Side Hustle Growth Lab - Project: Gutenberg

Being consistent is a key to success at just about anything, and with trying to make digital writing a viable side hustle, consistency and frequency are almost a necessity. We’re going to run an experiment to see if consistently writing on Medium for six months provides a positive return on investment.

Start Date: Late March 2023
End Date: Early September 2023

Current Status: In Flight

Five years ago, writing on Medium was a very good way to build an audience and make a few bucks for someone that just wanted to “write” and not worry about SEO or running their own website.

I’d done it under a couple of different pen names and accounts for various reasons (mostly work/career related) and I’d had some reasonable success - during about a two-year period from 2019-2020, I’d made about $10,000 writing on Medium and had gotten millions of views.

When I started thinking about getting back into building out some side hustles, I thought about using Medium as the platform to document a lot of the progress. I knew that Medium was popular among writers for business and “solopreneur” type pieces, so I figured there was an audience there.

I began investigating and came across a couple of things:

1. Medium seemed to only be recommending four or five writers in this space consistently

2. These people being recommended were all telling people to “write on Medium” as a side hustle

3. Smaller writers were complaining about not being able to grow on Medium and very low payouts

I became interested in the idea of whether writing consistently on Medium could actually lead to success, so I thought I’d test it.

When I began taking notes on what I thought the outcome would be, I suspected that I was going to be disappointed based on a lot of what I was reading and researching.

My overall hypothesis was:

• My follower count would grow from 477 followers on Medium with my personal account to about 1000

• The average number of views for articles published in the last month of the experiment would be ~150 views

• Monthly revenue by the end of the experiment would be ~$100

• That growth to my Twitter account and Newsletter would be negligible

Essentially, my hypothesis based on the experiment parameters would be that it is not worth it to continue and that the overall return on my time even at the end of the experiment would be less than $3/hr.

I had some reasons as to why I thought this, but we’ll save those for the analysis and conclusion at the end of the experiment - I don’t want to overly prejudice myself or someone reading this.

Before I talk about the structure of the experiment and how I’ll conduct it, I think it’s useful to describe the account that I’m using on Medium:

• I will start with my personal account which had about 477 followers at the beginning of the experiment and no real traction

• My personal account had some previous posts which I removed because they were “off-topic”

• One remaining post has had significant virality - it’s a review of a Keychron K2 Keyboard that since publishing in December 2019, it has received over 17,800 views

• The account was part of the Medium Partner Program so it was eligible for payments

• The account was making on average $0.10/mth over the last year, so nothing significant

For the sake of clarity and transparency, here is the traffic graph for the 28 days prior to commencing the experiment.

Ok, having now described the background of the account I’ve used so that it’s clear that there’s no funny business going on in that department, let’s get into how the experiment will be run.

It’s going to be a pretty straightforward approach:

• I’m going to attempt to post 1 article a day to Medium for 180 straight days (about six months)

• I will broadly stick to the topics of business and side hustling

• I will attempt to spend about 1 hour per day writing the pieces

• I may re-use some content from previous emails to my now defunct email list that were never published on a website anywhere before

• The content will be what I consider to be “B+/B” quality - so it’s not my absolute best work, but it will be story-driven, contain anecdotes, be engaging, and make a point

I think this approach will be a very good sample representation of what the average person who puts in a solid effort for an hour a day can expect to achieve on Medium if they are consistent.

The first monthly update will come at the end of April 2023 and will include a week of data from March 2023.

To be determined at the end of the experiment.