t get very many “reads” just by publishing your posts.

Instead, you need to make friends and find people with similar interests.

You might be surprised just how fun it can be to engage with other authors and read their different point of views.

By design, Medium is not just a publishing platform — it’s a social networking platform.

So socialize!

Rinse & Repeat

I really believe that the steps listed above are the reason I was able to pay off my $4.99 Medium Membership within three weeks.

I also believe that my overall success here on Medium will really boil down to them too.

I consider these my “vital habits”:

Writing
Engaging
Staying Consistent

These are the things that I will keep doing over and over again, indefinitely.

You should practice them too.

Oh Hey, It’s Ray is a real estate investor, entrepreneur, and former real estate agent. She lives happily with her husband and two children in the Pacific Northwest. See more from Ray at her YouTube channel and on Ohheyitsray.com