I pretty much blocked Tim Denning and all the other gurus after I arrived. It took me a year to hit $100, and a month later I hit over $4000. But that dropped pretty quickly, and I'm now doing between $500 and $1000 per month.

What these people don't tell you is that they started early, and when one starts early on any site, one gets to snag all the readers and that builds up as the years go on. For instance, I started on Google Plus on day one. Within a year, I had 37,000 followers.

So everytime someone new joins Medium, he has a new market, and they all fall for him. Americans seem to have an unending appetite for self-help. I think it's because they're all socialized to believe that they must be successful, live a wonderfully, meaningful life, etc. These things are unrealistic. The thing is if you have heard this on radio, on Tv, from your teachers and professors, you believe it. So when a self-help guru comes along, they are all clambering to get 'the secret.'

For what it's worth, I read the same books he did - 20 to 30 years ago. His ideas are not his own. He is simply repeating all the other stuff that these gurus come up with. It is stuff and nonsense.

But many people want to believe it, and so he has a sizeable market.

I have no interest in self-improvement articles or in learning to write. Most readers don't. Tim isn't catering to readers. He is catering to people who are desperately alone inside and who are desperately looking for meaning. In our day and age, there are a lot of those. .