This Writer Made $100,000 Last Year in Her Spare Time
Let's look at how she did it.
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Eve Arnold is a superstar in the online writing world.
I first came across her in June 2023, around the same time I was accepted onto the Medium Partner Programme. I read a couple of her articles and immediately liked the way she wrote. Her stories were informative without being dry, easily-digestible without being shallow.
Back then, she had around 13,000 followers on Medium. Little did I (or, probably, she) know how much things would change over the next few months.
Today, Eve writes to an online audience of over 100,000 people and earns around the same figure in dollar amounts. She’s comfortably within the top 1% of writers on Medium.
And, most remarkably of all, she only writes and creates part-time. She still works a day job as well!
I love these kinds of stories, the ones where ordinary people in ordinary situations achieve greatness in a realistic and replicable way. Eve repeatedly reminds her audience that she’s just a normal person writing on the internet, and if she can do it, so can they.
So let’s look a little closer at how Eve manages to make six figures a year from her part-time writing gig.
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Writing into the void
As Eve herself admits, she “wrote for three years straight before anybody cared.”
Here’s how she summarises her life before writing:
I was 22, had a degree and had no idea what I wanted to do. I decided the only logical solution was to get a grad job and move around a company for a while, and see what I liked.
Turns out, not a lot.
I spent 3 years on that graduate scheme. I spent 3 years of my life trying to work out what I wanted to do with it. Each job I moved to was as disappointing as the last. After the novelty wore off I was left with the sad realisation that actually, I didn’t like this corporate thing much.
Following this, she “tried every side hustle out there”, but none seemed to stick.
Then, she pivoted.
Eve found Medium, and started writing on a daily basis. She wrote on the internet every day for 3 solid years, and has been taking it “seriously” for the last 1.5 years (as of December 2023).
She’s written over 1,200 articles on the internet and has no plans to slow down.
To Eve, content is the product and “work is the reward”.
How does Eve make money?
Eve’s writing journey really took off when she began publishing consistently on Medium.
Her work appears on the platform on an almost-daily basis. She’s a writer for several of Medium’s biggest publications who regularly share her stories, giving her great exposure. But she writes for a few smaller publications too and does equally well.
That’s in part down to her massive audience. As I said, she had around 13k followers on Medium when I first came across her last year - now, she has over 80,000 readers on the platform.
That’s a lot of eyes on her words.
Medium pays for read time. The more people read your work, the more you get paid. It’s a simple (if often unpredictable) system.
Eve wrote to a much smaller audience for years before her following exploded in 2023. Her consistency and willingness to keep publishing even when no major rewards were forthcoming has more than paid off.
According to Eve herself, she made $30,000 on Medium last year. That’s an average of $2,500 a month.
Not bad for a part-time side hustle.
But what about the other $70k, you ask?
Well, after finding success with her writing, Eve began exploring the digital product market. She’s an expert at analysing trends and processes within her own work (which is why her writing is so helpful) and eventually compiled everything she’s learned so far into a series of digital products:
The Medium Blueprint ($199)
Ideation Masterclass ($79)
Part-Time Newsletter School (coming soon)
She’s also made a number of high-value resources free to download on her website.
Eve made $70,000 last year through her paid product sales, which could comprise 350 Medium Blueprint sales or over 875 Ideation Masterclass purchases, or a combination of both.
Either way, $70k from just two digital products is pretty incredible!
And that $100k income generation in 2023 was a jump of 80% from her 2022 earnings, so who knows where she’ll be at the end of this year?
How does Eve promote her work?
Unlike a lot of big writing gurus on the internet these days, Eve does very little self-promotion.
In fact, you’ll only find her in a handful of places online: Medium, X/Twitter, LinkedIn and Substack.
Eve publishes almost daily on Medium and X/Twitter. Both her Medium articles and X/Twitter posts are buttoned with a simple call-to-action to join her newsletter, The Part-Time Creator Club. She has a good-sized following of 18,000+ people on X/Twitter, and it’s gradually growing. She also posts on LinkedIn and has a Substack publication, although she hasn’t published there since October 2023.
Over 18,000 people have subscribed to Eve’s newsletter (including myself) and I would imagine, given the current state of social media, that the vast majority of those subscribers have come from Medium.
As with many social media-dependent newsletters, Eve’s hasn’t seen a huge amount of growth in 2024. But when you have an 80,000-strong audience on Medium, you don’t need to worry too much about getting subs from social sources.
What is Eve’s process?
It’s wonderfully simple.
She writes for 2 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. It seems she’ll write a piece, leave it for a day, edit it, and submit it for publication. Apparently, she has 400+ draft topics to choose from, so she’ll never be short on ideas.
She also tweets every day using an idea from one of her Medium articles (mostly) and adds a link to her newsletter landing page beneath it.
Eve sends out one high-quality newsletter a week, usually at the weekend. She only sends out more emails when she’s promoting an offer.
And honestly, that’s it.
Write every day. Minimal promotion. 100k in revenue.
What can we take from this?
The main lesson to take from Eve’s writing journey is just to keep getting your work out there with unwavering consistency.
Not getting any response to your work? Just keep writing. Not seeing any life-changing increases in your earnings? Just keep writing.
And, as Eve constantly reminds us, don’t pack in your day job in the meantime. If she can build a six-figure solo writing business in her spare time, so can you.
I’ll finish with this line from one of Eve’s most recent Medium articles, because it perfectly encapsulates her mindset:
“I’m 29. I’m sat in my newly renovated kitchen, in the rolling hills, with two incredible doggos and a life that I adore. I’m so lucky. I have it all.”
If you found this “Deep Dive” post helpful, please let me know in the comments below!
Imagine a world in which all of the writers write about writing and how to monetize it.
It's not just consistent writing that brings in the bucks. It's writing about making $ from writing. Many of us flock to this Meta-verse. We need stories of success to soothe our uncertainty and give us hope that all our toil is worth it. But if she wrote daily about her deep love of the Green Sea Anemone and her fellow undersea creatures, would you be sharing the secrets of her success?
Very inspired by this and the reminder that consistency is key for any content to take root. But HOW do you have a full time job AND write for two hours a day? (And workout and have friends and cook and clean and have a hobby, spend time with family, etc.) Asking as a twenty something who LOVES writing but feels already swamped getting two to three posts out per week amidst all of life’s commitments 😩