How I Made $500 From an Article in My Third Month Writing on Medium

There is no magic formula, but it is possible. I want to share the details to say — if I can do it, you can do it too.

I have started writing on Medium a couple of months back. It is still feasible for newbies to earn good money on the platform, if that is what you are looking for in Medium.

Before we get into the detail on how I pleased a mini-viral God on Medium with one of my articles, let’s get some numbers in front of you to decide if they are enticing enough for you to read through the rest of the article.

The said article got me my many first within two weeks of its publication:

• The first article to make over $500
• The first article to get over 100 fans (411 fans)
• The first article to have more than 10K views (50K+ views)
• The first article to have more than 1K reads (17K+ reads)
• The first article to have member reading time of more than 100 hours
• The first time my daily stats crossed over 100 fans (151 for the day)
• The first time my daily stats crossed over 10K views (17,150 for the day)
• The first time my daily stats crossed over 1K reads (6,335 for the day)

I have started writing on Medium a couple of months back. Before that, I had zero experience with writing articles. But I was an avid reader on Medium for almost two years when I decided to start trying my hands-on writing.

With all the pressure of being new to the writing and writing quality articles to entice the readers— you can understand how challenging it is for a newbie like me to find topics. After getting a topic, it is a herculean task to fill in the details.

Many successful writers on Medium suggest writing from personal experience. I am not yet ready to write about my vulnerabilities or personal life. So, the next best thing is my professional experience.

Being a software engineer for 15 years brings in a lot of experience to share. With first-hand experience on the topic, I just need to focus on my writing.

I wrote an article about how software developers have a lot of misconceptions about their own profession. The third point in the said article is as below.

Myth#3. You should remember all the built-in methods and their usage in a language.

I wanted to portray the developer’s concern about failure because they cannot remember everything about a programming language. Also, I wanted to show that it is not necessary to remember everything.

To accurately depict the scenario, I planned to add the most complicated programming language to the above drawing. I looked for it on google and chanced upon the esolang called Malboge.

While googling for the language, I came across exciting stuff around esoteric programming language (or esolang). It got me interested, and I started doing some research around what are other esoteric languages.

The details I found out was fascinating. I was not aware of so many esoteric languages after a decade and a half years of being a developer. Neither any of my colleagues ever talked about it.

It got me thinking— how many more people do not know about the esolangs. The result is the below article that made me $500 within two weeks.

Here is a screenshot of the article’s earnings page after 14 days from the publishing date:

Here is a chart of how the article picked up pace after ten days of publication:

What helped the article reach the numbers

What I think helped this article to make $500 are as follows (and it might help you to pay attention to those points in your articles too):

• Interesting topic— The topic of the article is not a common one. As I said, based on my experience, not many know about these languages. That must have made people click the article and continue reading.
• Right to the point — The article goes straight to the point based on the title. There is no building up required when we are writing technical articles. Readers want to know about the details as soon as they can.
• Relevant content— The article's content matches exactly what the title talks about. Whoever clicked on the topic to find out the most difficult programming languages got to read exactly that. Hence, the read time is high.
• Relevant references— I provided all the relevant references in the article. It also contained links to how readers can try their hands on the language by compiling them online. As a reader, it is always useful to know how they can do what the article has mentioned.
• Publication — It is a technical article that will be of interest mostly for people who follow topics such as Software Engineering, Software Development, Coding, Programming, etc. Hence, I published in an appropriate publication that caters to the readers interested in the above topics. This helped the article reach the right audience.
• Choosing the right tags— Choosing appropriate tags for the story helped. The article got into the top trending stories on Medium in all five tags and hanging in there (at the time of writing this article) for some days now. That must have increased the visibility and reach. At the time of writing this story, it was the #1 article under fun facts, #1 under software development, #1 under software engineering, #1 under coding, and #1 under programming topic.

At the time of writing this story, it was the #1 article under fun facts, #1 under software development, #1 under software engineering, #1 under coding, and #1 under programming topic.

If you have the question— Did I share the article on any social media platform to increase the reach? The answer is no.

It was all due to the magic of the platform. 80% of the traffic is from internal to Medium. I did share the friend links with a few of my friends who do not have a Medium membership.

Lessons learned from the viral article

I love to learn something from every event— be it a good one or a not so favorable one. Here are a few points that I learned from this event, and it might be helpful for you as a writer.

Write what interests you

As a writer, you might make assumptions about your audience’s interest. But no one can ever be 100% sure what will click with whom. Going viral is not in anyone’s control. It is better to write about what interests you.

Write frequently

You need to keep writing engaging and useful material. This (semi)viral article was my #48 article. None of my previous articles had crossed 1K reads. It will help if you do not base your writing on whether the previous one went viral or not. Keep writing frequently and hone your skills to get better each day.

Be mindful while reading

The idea for the article came up while researching for another article. That shows a viral idea can come out of anywhere. You need to keep a daemon thread running at the back of your brain to keep looking for ideas from everyday events.

Don’t worry about rejections

Did I tell you the article was rejected by a publication which deals with similar technical articles? Well, I submitted it as is to a different pub, and it got curated by Medium.

The result is in front of everyone now. Editors are human with their personal preferences about articles. Don’t let their judgment impact your morale and confidence. Publish the article in one of the relevant pubs and move on to writing the next one.

Add embedded links

At the bottom of the article, add references to your best work. Make sure the embedded articles are related to the same topic as the content of your story.

Two of my old articles got an increased view during this viral period and crossed 1K reads each. They pulled in together a $75 earnings in these three days.

One of these embedded articles got me my first top writer tag in HUMOR.

Enjoy the process

The most important thing I learned is to enjoy the whole process of writing. It is the most motivating factor for me. One viral article might follow with 100s of ‘yet another article' results. If my entire focus is on going viral, then I am pretty sure I will be demoralized in a few weeks.

Celebrate success

What is the point of success if you cannot enjoy it? I kept refreshing the stats every few minutes and gave myself the dopamine hit generated by looking at ever-increasing numbers of reads and clap. Usually, I look at the stats once a week, and I am back to that schedule.

This article is also a form of celebration for me (what better way to celebrate than doing what I enjoy doing i.e., write) for the little success I am lucky to chance upon in my short stint as a writer.

About the subtitle of this article

There is no magic formula but it is possible. I want to share the details to say — if I can do it, you can do it too.

If you have made it this far, I guess you would have noticed the subtitle and still decided to read the article. Kudos to you for not expecting a miracle solution provided by others to change your life. That means — you are already ahead of many others.

I did not want people to read this article expecting magic tricks for writing viral articles. Many successful authors regularly make much more than $100 per article for multiple articles in a single week. They might be the right people to share their ideas in that context.

For me, this is an attempt to celebrate and share my experience with whoever is looking for a little bit of inspiration. Or, perhaps a glimmer of hope that anyone can go viral (a mini one in my case).

The subtitle is an effort to help readers know what they can (or cannot) expect from this article. Anyone who wants life-changing tricks and tips gets the chance to save their valuable time by clicking on the back button.

People who want to read through my experience and see if they can derive their own conclusion will continue reading. This is a win-win situation for everyone.

Final Thoughts

I have no idea if and when I can make a similar viral article. I am happy that it happened.

Now I need to stick to the basics, use the learnings from the viral event, and keep writing about topics that interest me— hoping that readers can derive some value out of it.

Thanks for reading the article. Here is a link to the article that got me started thinking about the $500 article.