Write On Medium in 2023: Your Medium Blogging Guide

By Ayodeji
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Consider this your ultimate Medium blogging guide.

I decided I wanted to write on Medium in 2015 after I saw someone post about writing a viral article on the website. That decision changed my entire life.

Since then, I’ve published hundreds of articles on the website and made a six-figure income just from Medium’s partner program. If that weren’t enough, Medium helped me build an email list of 35,000+ subscribers that have bought books, programs, and coaching.

This single website alone built the foundation for the writing business I have today.

I’ve seen the way Medium has changed over the years. I’ve seen writers on the platform come and go and come back and go. There’s always been a debate about how viable Medium is for helping people make money writing. People have pronounced Medium dead for as long as I can remember.

Yet, it’s still here. It’s still one of the top 150 trafficked websites in the world. I wouldn’t call that ‘dead,’ but I’ll be honest about what it takes to successfully write on Medium in 2023 and beyond.

Why You Should Write on Medium No Matter What

There are zero downsides. You can still make good money on Medium and use it as a tool to build your writing business.

If you plan to become a full-time writer, you need to write a lot regardless of what platforms are available to you. When I started writing seven years ago, there weren’t opportunities to make money directly like writing on Medium.

Trust me, it was much harder to monetize your work back then. You had to get traffic to your WordPress blog instead of relying on Medium to get views. That meant strategies that are much harder to pull off like SEO blogging and writing guest posts to build your list.

On top of that, you had to create a ‘back-end’ to support your writing.

Your options were:

So you had to do a ton of work just to get eyeballs on your writing and you had to create a product or service. You couldn’t just write and get paid as you can now.

The types of writers who think it’s tough to write on Medium in 2023 wouldn’t have made it in the era I came up in.

If you’re new to blogging, understand that you still have a massive advantage over bloggers of the past. Consider yourself lucky that there’s a platform you can get paid to write on and lets you use it to build a writing business.

You can do everything required of you to build a successful blog and use Medium to get paid to learn how to do it. Let’s dive deeper into how to write on Medium.

Should You Write on Medium?

A lot of people who are new to writing on Medium have heard rumors about Medium’s ‘glory days.’

At the peak of this ‘gold rush’ some of the top writers were making $30 to $50,000 a month just from writing on Medium. If you were a blogger who had any sort of following, your articles would get 1,000 views almost instantly.

Then, the massive earnings and easy views went away. It’s true. If you’re starting with writing on Medium in 2023, you’re looking at the potential for a healthy four to five-figure income instead of astronomical numbers.

But let me ask you…would an extra few thousand dollars per month to practice your craft be enough to change your life? I bet it would.

Here’s what I do know. You can write for Medium, but the landscape has shifted. Now the game is about getting paid to practice with the chance at creating a decent side hustle you can parlay into a full-time writing career instead of a money printing free for all.

Writing for Medium in 2023 still presents the sort of opportunity I would’ve killed for when I first started writing. With the Medium Partner Program, you’re able to do all of these things at once:

  • Earn money directly from your writing
  • Add calls to action to your blog posts to build your email list (which is still a long-term strategy I advise)
  • Get paid to write posts you were going to write anyway if you have an existing blogging strategy

Plus Medium offers you exposure to a ton of writing opportunities and exposure.

Through Medium I’ve been able to:

  • Get freelance writing gigs that found me instead of reaching out to pitch.
  • Land book deals with foreign publishers
  • Find partners to help me launch products
  • Build a network of like-minded writers who skyrocket my career
  • Make money through affiliate marketing

All of those benefits are on top of averaging $100k/year just from the platform.

Medium still presents the opportunity for top writers to make $50-100k per year. Here are some tricks to help you reach the stratosphere.

Write For Medium Successfully in 2023

Instead of looking at Medium as the end-all-be-all cash cow, you have to instead treat it like the foundational piece to your writing business.

I’m still bullish on Medium as the best platform for writers on the internet. I still teach people how to blog on Medium. I have new students who are still rising up the ranks on Medium.

Medium is one of the multiple ways I monetize my writing and I use it to build other aspects of my writing business that help me make money.

Also, I still make a pretty damn good chunk of change each month.

You still can, too.

You can still make a living writing through Medium even if it’s not $20-30k per month. $1 to $10,000 at the high end is still in play for everyone on the platform. And there are still some anomalies that make more.

Truth is, even in its heyday, making big bucks on Medium is rare. Newsflash, making full-time money blogging, period, is rare. You need to be an anomaly to get the job done, period. That’s been true before Medium, it’s true now, and it’ll always be true.

To successfully blog on Medium these days, stop thinking directly about your Medium earnings. Use Medium as a place to learn how to become a better writer and use the traffic from the site to set yourself up for long-term blogging success.

Use The Marketing Technique For Bloggers That Will Never Go Out of Style

I’ve written a few emails and made $20,000 in a few days because I had a list of people who want to learn from me.

I’ve sold more than 20,000 copies of my books because I didn’t launch them without having an audience of people who wanted to buy them.

‘The money is in the list.’

Email marketing will never go out of style. You don’t need to build a list as part of your writing strategy, but it can accelerate your success.

I know a ton of writers who abandoned email altogether and went all-in on earning money strictly from platforms. This is a viable strategy, but email marketing offers additional support. And you can create this flywheel effect of getting more views for your Medium articles by adding subscribers to your list from Medium.

Here’s an article that talks about the process of building an audience in depth. In short, make sure every single article you write has a link to a landing page with a call to action for people to join.

Communicate with your list regularly. If you don’t know where to start just send them links to your articles once a week. One of my students, Niharikaa Sodhi, built an email list of 1,000+ people and used it to launch her own digital product.

She’s a great example of how you can go from amateur blogger to pro. You don’t need to wait forever to build a fan base you can sell to. Do it the way she did it. Make Medium a springboard to growing your list.

How to Write For Medium in 2023

I’m going all-in on search engine optimization in 2023. I plan to use SEO to build a ton of traffic to my personal blog and use that traffic to build my list and start to build a personal brand that’s totally independent of Medium.

I’ll be guiding all of the people I teach through this same as I gain experience with it myself.

When it’s all said and done I plan on my personal website traffic to be higher than my Medium blog.

Sira Mas is a great example of this. I spied on her site a bit after I saw her post in a Facebook Group about getting traffic to her personal blog:

personal blog

33,000 people visit her blog each month and according to Ahrefs, her blog alone is worth $7,000 a month in revenue. Often, Ahrefs shoots well below the actual numbers a blog does.

I didn’t ask her exactly how she pulled this off, but I’m guessing she did exactly what I’m about to do this year which is post content to your personal blog, republish it on Medium, and credit the articles back to your main website.

  1. Write search-engine-optimized blog posts on your website
  2. Copy and paste blog posts from your website onto Medium
  3. Credit articles back to your website using a canonical link

A canonical link just tells Google where the original source is. Also, it gives your blog authority because Google will credit the links to your Medium articles back to your blog.

Here’s what I mean.

Here’s a post I wrote a while back:

5 different websites linked to the post. Links to your post give it more authority with search engines which means it can rank higher. I’ve started going back through my old Medium posts and linking them to my personal blog so it gets credit for all those links.

If you want to credit an article to your personal blog, go to the advanced settings section of your Medium article and add a link back to your personal blog:

I’m going back through all of my old Medium articles and crediting them back to my personal blog. Also, I’m writing new search-engine-optimized blog posts and credit them back to my personal blog the right way.

As I improve my SEO skills, I’ll do a deep dive on SEO blogging for beginners, but for now, make sure to credit all your articles back to your website using this strategy.

Also, consider giving SEO a try because it can increase traffic to your website and help you come up with useful blog post ideas.

Here are some articles that can help you get started:

Be More Intentional With Your Blog

Begin with the end in mind. Use this as your Medium blogging guide and reverse engineer success.

In the future, your plan should be to have a writing business where you have a ‘back-end’ set of products to support your writing, an email list to develop a loyal audience who loves your work/will buy your products, and a traffic engine you can use to fuel your list which in turn fuels sales.

Here’s the recap of advice I’d give for beginners who want to learn how to write on Medium.

  • Set up your personal blog asap
  • Publish on your blog, copy to Medium, then use canonical links
  • Consider making a small product based on your writing to sell to your audience right away
  • Aim to get your first 1,000 email subscribers as a useful benchmark
  • Choose a monetization strategy you want to focus on whether it’s a product or service
  • After you’ve built a foundation on Medium, consider building further reach with different platforms

Overall, you have to adopt the mindset of a prolific creator and/or a business owner in 2023 instead of someone who just writes on Medium.

I always told my audience and students that I’d pivot when I thought it was necessary. We’re here now.

You want to put yourself in a position to have a writing career. Blogging on Medium still works quite well, but you have to think about your writing career as a whole.

Keep Medium as a central piece, but broaden your horizons, too.

By Ayodeji