Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links.

With an increasingly large number of articles on Medium that are earning next to nothing, I decided I needed to do something about it. Those stories could be earning extra cash on a dedicated website.

I started Side Hustle Monkey at the end of October specifically for my side hustle and making money online articles. But that still left hundreds of articles languishing, unloved on Medium.

The solution was a new site for all the articles that don’t fit in the side hustle niche. In fact, I have a few niche sites planned, as I have plenty of articles to fill them up.

I hosted my Side Hustle Monkey on Bluehost. I wrote about how it costs just $33 to host a website there for a whole year.

For my new site, I decided to try a different hosting company. I opted for SiteGround. They’re a top-notch hosting site that has fantastic support. I used them in the past for my travel blog. I was very impressed. That was a few years ago. Now, the front end is so simple to use that I’m going to transfer my other sites to them as well.

Click here to sign up for a SiteGround account.

Once I had my site set up, it was time to copy my articles from Medium. I decided to copy across the whole lot, then delete the ones that I’ve already published on SideHustleMonkey.com.

Copying across the articles was a 4-step process.

Step 1 — Download my Medium articles

To do this, head to the Settings page on your account, click Security and apps, then Download your information. On the pop-up window, click Export.

You’ll get an email with a link to the zip file. This can take up to 24 hours, but mine arrived in one minute.

Step 2 — Import the Medium file to WordPress.com

I read that you can’t import your Medium file into a WordPress blog that has themes or plugins enabled. I tried, but the Medium option was missing from the Import section.

But, there’s a workaround. You need to go to wordpress.com/start and open an account. It will show you a list of payment options, but near the top, there is a small link that you can click to get a free site. From there, just follow the instructions.

On the left-hand menu, click Tools, then Import. Choose Medium from the list of options, then upload the Medium zip file that you downloaded earlier.

Your zip file will then be processed. This step took 30 minutes with my file.

Next, click Continue and the content will be imported. This step only took a couple of minutes.

When I headed to the Posts section of WordPress it showed 454 published posts and 21 drafts. That was made up of my 453 published posts, along with a Hello World post that was already there. The drafts were mostly blank lists from Medium.

From here, I deleted all the posts that I had already uploaded to Side Hustle Monkey, along with a few others that I didn’t want.

I was left with 153 posts.

Step 3 — Export the posts from WordPress to your computer

First, you need to export your posts to a file on your laptop. To do this, click Tools on the left-hand menu and then Export. On the next page, click Export all.

Next, click Export all, and you’ll receive an email with a download link.

Click Download and the file will be downloaded to your computer.

Step 4— Import the posts from your computer to your new WordPress site

Once the file had downloaded, you can go to your main website and import it. But first, you need to unzip the download file. In the step below, you’ll need to import the XML file and not the zip file.

To do this, click Tools on the left-hand menu and then Import.

Then scroll down until you see the WordPress link and click Install Now.

That’s it.

I just did this and now have my 153 articles in draft format.

For my website, I only used 50 articles. I saved the rest for 2 or 3 additional websites.

I deleted the articles I didn’t need, added categories and tags, and checked each article to make sure everything is ok. I also added new featured images to each article.

After all that was done, I published the posts all at once. Another option you have is to schedule them to be publish one at a time. Maybe once a day.

I have the site up for sale for $399. I’ll keep the site until it sells. In the meantime, I’ll add some affiliate links so that it can earn a little monthly income. Not bad for a few hours of work copying articles from Medium that no longer make any money.

It doesn’t cost me any extra to host the site, as I have a hosting account that allows unlimited websites.

I now have 3 websites up and running, and will create a few more over the coming weeks and months.