How To Make Money On Medium. 3 Different Ways

Have you ever written on Medium before? Have you ever gotten paid to write on Medium before, or somehow made money with the platform at all before? 

Well, if you have or if you haven’t, in this post, we’ll be going over some strategies that you can use, starting today, on how to make money on Medium.

There are some very cool and different ways to make this happen, and the best part about it, is that they’re quick to implement, and they’re free!

So let’s check them out.

Can You Make Money Online Writing?

So obviously, a lot of people always ask the question “can you really make money online with such and such” when they’re shown a specific way to make some quick cash online.

And because of the nature of this particular article, the answer, as you might have already guessed is:

Yes! Of course you can.

Now, in the past years, making money online through article writing in particular has become something that more and more people each time, can happily say that they do for a living.

There are so many opportunities to make money online, and writing articles about something you like or are interested in, is something that everybody can do.

There are multiple sites out there like fiverr.com, upwork.com and others like iwriter.com that allow you to both buy and sell article writing services, and they’re always in demand because of just how many people need to create content, how much of it they need it and also, how frequently they need it. 

Consequently, another very important aspect of article writing is that it’s a very fast way to make money online. Some other methods take a lot of time and a completely different set of skills that you’ll need to develop from scratch, if you don’t know what you’re doing.

With article writing, all you have to do, is create the articles and maybe correct them or edit them, and you’ll get paid. No jumping through hoops in this one.

What Is Medium?

Medium is a free online blogging and article publishing site or platform.

It was founded in 2012, and is an excellent hub for journalists, bloggers, part-time writers and full-time writers alike. 

An interesting thing about Medium, is that it was initially made to serve as an alternative for Twitter, which only allows for 280 characters to be written on. As a result, Medium has now become a great place for writers and publishers to post as much of their content and ideas as they like…for free.

You can also link out to different sources, your own websites, youtube videos and the likes. You can like specific Medium articles (“clap”) and you can “follow” writers that you’re interested in reading more about.

How Do You Make Money With Medium?

There are a few different ways to make money online with the Medium platform, some of which we’ll be going over in this article.

However, not too long ago Medium was just a place for you to showcase your thoughts and ideas, and where you could maybe hope to get some real exposure if you got lucky. There was no real way to make much money upfront.

The Medium Partner Program

This changed when Medium introduced the Medium Partnership Program.

This program allowed you to create content that was “locked” and only accessible to the premium users of the platform (which pay $5/month to be able to read unlimited articles, magazines, exclusive columns and so on). If a premium member read and clapped on one of your articles, you’d get a percentage of their $5 subscription cost. 

Do note, however, that clap payments are just a fraction of the users’s $5/month subscription fee, and users that clap frequently have a lower paying clap, than those who clap less regularly. Claps can go from 1 cent, to 1-2 dollars, depending on who it is that is viewing the article.

In addition, Partner Program writers are paid monthly based on how much time the Medium members spend on their particular stories. The more time the members spend reading the stories, the more the writer will earn. 

There is also a very recent addition, in which Medium will give you a “writer bonus” for the articles that you write, that start to do well, which is a huge plus, of course. ?

This way, the Medium partner program is excellent for you, if you’re an avid writer and want to have your best content out there. If you ever wanted to start a blog and make money with it, this is a great way to get some repetitions under the belt and make money at the same time. 

Make sure, that you’re writing skills are good, but more importantly, that you can create an inspiring message, wrapped around an interesting story and that you’re sure that people will love reading them.

You don’t necessarily need to create too many articles or long articles either (although longer articles are amazing if done correctly), for you to make a good amount of money. They do however need to be top quality and informative. 

If you can publish content that both interest readers, that they can also relate with and learn something from, you’re good to go. The huge Medium audience should take care of the rest.

Make Money On Medium With Affiliate Marketing.

Another great way to make money with Medium, is with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is basically where you promote someone elses product for them, and you get a cut of the revenue, every time you make a sale (or transaction or even a specific action). 

This is very well known business model that is referral based, has been working for tens of years online, and is one of the best ways to make both great money, and passive income, especially online.

It’s among the most effective digital marketing strategies, that pretty much anyone can do without much startup cost or investment. All you really need is a website, in most cases, which you’ll get for free in the form of a Medium account. See where we’re going with this? ?

To do affiliate marketing on Medium successfully, you’ll have to: 

• Find a product to promote.
• You’ll have to get your affiliate link (which is a link that tracks back to you, as the affiliate).
• And you’ll have to create your Medium article with your affiliate link in it.

I’ve made a complete tutorial on how to make money with SEO and medium articles for free here if you want to check it out. I go a lot more in detail, show keyword research and some on page SEO for the articles.

The reason that this works so well, is because Medium is a high authority domain in Google. This means, that you can bypass the months and months it takes to create, manage, and get backlinks to your own website, to make it strong enough to appear in the top of the search engines, if there is not too much competition.

Product review articles, are a very effective and a not yet completely saturated way to accomplish this. You can promote both physical and digital products using this strategy. 

I’ve personally made money with Medium and affiliate marketing, so I know that this works. It works very well and really really quickly.  

Affiliate marketing on Medium can be a bit tricky though. Because of the fact that it’s a free method to make money online, it can get abused by a lot of scammers, and in fact, the platform has been shutting down Medium accounts left and right because of this.  

To circumvent this, you can either have your own website, where you can send the potential customers to, or you can create a shortened link using a link shortening service like bitly.com. 

Usually, if you create good enough content an place your affiliate links in proper places without spamming the crap out of them, you should be good to go. 

Remember that Medium is for creating the very best content you can! 

Monetizing Your Blog

Having your own blog is not a necessary requirement to make money on Medium, but if you do, it’s a great way to make money on Medium.

As we mentioned in the affiliate marketing section, Medium ranks very highly in the search engines, so it’s extremely easy to look for different keywords that might be a bit harder to rank for, for a newly created blog, and rank for them in a Medium article blog instead.

This way, and with the help of a few different, well placed and well thought-out short sized Medium articles, you can create a completely new stream of traffic over to your site that you can then monetize with banner ads, with your own products, or affiliate products too.

Alternatively, you don’t even need to create completely new content at all! You can simply repurpouse existing content from your blog, and add a few additional paragraphs, and make $100 in 24 hours and passive monthly income, like these people did. Sure, this example falls in the #1 category way to make money with Medium, but still…pretty impressive.

Do remember, that to monetize your blogs solely with ads, you’ll probably need a LOT of traffic (in the tens of thousands of views per month) to make any substancial amount of money (depending on your niche) so be sure to consider diversifying the revenue sources, so that you can make the most bang for your buck!