I Earned $6,000 From One Article. Copy My Strategy.
Here’s exactly how to write your best-performing article ever
I love Medium. I read at least ten articles a day, six days a week. And I want to read more great articles.
Money doesn’t always equal quality (or truth), but Medium’s algorithm does a pretty great job of rewarding articles that are at least extremely interesting. And I want to read interesting articles.
I want to read more $6,000 articles.
So today I’m going to show you exactly how I wrote a $6,000 article, in hopes that you too will write articles so wildly interesting that everyone will feel that they have to read them.
I can’t wait to read them.
My $6,000 article
- Title: Bitcoin and Ethereum Are Dead (And Their Honest Investors Know It)
- Subtitle: The $1+ trillion concept is brilliant, but it won’t end well
- 160,000 views
- 60,000 reads
- Length: 6 minute read
- Lifetime member reading time: 1592 hr 45 min
- Earnings to date: $6,075.98
- Timing: Perfect. (We’re having our first baby in ten weeks!)
Concept is king
- You’ve got to feel it in your gut. We humans aren’t just brains — we’re bodies, too. Forget about what’s popular and commercial and write what makes you physically excited. Turn off your phone, grab a pen and a notepad, and write a list of 50 story ideas. Then go for a long walk, ideally under the stars. Come back and reread the list out loud. Circle the ten that make you feel something in your heart, stomach, and loins. Ask your spouse/partner/bestie which one you should write first. Don’t take their advice, though… they, too, are probably thinking in “what the market wants” terms. Instead, watch how their body reacts.
- Write with high conviction about something deeply controversial. I am 100% confident that Bitcoin is currently being treated as a giant Ponzi scheme and that it will be the death of non-governmental crypto if we don’t reform coin speculation immediately.
- If you’re going to make yourself hugely unpopular with a good chunk of the reading population, you better bring your big guns and write a highly reasoned article. You’ve simply got to back up your thesis with real ammo. (Interestingly, to this day, my article has received hundreds of angry personal attacks, but no one has yet provided a convincing rebuttal that my underlying premise is wrong.)
- Be downright entertaining. Be cheeky, poke fun at the powers, don’t take yourself too seriously, either. Writing should be pure enjoyment.
- Be original. You can’t out-Tim Tim Denning, so don’t try. Be you. Several people have tried to copy my “[Horrible Company] Is Dead” series and it hasn’t worked. That’s my thing. Do your thing.
Title is queen
First off, don’t be click-baity. My article wasn’t entitled “10 Reasons Why Bitcoin Sucks.”
Just make sure it’s a title that people simply HAVE to click on, even haters.
Remember: If your article gets curated, the first few words of your title are the only thing readers will see in their inbox. Those first few words have to compel them to open the email, then click through to the article. Make them count.
Make sure your title makes a bold statement and establishes your premise/thesis. Don’t be abstract, be real and concrete and clear.
Don’t overpromise or underdeliver, either. Your article is simply an extension of your title premise. You’ll infuriate readers if you pull a bait-and-switch. I clicked on an article this week that was something like “Here’s The Average Net Worth Of People By Age,” and the weaksauce article just advertised a company that wanted get people to visit their website instead.
I reported it as spam.
Your subtitle is the knockout punch
Professional boxers always use combo punches when they’re going for the knockout.
Title-subtitle is your one-two blow.
A good subtitle reinforces your title, and builds on it.
Your subtitle should be so good that you agonize over whether or not it should be the title itself.
Come in hot
Like frying an egg on the hood of a car on a blazing summer day, I want readers to feel heat coming off my articles.
Bring all your passion to bear on every article you publish.
No fluff.
No filler.
No time-wasting.
Cut every single sentence that isn’t wildly helpful, wildly interesting, or wildly thought-provoking. Your readers deserve your very best, so cut to the bone.
Make it readable
“Use all the tools in your arsenal: bullets, numbers, quotes, headers, sub-headers, images, videos, and more.” — Jared A. Brock
Obviously, your writing has to be Hemingway-tight and you need to edit every article seven times before publishing, but it also needs to look physically pretty on the page.
Break it up into sections.
Make it varied.
Use short sentences.
Use short paragraphs.
Make it punchy.
Publish it to a publication
This goes without saying, but you should always publish your articles in a publication.
It doubles your potential readership: Medium will send the article to your followers, as well as the publication’s followers.
It can be extremely difficult to get published in some publications. I’m a top writer on Medium in a bunch of categories, but I simply gave up on The Ascent after they rejected ten of my articles in a row, all of which went on to perform very well elsewhere. Their loss. We could have been friends.
So either build strong relationships with good publication curators or start your own publications. I do a bit of both, but I much prefer the control that having your own pub affords. I like to publish on a pretty rigid schedule, and some pubs can take weeks to respond.
That’s why I started Surviving Tomorrow, Improving Together, and Personal Finance. That way, I can grow two audiences at once, and publish about politics, personal development, or money whenever I want.
Be patient
If a post gets curated, it takes a few days for Medium to email it to tons of people. In my case, the $6,000 post did okay until day four: And then it had 60,000 views in a single day, by far my biggest ever.
Not only did the post enjoy nice traffic for a few days afterward, but the influx of new readers and subscribers meant that all my other articles did quite well that week, too.
Once published, re-write it a dozen times
This is something that not enough writers do.
Unlike many of the other places I’ve published (Esquire, Huff Post, The Guardian, TIME Magazine, etc) on Medium, you can continue to improve your work even after it’s been published.
I re-edit all of my published articles at least five times.
- If someone makes a great comment, add it to your article.
- If someone points out a weakness or fault in your logic, fix it.
- If someone thinks you’re contradicting yourself, bridge the gap.
- If a ton of people highlight the same thing, make it stand out.
- If a kind reader adds a private note that you’ve made a spelling mistake, fix the error and go clap up one of their posts.
Let your readers help you improve your work. Often, my posts become twice as strong as when they started. In the case of my $6,000 article, I’ve edited it at least two dozen times, slowly improving it for every future reader.
Don’t mess with the sauce
For several weeks after the initial traffic insanity, my article was making a massive $160–180 per day off of <2 hours of member reading time.
I thought to myself, “If I can boost traffic to 4 hours/day sustainably, that’s a hundred grand in a year!”
So what did I do?
I tried to boost traffic and messed with the sauce.
What an idiot.
For the past three weeks, I’ve still been averaging 1–2 hours of member reading time per day…
…
…
…
But now it’s only paying me a few bucks a day:
As soon as I toyed with the system, the algorithm simply tanked the earnings.
Take a guess what day I started to tweak traffic:
There’s a lesson to be learned here:
Trust the process and don’t try to game the system — just keep writing.
In conclusion
We writers need to rip eyeballs away from inane, time-devouring clickholes like Youtube and Tiktok and Snapchat, the eye-blurring binge streamers like Netflix, the extremist-brewing sites like Facebook, and the toxic and addictive sites like Instagram.
We need to write better articles.
We need to write wildly interesting, wildly helpful, wildly thoughtful articles.
Hopefully, this article will help you do just that.
In the meantime, feel free to share your best-performing article in the comments below, so I can add it to my ever-growing list of wildly interesting articles to read. :-)
Follow Jared A. Brock on Medium and download his free eBook.
