Balancing Your Article Publishing Schedule

What is the right amount of articles to publish per week?

I’ve asked myself this question quite a lot and in this article, I’ll try to answer it.

If you are interested, grab a cup of coffee, and let’s dive into it!

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

Why I am asking myself this question

I started writing online because I wanted to learn something. I wanted to improve my English, learn how to set up a website and solidify what I had learned through writing.

How much should I publish?

I didn’t ask myself this question at the beginning. I thought of just writing an article when I felt like it.

After writing online for a couple of weeks, I stumbled upon Medium, a platform for publishing articles online.

And I remembered what I had learned from Nicolas Cole, an online writer I am following (here’s one of his books). He recommended starting to write online on platforms to create a following.

Furthermore, I learned that it is possible to earn money on Medium if your articles are being read on the platform. Although earning money was no primary goal of my online writing, I thought that earning (a little bit) on the side through something I already was doing seemed like a pretty good deal.

So I signed up for the Medium Partner Program.

My Medium Journey

To be part of the Medium Partner Program, you need to sign up for a Medium subscription which costs 50 $ (or in my case 50 EUR) per year. So, quickly it became a goal for me to “earn back” this investment.

In the first year, I had to make 50 EUR.

In order to achieve this goal, I had to publish more consistently. However, I also didn’t want to overcommit, burn out, and quit writing altogether. Publishing every day was out of reach due to my busy day job. Writing once per month seemed too low (I wouldn’t earn my money back by only publishing monthly).

I set myself the goal of publishing 100 articles in my first year. That meant I had to publish about 2 articles per week. That’s what I set out for the first year.

My Medium Journey in Earnings

The first month already was pretty good. In December 2023 I had earnings of 42.76 $. After fees and taxes that still translated to 29.93 $ of income. With that I’d quickly earn back my investment - I was thinking.

The next couple of months were quite good as well and until June 2024 I had mean earnings of about 40 $ per month. However, in July my earnings dropped to just 7.33 $ (there had been some changes in how Medium was calculating the earnings).

Until October 2024 earnings climbed back up to 15.58 $ but then dropped all the way down to 2.75 $ in November 2024.

What was the reason?

I think it was because I changed my publishing rate from 2 articles per week to 1 article per week at the end of October 2024.

So it seems that publishing once per week is too few to sustain a Medium membership.

Let’s get back to the publishing schedule.

I want to make one point clear (once more): I don’t write online because I want to earn a lot of money. I do it to learn and improve.

And what can supercharge learning?

Timely feedback.

Timely feedback from an engaged audience is even better.

Without many followers at the beginning, it can be hard for a new writer to get exposure to readers and feedback. Just publishing a website (without marketing) doesn’t generate traffic on its own.

This is why platforms (such as Substack or Medium) are powerful: you can tap into the existing community and start to create a following as a new writer.

With Medium this worked out quite well the first couple of months, but since July 2024 there seems to be something off. Views and reads are going down and my Medium audience stagnates.

One reason surely is the reduced publishing pace. However, as the trend started already in July, there has to be another reason. It seems as if Medium doesn’t expose my articles as much as it did for the first 6 months.

I’ll stay on the platform for some more months, but if the trend continues I’ll leave and focus more on my personal website and Substack.

The answer to the question

What is the right amount of articles to publish per week?

It depends.

If you want to be successful on Medium, I’d say it is publishing as much as possible. I didn’t try it out myself, but publishing daily might be the goal to set out for. Then it should be possible to surpass the 100 $ mark easily. With publishing once per week or less, you won’t be very successful at Medium.

If you want to write for writing’s sake, do whatever feels good for you. It doesn’t matter if you publish once per week, once per month, or irregularly as long as you are having fun. That’s what I am out for.