I’m Writing on Medium Every Day in 2021
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One of my New Year’s resolutions is to commit to publishing a new article every day on Medium in 2021. I have watched Medium grow in the sidelines for the past few years, and I believe that 2021 is a good year for me to invest my time in writing and seeing how these efforts can also pay off monetarily.
If you’re wondering what it’s like to write for Medium and make it a side hustle, I will walk through the reasons why I am doing this and lay out my initial game plan for the year. For reference as I’m writing this, the date is January 2, 2021. So far, I’ve been successful for the past two days. An accomplishment, I know (we all need small wins in life!). Yesterday, I published my article on how I saved $60,000 in 2020.
The Motivation
Improving My Writing
I would say that I am an okay writer. I can write when I need to, but it certainly isn’t an activity I have burning passion for. More and more recently, I’ve recognized the importance of becoming better at writing. In my current job, I don’t have a lot of writing opportunities. However, as I develop in my career, the expectation to effectively communicate and tell stories through writing gets higher. Writing on a daily basis on Medium will be my way of working this technical debt.
Even as I write this now, my fingers often freeze above the keyboard not knowing where to go next. By the end of the year, I expect to be able to tell a story on Medium without having so many frequent pauses. As Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” I’m striving for excellence in writing, and I hope that this year of work will help me achieve that goal.
Medium as a Side Hustle
Ever since I was a kid, I was always looking for ways to make money and independently support myself. After discovering Medium and enjoying content from other writers, I found posts discussing the kind of money people earned on the platform. I was curious to see how well writing on Medium worked out for contributors, and I found some eye opening posts. Here are just a few that I read:
As I discussed in my article on how I saved more money than I ever had in 2020, I already have a substantial side hustle trading in the stock market. Along with that, I actually have several other significantly smaller side hustles that I manage. It would be really cool if Medium moves up that list in addition to helping me hone my writing skills.
To start, I already enrolled myself in the Medium Partner Program and have earned a whopping $0.02 to date. It shouldn’t be too hard to beat that, right?
My Niche
While a lot of writing success comes from the quality of the writing, it’s also a game of how competitive your content is compared to that of others. I don’t mean this in a cutthroat way, but there are many niches. In order for me to be successful, I need to do decently well in the niches I choose to write in.
I will mostly write from my personal experience, and a lot of that involves my passion for personal finance. Money and finance can be an extremely saturated topic, but I’m hoping that I can write about more specific topics that will gain more attention from readers. I think that seeing the analytics from my stories will help inform me about what I’m doing well and what I can improve upon.
Accountability
By publishing this article at the start of 2021, I want to hold myself accountable to the expectations I have for myself. I would like to publish an article every month breaking down things that I learned over the past month. That could be a cool series to look back at. In those articles, I’ll go through my story analytics and my thought process. Over time, I want to compile a journal detailing my Medium writing journal. When I start publishing those articles, I’ll update here with links to my reflections as I continue with my writing journey.
It would also be pretty cool to do an article at the end of the day with the exact same headers discussing how well this all worked out for me.
My Writing Strategy
In order to publish an article every day after barely ever writing, I’m going to need plan things out to give myself enough of a runway to takeoff. Writing is certainly not a breeze as is, so here are the things I will do to make things easier on myself:
- Whenever an article title/topic comes to mind, I’ll immediately save a new article draft.
- Whenever I’m Googling something and can’t quite find the answer to my question, I’ll also immediately save a new article draft. It would be great to write content on questions that haven’t been directly answered.
- If I finish an article faster than expected, start flushing out some other drafts in my writing queue. That way, I can maintain my daily publishing schedule.
In all of this, I want to minimize the amount of time I spend brainstorming things to write about. As a perfectionist, it’s easy for me to reread something over and over again only to end up never publishing it. I will always proofread my writing, but I want to speed up this process from writing to publishing by doing it more often. Practice makes progress.
So, Time to Get Writing!
After writing all of this, I already feel ready to get on with some other pieces. There’s so much to do and so little time. Time to strap in for a ride in 2021!
