How To Make Money on Medium

Charles Lafontaine
4 min readApr 1, 2023

Alright, it’s time to start making money on the Medium Partner Program™. You’ve spent some time perusing the site and you’ve seen a few of the millions of articles about how you too can make money. You have now seen everything you need but here’s the secret: explaining to people how they can make money is how you make money.

So please enjoy my handy guide explaining How To Make Money on Medium.

1. You’re going to need to build a following. Using your insight, experience, and wisdom honed over many years you’ll soon be able to amass legions of fans who can’t wait for your next fascinating article.

Barring that, you’ll need lots of people who tapped the “Follow” button next to your name even if they never plan on reading a thing you produce. So just get out there and start following everyone in sight. Dating gurus, crackpots, mystics, bloggers, reformed Nazis, current Nazis. It’s all good so long as you get those numbers up. If even a fraction of the people you follow go ahead and follow you back, you’ll soon be eligible for those sweet Medium bucks.

2. Next, you need to diversify your portfolio. No, I’m not talking about increasing your investment exposure or widening your areas of interest to become a more well-rounded human being. We’re here to make money, not actually do anything. So start up an account with Patreon, Ko-fi, PayPal, Tipjar, and any other money grubbing software you can get your hands on. Ensure you paste links to them at the end of your articles.

3. Speaking of which, you haven’t written anything yet. That’s just fine. Writing things is the least important part of making money on this platform made to publish your writing. What you need is to write about how others can make money writing which will in turn make you money from your writing about their writing. Short articles, short titles. No exceptions. No one wants to read your long and detailed guides. This is the information age. Get to the point. Bonus: short guides can be incredibly vague which is perfect for the next stage in our plan.

4. Volume. Flood the market. Write and write and write the same damn thing over and over again. Give small variations on “how to make money” or “how to create content” to stretch out the same content. But you need to draw eyes. No one is going to believe that you’re successful just because you tell them how to be successful. Explain that you’re successful and therefore they can be successful by following your example. So change it to How I Make $659 An Hour On Medium and How I Write 41.5 Articles Before Breakfast Every Morning (With Little Effort). Sprinkle in some articles that seem like a deep dive into how this site works. How Much Money Can You Expect to Make on Medium? Ooooh, that guy’s asking a question that he must be about to answer and he’s obviously totally qualified or why else would he ask? Clicky click. Make em feel like they’re missing out. People That Don’t Know This ONE SECRET Never Earn Big on Medium. What is it? What is it, I must know! And always make sure to slyly tell people to read until the end of the article. It’ll help with the amount of time your trash is gawked at and up those numbers.

Throw in some filler between your filler. Write about how fun bouncy castles can be or if you enjoy sushi and why. Just throw it out there under the guise of being so fun and random.

Troll the waters with drivel.

Every few months, write another Let’s Help Each Other Get to 100 Followers article encouraging people to follow you and everyone else in the comments. Even if you hit the 100 followers mark long ago, it’ll boost your follower count a hell of a lot more than it’ll boost anyone else.

That’s how you energize a group. You did it and so can they, even if you provide no proof and never offer any reason as to why you have any more expertise than the last guy. The more you spew, the more likely someone is to click it and trigger The Algorithm. The great mystery of Medium, the almighty chooser of viral articles. Then it’s cash in time.

Oh, and be sure to tell everyone that you’re also a software engineer. Everyone trusts a software engineer to know what they’re talking about because no one knows what they actually do.

And if all that fails, write about racism.

Thanks for reading!

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Charles Lafontaine

Philosophy, politics, social commentary. Life of the party.