How I Am Making Money Writing on Medium in 2024

Howdy and welcome back everybody. My name is Doug from AI Business Plans, and welcome to my AI tool journal. Grab yourself a coffee. We're going to go through three different things in the video today.

First, I want to explore how to generate revenue streams online. I'm going to take a look at the Beehive newsletter dashboard. I'm going to share my month-end earnings on Medium, plus I'm going to reveal the affiliate program that I'm going to focus on until I get my first payout from it.

Next in this video, I'm going to talk about an exciting update for medium.com that I just discovered. I recently learned this strategy that I believe is going to significantly increase my earnings from the content that I already have on Medium. So I don't have to write anything new, but this will increase my earnings, and it also aligns with the chosen affiliate program that I want to focus on. I've already started experimenting with this, and today I want to share some of these details so that we can look back in a couple of months and see what the difference actually is.

The third part of this video, I'm going to go through and do a step-by-step. I'm going to show you what I'm doing inside the app called machined AI. I'm going to show you step-by-step how I'm creating a cluster of search engine-friendly articles that align with the affiliate program that I've chosen and turn that into a revenue stream.

But first, here's a little spoiler.

You can get a free Beehiiv newsletter and have up to 2,500 subscribers on there on the free platform. You can get 1,000 free actions on make.com, and you can generate three SEO clusters of content, for free, using machined AI.

The only thing you need to pay for to follow along with everything I'm doing in today's video is I would recommend that you get a paid membership on Medium and that you also pay the $20 a month to use OpenAI ChatGPT so that you can use the API for calls inside make.com to automate everything that we're talking about here today.

Increasing Earnings with Medium's New Strategy

In this section of the video, I want to benchmark some of my earnings.

It's the 31st of May, 2024, so essentially this is what I got for my views and my reads over on medium.com for this profile.

I want to go to the partner program earnings, and we're anticipating earnings this month of $93, which is up from $58 last month.

That's a nice percentage increase, and I'm expecting that to grow again in June for sure because of the changes that I just did the last couple of days in the interlinking for all these articles.

So now all these articles that are making money are now featured within all of the other articles, and some really great articles that weren't making any money are bumped up and featured across a bunch of different articles.

I think this is going to change over time. Another thing that I want to focus on is that the articles that I was writing in the past were written with a different writing approach, a different style.

Now, using the AI to rewrite and get my stuff better written, it's just making more money. People are taking more time to watch those articles.

Generating Revenue with Beehive and Affiliate Programs

Medium is one of the places that I really like because we can judge what is actually working. Some of the other revenue streams that I'm looking to build is here on beehiiv.

I upgraded to the paid membership already so I can start playing around with some of the ways to make money inside this system.

There's not a lot of ads for me right now, maybe because of my very small viewership that people are not making their ads available to me. But I did a couple of them back on the 4th and the 5th of May and earned a little bit of money. Yesterday, I did another one with Opus AI, and there were a few clicks through there, so I'm expecting to make some money through that one as well.

Over time, as I'm starting to put these out, we can see where the links are, where the money is.

As I get more people following along, I think that these ads within the email itself are going to make more money. I don't have any subscriptions set up; I don't have anything in there as a paid premium, but I'm certain that I will. I'll make a paid premium of something or other, I may as well, and see how that works out.

Then I started working with the boosts, which is to boost other people's newsletters from within my own. I've got a very small readership, so I'm not going to make a lot of money off of this, but I have website boosts plus these six different email boosts.

Now I'm going to apply for, and as we'll see later in the video, machined AI is going to create some blog posts for me that I'm going to utilize some of these email boosts inside to start off the first layer of income and then to republish over on Medium for that second layer of income.

Here's how I'm monetizing with Beehiiv.

The next way to monetize with Beehive is by referring people over to use Beehive. So 124 people have gone through my discount link, seven people have signed up, and one person has converted.

This is pretty good though if they convert and pay for the whole year right up front. I get a nice $500 chunk, so that's worth writing about and explaining and showing how this can earn you money, especially as my audience grows and I start to earn more money. It will be more convincing.

Leveraging Community Platforms for Recurring Revenue

The third revenue stream that I'm working on now is to increase my monthly recurring revenue through my community over on WHOP.

Start selling on Whop for Free 

Inside, I've got some products where I can go to the dashboard, and I can see that I have my GBT money community for $4.95 a month. There are 167 people who have joined, and there are only seven people who are paying in there now.

As that grows, I'll increase those fees as we get more people in.

But it's great because I can add all of the automations as course lessons so that you can go into the course and pull out all the automations that you want.

Over time, I think that this is going to become a very big revenue stream, and it's part of the bottom of all of the blog posts that I go through.

Here's one that I did earlier:

beehiiv newsletter, get your profile on Medium, and then get some sort of course and community access on Marketplace for whatever your topic is.

I think these three things work together no matter what you're working on.

I just want to benchmark those, but at the same time, I want to have a revenue stream that is going to pay me monthly.

Choosing the Best Referral Programs for SEO Content Clusters

Now let's focus on the affiliate program that I'm going to focus on for the SEO content cluster that I'll do at the end of the video. Recently, I started getting serious and really comparing the referral programs that I was anticipating to do with AI Business Plans.

I looked at Perplexity AI, machined AI, make.com, and Taskade, as well as Beehiiv.

I want to offer valuable tools that offer a monthly income for referrals and they also offer a free service level to new customers.

Here's my three criteria for the referral programs that I want to promote:

1. they have to be useful and valuable tools,

2. they have to pay a monthly referral fee for me for referring them a customer, and

3. they also have to have a free service level for new customers so that people can get comfortable with the program and this before they upgrade.

Despite my love for the tool Perplexity AI, its referral program only reduces my paid membership fee by $10 for each person that I refer to them, and there's no potential for a real cash payout if I'm referring a whole bunch of people to them.

I also found that Notion also has a cap. When you start out a new Notion account, it has a cap of a thousand actions or something before it requires you to upgrade before you can do anything else with it. For me, Notion didn't provide enough free details for me to get used to the system.

Instead, I'll promote Taskade, which has a free fantastic level for beginners, and make.com, which also provides a very highly useful tier and it really justifies the paid level when you need to upgrade. At the same time, I want to have a revenue stream that is going to pay me monthly.

This SEO articles I'm focusing on make.com because people can sign up there and use the free level for a long time, up for forever, and you get a thousand automations every month. That's huge.

If you are needing more than that, it's obviously producing you some value and I'd be grateful to be earning money from you getting a tool that's that valuable for you.

I'll be tracking this, but I don't get paid until it goes over $100 earning.

I don't have any earnings right now at all. I haven't focused on this too much.

So now that I'm doing this SEO cluster focus, as we go over the months, this is going to be great to look back on and do before and after.

Another one that I'm going to be promoting is Taskade.

I haven't used it very much, but I'm learning about their automated agents that I've got to go set them up. They're just too powerful for me to ignore, and Taskade is another one that I'll be tracking my referrals.

I got 27 clicks, one referral through there so far, and you can use that for forever as a free level, and it's a huge powerful tool. These ones I'm really excited to be promoting.

Last thing I want to talk about for numbers is the growth of the YouTube channel. 

This is going to be exciting because everything wraps back to the YouTube channel over and over again.

I create the content here, I use GPT to strip that content out and make a long blog post. I reprocess that a bunch of different ways, and then I'm also republishing things over onto the AI business plan business page over on LinkedIn.

This is super powerful.

If I go back to my view as an admin, one of the things that I'm looking to do is to follow other top pages and to comment on their content as they're putting stuff out. Some of these guys are really doing great stuff. It leads me to some really great tools that I'm always grateful to refer to and credit the people who I learned things from.

Think of this as creating a constellation of passive income streams.

It might look like a puzzle when you look at it like a 2D perspective, but some of those puzzle pieces are earning more money than the other same-sized puzzle pieces.

By identifying these larger income sources, we can create our content clusters around them and hopefully bolster our passive income over time.

The Power of Interlinking Medium Articles

The second thing I want to cover in today's video is over on medium.com. I recently learned that interlinking your articles is a logical way of adding another layer of income stream to the work that you've already done.

I found an article by another Medium author, and I'll leave his link down below. He introduced me to this concept and he directed me over to a YouTube video that showed the interlinking strategies of Wikipedia articles.

Alright, now in this section of the video, I want to say thank you so much to Oliver Lövström for posting this article.

He did some really crazy research that I can't reproduce, but I can tell you about it here. He found out where his most popular story on Medium was by doing a knowledge graph and he did a whole bunch of details that are beyond me.

He really shares how you can do it in the post as well. He gives all the coding on this, and it's a genius post.

I'll leave a link down below, but the gist of it is that you've got to be linking back to your own posts using the internal linking that Medium already provides. It's fantastic.

If you scroll right to the bottom of the post, I went down to the video that he recommended and I watched this how a guy made a knowledge graph from Wikipedia.

As he described how this knowledge graph connects everything together, it just made logical sense for me to start going through all of the different publications that I can find on medium.com and be sure that I have an article posted there that links back to all of my best earning articles.

Creating Money-Making Content Clusters

So if I go into all the publications that I am now an author and I can submit an article, I really have to take some time to go through and review these and be sure that I have an article posted in these publications that links back to my biggest earning articles.

This way, I'm going to make more money without even writing more.

For this experiment, let's do it and see if this dramatically increases the revenue streams that I'm getting on Medium, and I'll talk about those and I'll show those more in a second.

Just by watching this video and reading through my friend's post, I got inspired and I went through and I manually reviewed my own Medium posts. I really did a lot of work to improve the linking between them.

I'm expecting to see an increase in earnings from my older articles over the next couple of months, and I'll compare that to the months prior.

I know that's just from the interlinking strategies that I did.

Now, as a power strategy, I'm actively seeking different Medium publications to submit articles to, to ensure careful interlinking back to my own revenue-producing articles.

Where should we be spending our time generating content?

So, the first part of the video, I talked about different ways of identifying which revenue streams are going to be the most lucrative.

In the second part, I talked about a way of doing interlinking in your Medium article so that you're going to increase the revenue that you're getting from the articles that you already have without writing anything new.

I think that's super powerful, especially as we know this and we can start building it forward into the articles that we're creating with our content clusters.

Now for the third part of this article, I want to go through the step-by-step process of creating a new SEO-friendly content cluster using machined AI.

I'm going to discuss my publishing strategy that I use over on Medium to back this up and how I'm going to use this interlinking strategy now to really boost the earnings that I can get only from medium.com as a result of generating these articles.

Configuring Machined AI for SEO Clusters

Okay, so for this last part of the video, I've already gone ahead and I've done a bunch of the setup here inside machined AI.

So I'm just going to show you where I am, what I've done with it, and how you can go in and do much the same thing.

Starting off with, I'm looking at very low-volume keywords from what I've chosen to target. I chose to target AI tools, automation, make.com, and then I put in my audience are startups, business owners, bloggers, and content marketers who are 30 to 60 years old who are focused on creating passive income, growing their followers, and making money online.

So I tried to stuff my keywords into that as the target, and then as I went through it, it gave me these initial article titles. But as I changed the tone of voice from these different articles, it rewrote and it changed the title over here.

So if I go to Casual, yeah, it's rewriting that article title again so that the whole thing will start off with this tone.

But I want a couple excited. So the cluster starts off with the main article and the rest of these four will link back to that article.

There are a few different options we can go through here. I've made them all long. I set them all to GPT-4, the experimental. You can't see up in the—oh yeah, you can. So up in the top here, I've also set the experimental on. Then through the tone of voice, I tried a few different tones here where the main article is going to be neutral and clear.

This is going to be the main sales page, I think. Then the next ones are going to be more personal, excited, friendly, empathetic, and excited. But here I've got this one at third person.

I want to put these ones first person singular for all of these, so it's me telling the story because these four articles, I'm going to break them up and I'm going to repost parts of them over onto Medium.

I'll talk about that in a second. I have to show you inside what I did before.

Now the next thing that I need to do is configure it, and this is where it gets really cool and personal.

What I did is I went through and I found different articles of my own that I want to feature and focus on.

Each of these are good revenue streams, but most of them have my own video in them, and it's a transcript of my own video. So it's another layer of taking my own content and featuring it for each of these different blog posts.

So now I've taken those five posts, and I put them in here on a separate line. I've enabled the semi-automatic research, and I did not enable the automatic research. I don't want this to go out onto the internet. I wanted to really focus on what I've written so that inside those articles, it's always going to be referring back to my own stuff.

I've also enabled citations and references, but I've disabled the citations because what it does is it keeps putting a link saying "AI business plans," but I'm going to be putting this onto my own website.

So, never mind. I just took this off, and I went through and I took this list, copy-paste, and I went through for each of these configuration setups and I did the very same thing for all of them.

For this one, I enabled the citations for the main one. What I should do for that is to put the citation as a footnote, then I can remove them if I don't like them. There we go.

Next, I set the humanize all the way along, and now that I've got everything set up, all I have to do is click on write, and it will queue all of these articles and it'll start writing them for me.

Once they're finished writing, I will open it up and I will format it so that it's prepared to go onto my Beehive website.

Publishing and Formatting SEO Articles

Alright, I did pause the video for a second, a minute or two, and I waited for these to come up. So now let's see what we have here. I click on read, and what I need to do now is put in my website domain name.

So now that I've put my domain name in there, the links, when I export this article, the links will work properly. So learn more at AI business plans how to build revenue with AI tools.

This will be the article name. So each of these five articles that I've asked it to write now will be linked back and forth to each other from within all of these articles.

So as I start scanning through and I really start reading the content, of course, it's all generated from my own content.

So I'm liking what I'm seeing here, although some of the specific details about subscription models and the numbers, potential earnings, I always want to remove those.

But I appreciate that it's breaking up the content into different forms.

• So we got a bulleted list,

• we've got a table,

• we've got a couple paragraphs,

• and then another small table.

So I can work with this.

Creating and selling a course, medium program, the Beehiiv newsletter. So each of these are revenue streams that I want to develop.

So AI business plans, the newsletter, machined AI content so that I can be linking back to the articles that I've already created about that, and more details about the Cluster content SEO strategy.

Making money while you sleep with the marketplace.

This is super powerful as well. It's another one of the referral places that I want to focus on.

Building buzz with a Discord community, partner up for more bucks. These are really good things. Boost with revenue with vendor partnerships to expand your footprint. These are really good. Opus Clips.

This is awesome to see this stuff. 

Create content like a pro, keeping your eye on your earnings, and then references to each of these articles.

It's really—I think this is fantastic stuff that for the amount of time I had to put into this, it's madness how amazing this is.

So what I will do now is I'll copy this, and in my dashboard for AI business plans, I will click on start writing and I'll just simply paste this in place.

From here, it takes a bit of time.

Now I'm going to really review everything and ensure that it's all working correctly. I've got to go through and make sure all of these links now go through to my affiliate link so that everything here is going to be an earning for me.

I'll probably make most of those so that they are not a link and then not so annoying to see that all the way through, and I'll make a couple of them active.

Then I've got to go through and I really have to work at doing the edit on this content to be sure that it's really good and correct.

Then after I post it, I'm going to post pieces of this over onto medium.com and link those back, and I'll schedule those pieces to go out over time.

So now I have all of these articles that I can just quickly go and put them as drafts over AI-BusinessPlans.

One thing that I did was I posted one, two, three, four of them onto the website without sending out an email.

I just posted them and just left them on there. Then the fifth one I linked back to all those initial four, and I posted that with an email send out.

So in other words, what I did was, if I close this, is I posted these four articles, one, two, three, four onto my website.

I did the work of formatting them, putting in images, and making sure that the links were correct. Then I published those without any fanfare. I just published them online.

The fifth one that links back to all these four, I published that onto my Beehiiv newsletter and I sent out an email to my readers about that as well.

Next, I went through and I took each of these articles and I republished those onto a different publication on medium.com, again using that internal linking back to my revenue-producing posts.

Here inside the dedicated publication that I have, LearnAIforProfit.com, we can start to see these articles will start to drip feed out.

What I can do is go into the stories section, into the scheduled stories, and we can see here that myself and a friend, Jim, are publishing these every couple of days.

So here's one on June the 1st, June the 4th, June the 8th, 11th, 15th, 18th, and 22nd. All of those articles are going out to start reinforcing this first cluster of SEO articles that I put out.

This was kind of an experimental cluster of SEO articles, whereas I'm being a lot more specific with this cluster of SEO articles so that I'm focused on make.com as my earning center.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

It is quite a bit of work to go through and actually publish all this stuff, even though I have all this help from the AI. But I really couldn't do all of this at all if I didn't have the help of this AI.

It is mind-blowing how much this takes care of.

Wow, that was a big video, a lot of content there.

Which are the referral programs that we should focus on as content creators so that we can actually make a living out of this?

Second, how can we make more money out of Medium without even creating more content just by the correct interlinking structure? This one's super huge, and I'll be continuing to work on that and report on that over time.

Then third, we went through another monster huge one with machined AI creating a whole bunch of content. Now that I'm going to schedule through and I'm going to follow that same pattern, you bet I'll be reporting on that one as we unfold time to see how it actually turns out.

Thanks again for tuning in and being here all the way to the end.
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