Great question gravity well. Other’s may disagree with me but I personally think it’s important as a writer to have more than one income stream and not rely on just one — platforms (like Medium), clients, magazines etc., change all the time. One pathway if you write non-fiction articles, short stories, or poetry, is to learn to pitch editors (there are lots of articles online about how to pitch well). Then research some magazines, websites, or literary magazines that take contributions. I usually look at the front of a magazine or the bottom of a website to see if they take submissions. You could sign up to Authors Publish Magazine, they send out weekly emails with places that are taking submissions. You can also work for clients, ghostwriting, writing copy for website about pages or for advertising etc. You could approach big companies through email and offer your services, make contacts through LinkedIn, or find clients on somewhere like Freelancer or Upwork (although these have been difficult lately to find quality work in so I wouldn’t recommend them necessarily — but it could be a place to build up confidence as a new writer possibly.) It really depends on what kind of writing you want to do? The best advice I was given as a new writer is that every area of writing is hard to break into. Once you break in though, I’ve found there’s a lot of work available.