In January 2018, I found myself sitting in an old church in Atlanta, GA, with 30 other entrepreneurs that had been converted into an event space and AIrbnb.

I was there as the "Connection Concierge" for a brand-new mastermind group called Meeting of the Minds...started by an ambitious 22-year-old. I had been flown out to stay at this church and pull off the very first mastermind where we hoped to convert some of the 30 or so successful people in the room into paying members.

On Day One, our very first guest speaker was Benjamin J. Hardy, who had driven hours from Florida just to speak at our event. He had already made a name for himself as the #1 writer on Medium (mostly in the areas of personal development and entrepreneurship) for 2016, and was then making $10K+ a month just from his email list which he was directing people to sign up for as a CTA on the bottom of every single one of his Medium articles. After one of his first articles went extremely viral, he started adding 5000 new people to his email list every month!

The money he made came from a small $27 daily journaling course he'd put together to help people become better writers, and that he offered to every person who signed up for his email list. At the time, he'd just secured a 1/4 million dollar book deal, and was still working on completing his PhD in organizational psychology. That book, "Willpower Doesn't Work" would be released a few months later. 

Now we all know the money is in the list, so it's not hard to understand how becoming the #1 Medium writer could lead to a 6 and then 7-figure business, book deals, getting published in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Thrive Global, and many high-profile speaking engagements.

I took mad notes while Ben was talking, and what he shared is still highly relevant for finding success on Medium today. After hearing him speak, I was fired up and started building up my Medium profile and quickly gained 1.7K followers and even had an article of my own go semi-viral (it's still making me money and getting shared at least).