How I Earned $360 and 6,800 Views From A Single Story

What steps I had to follow to reach almost 7000 readers and what I learned throughout the process

Can daily writing on Medium become a profitable side hustle? It depends.

I’ve seen way too many articles of Medium writers encouraging their peers to “immediately start your own blog, find your niche, and write an article a day.” There is also a small number of writers that take the courage to share their four-, even five-digit earnings on Medium.

Over the past year and a half, since I joined Medium, I’ve read many such articles that give tips on how you can easily do the same, rather than the steps the writer had to go through.

I’m saying that, because I had tried it, and it didn’t work that well at all.

So, in this article, instead of me guiding you on how to earn more money out of your articles, I’ll tell you about my experience with what I did to earn $360 on a single story that was read by nearly seven thousand people.

It would be then up to you, the reader, to decide whether to implement my strategy and learn from my mistakes.

The Profitable Medium Article I Wrote

Last year at the beginning of December I celebrated my 6th month on Medium. Up until the end of 2020, I had accumulated a couple of strong months, where I earned more than $100 — $276 in September, $115 in October, and $310 in December.

I’ve never been a prolific writer. Even during times when I earned the most, I still wrote an article per week. Probably because of lack of ideas…or time.

Each of the previous stories had been earning me around $20-$30 each, which was not that bad for a fresh university graduate — I could pay for my Spotify and Amazon Prime subscriptions, and still have some spare money to buy books.

But it wasn’t until December 2020 that one of my stories exploded. A story that, over the course of a few months, would earn me $360, be read by 6.8k people, and most probably be one of the main reasons I gained 5 thousand followers in the next half a year.

I’ve always been interested in psychedelics and their implications on the mental and physical health of the users. That’s why, using 11 scientific sources, I managed to write a 1,300-word article about whether smoking cannabis could potentially damage your brain cells. Hence, this 6-minute-read article was created:

I published it in ILLUMINATION and it was instantaneously curated by the Medium staff in the Cannabis category. Two days after its curation, the views and earnings skyrocketed. I’ve noticed that the higher the internal views and the member reading time, the higher the money you receive will be.

Then, over the course of a couple of months, I would usually get from 20 to 40 readers a day, which would, in turn, generate from $2 to $5 each day. Of course, the member reading time had also been dropping steadily.

Here’s the thing with Medium: it’s guaranteed that your story will experience a gradual decline in views and earnings, however, experience showed me that your story will be generating profits for at least two months after its initial publication.

Yes, you would earn only $2-$3 a day, but if stretched across weeks, it’s a lot.

I also got 20 comments and 2.1k claps, my highest numbers so far.

I also shared it on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, from where I gathered an additional 57 friend link views. Most of these readers were non-Medium members, which meant that no money had been earned from their views, but it was a good feeling nevertheless.

The story, however, hasn’t generated anything for the past couple of months, which is understandable, as it was written a year ago. So, here are the things I did while writing the story and after I published it:

• I Used a Dozen Scientific Sources That I Hyperlinked To My Article

During my four years at university, I got used to including at least 10 reputable sources into any 1000–2000 words research paper I wrote, as it boosted its credibility, making less room for bias.

That’s why I tried to include as many sources as I could into my story, which undoubtedly helped for the SEO — and better backlinks result in higher trustworthiness.

I Used My Own Illustrations (and used many of them throughout the article), Not Stock Ones;

Most of the readers here are now sick of seeing high-resolution pictures with a low aperture of people either smiling or frowning, depending on the context.

“I’ll just put a sunset for my self-help article and a more dark-themed picture for my critique of the 9–5 job.”

It’s really easy and less time-consuming to just use a stock image for one of your Medium stories. However, going the extra mile will always bring you more readers and followers.

Creating the images for your articles often means that you’ve taken your game one step forward, instead of choosing the generic, straightforward method.

It’s not really necessary for your Photoshop skills to be advanced in order to create a good story cover. The reality is that anything different from a stock image would look considerably more professional. It usually takes me from 5 to 10 minutes to create an illustration.

• I Created the Title as a Question;

I’ve noticed that for all the years I’ve been writing essays, research papers, and articles, there’s something special with titles that are presented as questions.

This could actually be your best choice for a title style sometimes, but you need to make sure that first, your question-title gives enough information to the reader, and second, it should be specific of what your argument is about — you could make the reader guess what the conclusion is, but you shouldn’t do it for the general topic of your article.

I would also sometimes use a question in the title when I write about a controversial topic, that divides scientific opinions and findings — such that have no decisive conclusion.

For example, whether cannabis is good or bad for treating anxiety. There is no point in arguing for or against the one or the other, simply because there’s no final, concrete proof. But that’s just an example, I’m sure you could come up with hundreds more of this kind.

• I Published it in a Big, Renowned Publication;

Most of my articles have been published in the ILLUMINATION, which, I think, has given me a huge boost in visibility. However, big publications on Medium have their disadvantages.

Although they could potentially reach thousands of people, as hundreds of writers are being published on a daily basis, it would be really hard for your article to stand out. So I guess it comes down to personal preference and wise choice — publications do need to be carefully picked.

• I Replied to Every Single Comment;

From the 20 comments I received, I replied to each and every one of them. While replying, I carefully structured my answers in such a way as to continue the discussion further. It’s a really nice feeling to see that your readers actually care about what you write about — so engage with them through the comments section, and be genuine.

• I Got Lucky.

Although I carefully planned how I’m going to write the story, what sources I’ll use, when exactly I’ll publish it and to what publication, what hashtags I’ll use, what images I’ll include, and so on, a huge part of this “success” of mine could be attributed to pure luck.

I had always written and structured my articles in mostly identical ways, but none of them had reached that many people.

Why’s that? I still can’t answer that question.

I guess it might be a mixture of everything, including luck.

What did I learn from all this? Probably that success is bound to come if you have a writing plan and you stick to it — you never know when an article you’ve written will explode, that’s one of the reasons I still write on Medium. Just don’t stop writing and don’t give up.

Thank you for taking some time to read my article! If you wish to read more written by me, check my Medium page:

If you are further interested in psychedelics and mental health, I recently wrote about how cannabis affects your body and brain, and how psychedelics could potentially help with anxiety and depression: