MEDIUM | WRITING | MONEY
How I made $3,000 in one month
Not to brag or anything, but I just had my first $3,000 month.
Before you get too excited, I’ll let you know it wasn’t on Medium. (Come on, I only have 60 followers. I don’t quality for the partnership program yet.)
It was on the greatest freelancing website nobody knows about.
Want to know what it is?
I’m going to tell you. But first, I have a confession to make.
About that 60 followers…
Well, to say gaining followers is harder than I thought would be an understatement.
I’ve been playing the game — following people, reading their stories, highlighting, clapping, commenting.
I was writing a new story daily and was starting to see readership increase, slowly but surely.
I was hitting my stride — and then I just got frustrated.
I started to wonder what I was doing it for.
Was I doing it because I love to write? Yes and no; I’d write whether I was publishing on Medium or not.
Was I doing it to make money? Again, yes and no. I didn’t expect to hit paydirt right away, and I have enough money coming in from other jobs.
And then I started reading stories about how much people were making.
Stories like this one: I Finally joined the $100 club and Here’s What I have learned so far!
And this one: How I Jumped From $0.17 and 147 Views to $500 and 30K
… And this one: 8 Months On Medium, 4-Figure Pay, 5-Figure Views & Regret
Was it worth all the screen time just to make a couple extra bucks a month? Passive or not, it seemed like a lot of work for little gain. Sure, there was the odd success story of an article going viral and racking up hits in the thousands. But the odds of that happening are, well, like hitting the lottery. (Okay, a little better. One in a million, according to Forbes.)
Did I really want to dedicate hours of my days to building an audience and a body of work that would only bring in dollars a month if I was lucky?
Wouldn’t it be better to spend that time on the amazing freelancing website I was already writing for?
Wouldn’t it be better to stop procrastinating and dust off the handwritten manuscript of the dystopic sci-fi noir thriller that I penned three years ago to finally get it ready for publication?
Or, you know, to just stop staring at a screen?
Wasn’t there a better way to get to 100 followers so I could finally see the money start to come in and decide if my efforts were worthwhile?
So I made a decision. I took a shortcut to 100 followers. I bought them.
And no sooner did I see the followers trickle in than I regretted it and started blocking them. Though they weren’t bots, they weren’t real followers. They didn’t write anything. They followed a handful of accounts, but they didn’t interact with anybody.
They weren’t part of the Medium community. The community that I was starting to feel a part of. The community that I had suddenly betrayed.
I cancelled my purchase and wallowed in self-pity for a while.
So now I’m back from my self-imposed exile with a new frame of mind.
Am I going to keep writing a story a day, two on the weekends? Probably not. Am I going to write the perfect click-bait headline, the ideal three-minute article, the listicle to end all listicles? Nope. Am I going to go viral? I seriously doubt it. (I hope to save that stroke of luck for my aforementioned novel when it’s ready to go to print.)
Okay, I’ve led you on long enough. Thanks for indulging me.
The website is writelabel.com. It’s a crowd-sourced content website that specializes in ads for radio, TV, and podcasts. Essentially you compete with fellow content creators for projects. Each project has a pot of money to be awarded. Just writing the submission gets you a guaranteed payout of a dollar or two. If your submission is featured by editors or favourited by clients, you get a bigger share of the pot.
If you’d like to give it a try, here’s a link. Let me know how it goes.
FYI, you have to pass a test first. And if you end up writing for them, I get $10 when the first project you write on pays out.
You’re probably wondering what I’m doing back here if I make so much money there.
Truth is, I treat Write Label like a job. With Write Label, I go to work, I do my job, I go home. When it’s done, it’s done.
Medium? Well, as I mentioned before, it’s a community. This is where I hang out when I’m not at work. This is where I write what I want to write, where I read what I want to read (or what I didn’t know I wanted to read), where I get exposed to people and ideas I wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to.
I regret buying followers, but I’m glad I was able to block them and undo the damage. (Medium officials: I’m happy to report the account names in return for amnesty.)
I’m also happy I took a little break. Now, I can appreciate Medium more for what it is, and not what I wanted it to be.
Here’s hoping I don’t get banned!
Had any luck with Write Label? Share your thoughts in the comments or tag me in your own story!
Thanks to the following authors for their stories: Kristina God, Burk, and Vanessa H.
And thanks for the real follows, Michael Vastola, Charlee Renee, Mark., Peter_sDreams, David J. Obedzinski, Simon Pastor, romanzenondawidowicz, Lesley Tao, Lawrence Burrows, Keith Chen and Mason New!
