The publishing platform Medium’s been around for years. But the company has made a few changes recently that might make you reconsider whether or not you should be writing on Medium. Our guest for the 419th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Thomas Smith. I asked Thomas to share some of the reasons Medium has become a place for readers to find great content as well as a place for writers to not just share their thoughts, but also to potentially earn a respectable income stream by posting thoughts there instead of social media or your own blog. Why Thomas? Well, he’s earned more than $19,000 for a single post on the platform, and well over six figures over the past couple of years. So he knows a thing of two. And he shared it all on this episode. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Thomas’s Thrive on Medium Course

How to Find Clients 36-page Mini-book

The FREE Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  It’s been said so often that it’s almost become a meme… there’s this idea that successful millionaires… or maybe its billionaires, I can’t quite remember, but successful millionaires have on average seven different streams of income. They may have a salary or income from a business they own, they earn dividends on their investments, maybe they have income from property they own, and so on. And people share this idea with the intention that those of us who hear it will also think about ways to add different potential income streams to our businesses.

But as a content writer or a copywriter, you may not have access to investment that pay dividends yet. Or property you can rent out. Or many of the other more traditional ways these very wealthy people earn money. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t options for us. In fact, some of these options may be easier for you and me, than for the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world to capitalize on.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with successful Medium writer, Thomas Smith. Thomas has been writing on and making good money with Medium. He recently released a course that shows how he does it. And I wanted to chat with him about the possibilities for content writers and copywriters to use Medium as a potential revenue source—especially for the kinds of writing we might want to do for ourselves instead of our clients. If you write for you… you may want to listen to this episode twice so you pick up on all the ideas Thomas shares about growing an audience and income stream using Medium.

Before we get to that though… you hear me tell you about several resources that we’ve put together to help you build and grow a writing business. I’m going to quickly list a few of them here so you can get the help you need… we have a free facebook group called The Copywriter Club. You can find us on Facebook and request that we add you to the group where you’ll find seven years of threads about all kinds of copywriting and business questions. Obviously you know about this podcast. You’re listening to it right now and there are more than 400 interviews with successful copywriters and other experts in our backlist. Once you’ve listened to this episode, scroll through to find interviews with people like Seth Godin, Jay Abraham, Jereshia Hawk, Joanna Wiebe, Todd Brown, Kennedy and so many others. Honestly, it’s the best free library of copy, content and business ideas that you’ll find anywhere. And it’s at your fingertips. And right now you can get our free, 36 page mini-book called How to Find Clients when you go to thecopwriterclub.com/findaclient . I guarantee you’ll find at least one and probably 5-10 ideas you can use to find a client for your business. We’re here to help you build a business, so be sure to take advantage of all the free resources we’ve provided for you.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Thomas Smith.

Thomas, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I’d love to start with your story. How did you become a content consultant, a writer, creator, I mean, of your course, Thrive on Medium, which I should just mention right up front, it’s a course not just about writing for Medium, but actually making a living from it. So how did you get there?

Thomas Smith: Yeah, so my background is actually in AI, going way back to before it was a thing. I have a degree in cognitive science with a focus on AI from Johns Hopkins University. I was studying that kind of technology when it was literally on a whiteboard. You were drawing neural networks with a dry erase marker. So it’s come a long way in the time since then, but that was my original background. And I’m also a professional photographer. So I combined those two interests. I launched a company that uses AI to help archives, understand what’s in their archives, find photos in their big collections, get those out there for people to use. Been doing that since 2010. And along the way, I really learned how to kind of take those two interests of AI and photography and combine them in my own business, but also to explain them to people because AI is super confusing and photography is very technical. It’s also creative. There’s a lot of things that people have to understand in order to do both of those. So I kind of developed an expertise, I would say, in explaining those kinds of complex technologies in fairly simple terms and started to publish articles about photography and about AI. And originally I was just writing for publications in the photography space. I was writing for some bigger publications too, like IEEE Spectrum and that kind of thing. And I came along Medium, found Medium, this was in 2019. And I can go into a lot more detail about exactly how Medium works, but it just felt like it was going to be a great home for my writing where I could Basically talk about these topics that I’m very passionate about and have a lot of real world experience in and explain them to people and kind of share how to, how to use AI and how to do photography and how to build a business. All the stuff I picked up along the way in a way that would be really helpful. And it turned into not only a successful kind of platform for me, but also something that helped me launch. a consulting component to my business, where now I’m not just doing photography and using AI and helping archives, but I’m actually helping other companies understand how to tell their story in that space, how to share what they’re doing on Medium and on other platforms. It’s turned into essentially a content consulting business. That’s now almost the size of my core business with photography and AI. So Medium has been a huge piece of that, not only direct earnings on the platform, which I’ll get into, but also the way it’s helped me kind of add that onto my existing business.

Rob Marsh: That’s, yeah, that’s amazing. So as I hear you talk about this, I’m curious, and maybe this is where we get into how Medium actually works, but why Medium over, say, my own blog or Substack or some other publishing platform where I can share what I write? What’s so great about Medium?

Thomas Smith: Yeah, so I think, you know, it probably makes sense to step back and talk just briefly about what Medium is. I think everybody’s probably aware of it, especially if you’re a writer, you’ve seen it, it’s out there. But basically to break it down to the very basics, it’s a subscription platform. So people pay $5 all the way up to around $15 a month. There’s different levels that people subscribe at. And in exchange for that, they get access to all of the writing on the Medium platform. And a lot of it is behind this Medium paywall where you have to be a paying subscriber to have access to it. At the moment, Medium has about a million paying subscribers. They’ve grown tremendously over the last few years. They were around 750,000, uh, coming out of the core pandemic time when people were, you know, at their computers all the time, they’ve since grown even more dramatically up to around a million. So they’re bringing in probably five to $7 million a month from these su