How My Medium Marketing Changed Since I Started Out + Yearly Income

Elna Cain
5 min readAug 21, 2021

I started out on Medium in 2014.

About three months after officially starting out as an online freelance writer. I guess I heard about Medium and how this might be a great tool to build your portfolio to show prospects you can write.

But for the next year all I used Medium for was to republish my content from my own blog at Elna Cain.

My republished content from my Elna Cain blog

All of these posts are on my blog and do well there, so I thought they would do well on Medium too, but not really.

I wasn’t really invested in Medium at that time and many people weren’t either.

Some of my freelance writing clients were doing the exact thing I was doing — republishing their content as a way to grow an audience.

While it’s much better to do this strategy on LinkedIn, Medium was a new content platform for writers and, since I recently started a few months prior, I thought I would check it out.

Well, I stopped checking it out for four years. It was in 2019 that I started again and am still continuing my writing on Medium.

What happened during those four years?

Well I was landing amazing clients, writing on my own blog and started other projects like creating digital products, creating different income streams and started other blogs, including contributor sites like FreelancerFAQs.

Essentially, I was making money and at that time and I didn’t know you could make money on Medium. I just knew it as a content platform to repurpose content you already have.

It wasn’t until I learned of popular Medium writers and seeing how much money they made that I thought it could be a cool side income strategy for me. Much like Youtube is for me currently.

So I started writing on Medium again.

Medium writing in 2019
Elna Cain

SaaS freelance writer & mom with real-world marketing experience. Mentors writers on her blog https://elnacain.com. Need a writer? elna@elnacain.com