This Month I Earnt $6.76 on Medium! Here’s How!

Joe Douglas
4 min readMar 12, 2021
Oil painting of Scrooge McDuck, Donald and his nephews by creator Carl Barks

This month I earnt the most I ever have on Medium since starting here six-odd months ago. After conversion from $US to £UK, that’s roughly £4.80! Finally, after six months, I’ve earnt enough on Medium to buy myself a coffee. (But I don’t actually drink coffee, so it’ll be tea or hot chocolate.)

It wasn’t easy to do however, let me tell you! Never fear though, as I’m going to let you in on my money making secrets and soon you too will be making enough to afford one hot beverage a month!

Stock Images Be Damned!

You’ll see lots of people on Medium praise the stock image. “Oh,” they cry, “they make your articles so much more visually interesting!” To this I say hogwash!

In my highly opinionated opinion stock images are the equivalent of pastel colours. Nice, inoffensive things that are just there but don’t actually say anything. They float in a swirling miasma of “oh, that’s nice” and “meh.” Half the time the stock images people use don’t even relate to the article they are included with.

I say be brave with your images! Use something that is actually interesting. And relates to the story. I’ve put my money where my mouth is with this one; one of my articles has a lead image of a demon!

Write About Important Things, Like Comics!

Yes, yes. I know there was some overly idiotic, dictator-like, sentient-hair-wearing white man kicked out of an important job recently. But give it 10, 20, 50 years and no one will care. Cultural heroes, that’s the important stuff! The world might be fighting a pandemic, but there are inspiring stories of men and women in skin tight leotards battling terrible villains with giant eyeballs for heads. Those are the stories that will be remembered!

Insult Americans

By far an away my most successful article, and the one probably responsible for allowing me to purchase that tea or hot chocolate (I still haven’t decided which) is one in which I pretty much call Americans self important and unaccepting of anything outside of their own world purview. But hey, it seems to work!

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Joe Douglas

Collector. Writer. Artist. Geek. I write mostly about the hobby of collecting. Check out my full portfolio at JMDWorks.org.