If you enjoy writing, then earn more with Pre-Revenue Blogging

If you like writing, you’re really going to like today’s potential side hustle. Pre-revenue blogging is a very popular passive income idea that makes money that doesn’t require you to learn too many extra skills to do so.  The sites that support this relatively recent innovation give you immediate access to an engaged audience and make building your blog pages as simple as possible, so you won’t need to become an expert web designer to start earning an income. If our simple guide doesn’t answer all of your questions, just hit reply to this message (or any email from us) and let us know!

TL;DR

• Free – no cost to start or running your blog
• Simple – no additional skills are needed. You just need to be a good writer
• Potentially big profits – successful writers can make four-figures from a single post
• Quick – you can start earning from within a month of your first post
• Competitive – only a small percentage of writers make good money
• Labour Intensive – unless your article becomes popular, it can involve a lot of work for little passive income

What Is Pre-Revenue Blogging and How Do You Make Money?

Have you heard of the website and blogging platform ‘Medium’? If you’re a writer, I’d honestly be quite surprised if you hadn’t. In fact, its popularity has spread well beyond just writers as it has become a repository of high-quality, highly informative content. It’s also the short answer to the question posed by the heading above. Effectively, pre-revenue blogging is Medium.

Let’s expand on that… Medium is not your average blogging platform. Unlike Tumblr, WordPress, Wix and dozens of other platforms, Medium has what amounts to a paywall between their readers and their best content. For $5 per month, members can read an unlimited amount of articles and offer ratings (in the form of ‘claps’) and comments. By contrast, a free membership will give you access to only three paid articles per month, though anyone can access the lower-quality unpaid stuff.

This paywall does two things. Firstly, it creates an expectation of quality, which is why Medium has become such a popular source of genuinely good articles. Aside from SEO considerations, there’s no real requirement for high-quality content on other platforms since people don’t need to pay to read it and a dissatisfied reader doesn’t really harm your metrics. However, offering a paying customer a sub-par product is going to give you very bad ratings very quickly, severely limiting your return on time invested.

The second thing a paywall does is generate an immediate income for the writer. Ordinarily, a blog would be dependent on advertisements and affiliate links to make money, creating an inconsistent, hard-earned and generally quite low income per article. Through the paywall (called the Medium Partner Program), writers can earn a small percentage of each reader’s $5 membership fee for their time on the page.

Using Medium, a single story can earn over $9,000 and a writer’s full catalogue can bring in five figures per month. In September 2019 alone, Medium reported that nearly 9% of all of the writers on the platform earned at least $100. This was achieved because, despite being a membership-only platform, Medium has well over 220 million monthly users, putting it in the same league as extremely popular social sites like Pinterest and Spotify.

To ensure that the best writers are supported and readers are getting value for money, a team of in-house content curators select the best articles to promote, pushing links to user feeds, email digests and giving them pride of place on the homepage. The really exceptional articles get ‘featured’, receiving the attentions of a professional copy editor and a graphic designer and getting even more prominent placing on the Medium site and app. While a curated story can typically earn about $50-$250, a featured story can make anything from double to ten times that amount.

It’s worth noting, at this point, that Medium may dominate this scene, but they are not the only player. Other options include Vocal.media and Ghost, both of which offer a product subtly different to Medium. Ghost, for example, gives you a lot more freedom to control how you design your pages and even allows you to gather payment directly through native advertising, arguably giving you the best of both the pre-revenue and typical blogging worlds. However, what both of these alternatives lack is Medium’s massive audience and, without readers, your income-generating potential will be significantly reduced.

How To Get Started with Pre-Revenue Blogging

Starting to earn money through pre-revenue blogging is, on the face of it, very simple: just join Medium and start writing! Be sure to post your articles behind the paywall and do a bit of self-promotion if you can, posting links to your story on your own social media. Then just wait for the money to roll in.

Sadly, if your story does not get at least curated, your chances of making more than a few pennies (if that) are very poor. You can promote it as much as you like on other platforms, but you need Medium users to read your work in order to generate income, so you need your story to be promoted on Medium. Since you can’t do that yourself, you’re dependent on the in-house curators.

You could try depending on people trawling the tags to find good stories to read, but the sheer quantity of content being posted means that new stories in popular tags will be smothered by competitors almost immediately. If you hit the niche tags, your content will be at the top of the page for longer, but you’ll also have fewer people looking for it.

With the Medium economy depending entirely on views, niche content’s earning potential isn’t as good as a well-written piece on a popular topic. Among the most successful Medium stories of all time, most of the top 100 took an in-depth look at a trending event, using personal perspectives and analysis to add something of value to the reader.

Note the use of the word “personal” above – that was entirely intentional. A degree of vulnerability and honesty with your reader makes a big difference in building an audience, which will lead to more consistent readership (and income). For example, one of the more popular stories on Medium was entitled Digital Exile: How I Got Banned for Life from AirBnB. It earned 181,000 claps and a lot of money by offering a painful personal story while also commenting on how some big tech companies can mistreat individual entrepreneurs. Mixing social commentary with personal insight like this can be a winning combination.

Other popular stories were those that could both educate and entertain the reader, teaching them something new in an engaging way. If you have a useful skill to pass on (beyond writing, of course), doing so here may be simpler than creating online courses while still providing a source of passive income. In short, if you embody the BBC’s ethos of “inform, educate and entertain”, you’re more likely to succeed.

In fact, journalism skills will generally serve you well if you want to write on Medium. Good headlines are essential for attracting readers, just as they are in newspapers and magazines. Similarly, the curator’s guidelines are virtually identical to the guidelines of your average high-quality publication.

They ask:

– Does the story meet a high editorial standard?

– Does it add value for the reader?

– Is it written for the reader?

– Is it complete?

– Is it rigorous?

– Is it honest?

– Does it offer a good reading experience?

– Is it clean?

– Is the imagery appropriate?

Ah, yes – at this point, I should mention that you also need to illustrate your stories. You’re not actually obliged to do so, but it certainly doesn’t hurt and the process is kept very simple.

Things to Consider before writing for a living

While pre-revenue blogging is a simple and effective way to make money from writing, it’s an approach that will only really bring big earnings for those who are really good at writing, especially those with some experience in journalism. There is only one factor that impacts a story’s earnings: the amount of time a member remains on your page. That being the case, the onus really is on producing high-quality, highly readable, in-depth content. If you’re new to writing, it might take you quite a lot of time and practise to get up to that standard.

Additionally, as the most successful stories were those that expressed a personal angle to a trending event, the earning potential of each story you write is quite short-lived. A how-to guide will have a theoretically infinite shelf life and may earn you a consistent trickle the source of passive income, but content concerning current affairs will only last as long as the affair remains current. This means that you may put a lot of time and effort into a story that makes a lot of money in its first month and then nothing the next. In order to maintain a consistently high income, you will need to maintain a consistent quantity and quality of work. Put simply, this is primarily a source of active income – it’s basically a job.

In March 2020, 64% of Medium authors made some income from the platform, but fewer that 7% made more than $100. And, of course, 36% of writers didn’t make a penny, either through voluntarily keeping their content in front of the paywall or from getting no readers. Given how few articles are curated or featured, relative to the number posted, the odds of making a good amount of money each month are not great. That being the case, those with good writing and journalism skills might be able to get better and more consistent income from freelancing.

How Much Does It Cost To Get Started To Get Started Blogging?

There is no monetary cost to getting started on Medium. Joining as a writer is free and there’s no charge for posting articles. Additionally, there are no paid shortcuts to success – no sponsored posts or paid promotions. The only cost to the writer is their time.

Learn more about Medium and other Pre-Revenue Blogging Platforms

If you are interested in learning more about writing and earning passive income for your efforts, check out these links:

Medium – Ideas and perspectives you won’t find anywhere else

Vocal.media – share your stories and earn

Ghost– last week, 8210 writers, podcasters and video creators set up sites on Ghost