You want to start a blog but you do not have money to invest on self host blog to earn some ad income.
Well, the good news is you can start a blog with no money. You don’t have to pay for hosting, domain or anything that is related to blog.
The bad news is it may take longer than you wish and you will not earn any ad revenue.
But there is another good news, you can attract followers and also potential income if your article is engaging enough to your audience.
The platform I am talking about is Medium.
Start writing in Medium
Medium is a fantastic source of articles from a huge variety of writers, poets, and comic artists from around the World. It was started by two of Twitter founders in the year 2012. It looks like a standard blogging platform but according to The Atlantic, it had been “designed for little stories that make your day better, manifestos that change the world and helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say.”
Easy Sign Up to start blogging with no investment / money
Writing in Medium is pretty simple. You just have to register, create a profile and start writing your story. It’s a very minimal style, black and white interface where you don’t have an option to change the page style, font or even the layout.
It’s purely for writing and publishing. You do have a choice to pick your own images though (Remember to have permission or tag the owner if you have decided to use someone else’s image.)
Income from Writing in Medium
The best part of writing in Medium is, if someone reads your article, you will earn income. The more people read the more money you earn. There are writers who earns as high as $16,685.50 for a single story.
Like many other platform, having a potential income from Medium is not easy. It requires an article that captivates your readers attention. Once it does, your earnings will increase and it doesn’t stop. The article will keep earning until you decide to take down the article (now, why would you be doing that).
You might be worried that writing in Medium instead of your own blogging platform will take away some good potential of earning more through ads. It is true but remember, writing in Medium does not require any yearly blog maintenance fee as it is taken care by Medium.
Once you start earning from Medium, you can always put the money in starting your own self hosted blogging. If you have already established a substantial amount of followers, you can direct them to your blog from your article.
Plus, all those posts that you have posted to Medium can easily be published in your new blog weekly to gain traffic and earn income too. All you need to do is just mention that the article was originally posted in Medium.
Why not WordPress instead of Medium?
Good question. The difference between Medium and WordPress is that Medium is a platform for stories in a particular industry meanwhile WordPress is just an open source content management system in which a user publish content and manage users.
If your intention is to share your passion and knowledge, then Medium would be a great place to find like minded potential readers as it caters to a specific industry. On the contrary, WordPress would be a better place for business to write on their products and services as it caters bigger audience with bigger pool.
You will catch someone’s attention in Medium since it’s a smaller pool with the exact target than a WordPress with larger pool that would probably push you back much farther in the search engine pool.
Both platform caters to different type of users and offers distinct benefits.
Other platforms
Quora
Quora is also a great platform to write but it’s different than Medium because you need to answer questions that is asked by Quorans. You can earn money from this platform too but only if you ask questions that gains attractions and not through answers.
However, the good thing is since you have written an answer to a question, you can easily convert this to an article and publish them in Medium. If you have answered a popular question with many engaging comments, it proves that it is a topic that garners attention. Thus, it could be a great article to attract attention in Medium too.
Reddit is also another platform that you can start writing. It is similar to Quora but with stricter rules. Reddit is rich with information but I don’t think that you will be able to grow much by posting in Reddit.
However, it can be a platform to find some interesting topics for your article
Final Words
If you are serious about writing and you don’t have any money to spare to start up a self host blog. I highly recommend you to start writing in Medium. The platform is great for an individual who’s just beginning to explore on blogging.
My choice will always be Medium to start on writing as the platform is rich with potential readers from so many genres. Also, it pays well too. If you ever doubt on what is the benefit of blogging, check out this article.
So, are you going to start writing in Medium?