Jackpot Journalism: How to Win Big in the Medium Casino

Formulas for posts that succeed

I’ve been on Medium for about 9 months now, and everybody has been so nice to me and I love it. I’ve made money — which is not something I anticipated at all — and now I want to give back to this community.

I have thought about what has worked for me here in Medium and put this piece together thinking it might help someone. There is no catch and I’m not selling a course or anything. I really am just so grateful to everybody I’ve interacted with here, from the readers to the writers to the editors, and I want to contribute something.

So thanks everybody, and especially Julia Beaudett, my editor at Sexography. Publications make such a difference to the Medium writer. We sometimes forget that the editors don’t make any money and do it out of love of the form, so thanks again Julia and Benjamin (and you too, Average Don Juan!).

Welcome to the Betting Floor

It dawned on me that we’re all gamblers here on Medium — competing for the prizes of claps, reader engagement, and money, real money.

It’s a big slot machine really. Every time you write and post an article, you’re pulling the arm down and watching the slots spin. If you’re lucky you can hit it big — real big.

There is a gambling aspect to all writing, of course. When I graduated from college in 2007 I freelanced for a newspaper. We got paid a buck a word. But if our article got picked up for national distribution we would get a payout.

It was the equivalent of getting curated.

But for the most part, we were just pumping out words for a buck each so it felt more like being on a treadmill than being in a Vegas casino.

When I found Medium though, I felt like I had stumbled into Cesar’s Palace.

I was just putting my toe in the water, trying my hand at writing for fun after a ten-year layoff. I had no expectations. I certainly wasn’t planning on making any money. My friend told me I could publish on the site and somebody might actually read my article. So I registered and started posting. My second article, by a fluke, hit the jackpot.

777! Jackpot!

Wow!

I did not expect that. We’ve all heard these stories about Vegas, right? Some little old lady walks in, puts a quarter in the machine, and on the first spin wins ten thousand dollars.

Well, that’s what it felt like to me, hitting it big with that second article. But even better. Here’s why.

Medium Jackpots Are Even Better Than Vegas Jackpots

When you hit the jackpot in the slots, it pumps out your money, you take it home and that’s it.

But imagine you win a $1,000 at a slot machine in November in Vegas. You go home. Then six months later, a representative from the casino shows up at your house and says, “Here’s another $1,000 from your jackpot.”

That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Well, that’s what Medium jackpots do — they keep on giving.

I remember writing my editor Julia a note about an article about blowjobs and porn, saying, “I can’t believe my article has gotten over 300 fans and 2,500 claps and guess what, it’s almost made me a $1,000!”

Um…I didn’t really get it back then. That jackpot was only getting started. A few months later and that one article has over 1,000 fans, and has paid me thousands more.

Every “jackpot” article that you write will continue giving, like passive income, over the months and years. If you wrack up enough jackpot articles, you will have enough passive income coming in each month on Medium that it doesn’t matter if you have a bad month — your previous months keep paying.

So, How Do You Hit the Jackpot?

Luck. Pure luck.

In retrospect, there were a few things I did (luckily) that can be repeated and greatly increase the chance of hitting the jackpot. I will tell you some of those things here.

But I will also take a bit of a critical look at jackpot journalism. It can in many ways be harmful to your writing process. You can easily end up writing things you don’t give a crap about in hopes of hitting the next big jackpot. Luckily, there are also steps you can take to get back to your creative core.

You’re not a professional gambler, after all. You are a professional writer. You are an artist.

Don’t be a sell-out to the Medium money frenzy. Sometimes I don’t even think it’s the actual money that hooks us — it’s the stats. You look at your graphs and your wonderful charts and you see the arrow going up, up, up and you get a real endorphin hit.

Hell, every time I look at my email and I see, “Congratulations, your article has been selected by Medium curators…” I practically have an orgasm.

This is a serious addiction that can lead to you holing up in your room like a junkie for three weeks forgetting to shower and chasing that next Medium high.

Be careful about this casino. Gamble responsibly. And if you feel like you’re losing control, take up booze, drugs, or Jesus instead. This thing will kill you, I’m serious.

Jackpot Number One:

A real story about a person from real life who is really interesting

This is one way to win at the Medium casino. It’s tried and tested and it almost always works. That’s how I hit my first jackpot. I knew a very, very interesting woman. As I was writing about her, I was like, “I can’t believe nobody else has ever written about her, because I know for a fact a lot of people who know her are writers. This is too easy! Why didn’t anyone else ever do this?”

That is my first piece of advice to you about how to hit a jackpot. It really should feel like “this is too easy and why didn’t anyone else ever write this?”

Jackpot pieces on Medium always have that quality to them. But lucky things always seem to have that quality to them. It’s sometimes hard to wrap our heads around it because we are kind of trained to believe that life is hard.

Winning a jackpot once on Medium is not hard

If you put out a bunch of stuff in the right places — I am going to show you how and where — you will win a jackpot, that’s not hard.

What’s hard is winning a jackpot month to month, which is what you would need to do to quit your job and support yourself only by writing on Medium.

For instance, I had written a jackpot story about a really interesting woman. The problem is, how many really interesting women does one know? You cannot rely on this “formula” because there are only a few really interesting people in anybody’s life. So you can get three, maybe ten jackpots from the real people method. It’s not something you can really hang your hat on.

The woman I wrote about was the most beautiful woman I had ever met. She was once a Victoria Secret model and she had given all that up to try to make it on something other than her looks. That was so interesting to me. Whenever I was with her, I had trouble keeping my eyes off her stunning face. But I also had trouble removing my heart from her “story.” The story that captivated me, and that I would be acutely aware of every time we hung out, was that it was actually not easy being incredibly beautiful. In some ways it was tragic.

I had always wanted to be incredibly beautiful! And here I had evidence in front of me that I was a fool for wanting that.

So that was the second story I posted on Medium. Unlike my first story, which got one clap — from my niece! — this story got a shit ton of claps. It got curated in the category of relationships and beauty. Relationships are a good category to get curated in by the way. We will get to that.

Jackpot Number Two:

Prescription, prescription, prescription

Yes, there are three things to remember about almost any jackpot story that hits on Medium: it gives a prescription, it gives a prescription, it gives a prescription.

We are looking for answers, people. I see this in myself when I am reading articles on Medium. I sort of skim through it and try to see what the solution is that I can apply to my own life, or that we can apply as a society. It can be a how-to story about building muscle in the gym, how to code better in Python, how to find a boyfriend, or how to help stop climate change.

It must have a quick list of strategies and solutions that we can adopt. This list must be made easily scannable, through the use of headers.

See, for instance, what I am doing here. Within this long article, I am embedding my prescriptions for types of articles that hit jackpots. Later I am going to embed my specific instructions about how to make these articles successful. There are two embedded, easily scannable lists of solutions to the problem.

You don’t have to read the whole story or follow the autobiography of how I got here, or my thoughts and feelings about it, or any of that. Yes, I’m putting that in, but maybe it acts as a kind of filler around these basic solution headers.

I know, I’m being pretty meta right now, right? By the way, don’t be meta. Meta is the jackpot killer. We’re not interested in authors self-referencing themselves or disappearing up their own bumholes. We want answers, man!

Jackpot Number Three:

Multiple orgasms

Humor, for instance, is a topic you can get curated in on Medium. Humor is not, let me stress, a jackpot category. I learned this the hard way. Humor is what I wanted to do, but the numbers of people who just read satire on Medium is woefully small compared to other topics.

I remember getting an email announcement from the super great editor of a humor publication excitedly announcing that a piece by one of his female writers was “going viral.”

I was kind of mad. I had never had a humor piece go viral. So I went to this writer’s piece and discovered what the editor had meant by viral: the piece had about 50 fans.

Just to be clear, 50 fans is not a jackpot. It is “going viral”, in comparison to other pieces in humor publications. The average successful humor article gets about 15 fans.

My definition of Jackpot is at least 100 fans in the first few days. This will grow, and after a while will become 250. If it is a longer article, that will mean three to four hundred bucks.

The fan to dollar formula

It varies of course. In the pre “engagement” era, fans translated into bucks more or less as 25 percent. That is, if you had a hundred fans, it meant 25 bucks in the old regime.

Now, since they have changed to “reader engagement”, which means the time the reader spends and the interaction that the reader demonstrates (via highlighting and commenting and stuff), the clap to dollar ratio can be even smaller — or way bigger! Claps are now no longer a metric that you can use.

On my short humor pieces, I can have 50 fans and tons of reader engagement, and make less than five dollars.

Yes, short humor has been basically decimated by the new regime. A lot of my friends who wrote that have actually quit.

Even longer humor, by itself, is not going to be a good earner unless it’s humor plus something else.

Getting curated in multiple topics is not easy

I already mentioned that my piece about the beautiful woman was curated in Relationships and Beauty. But that hasn’t happened a lot.

But a lot of the time I am attempting to get curated in humor and at least one other commonly curated topic. So, I am still able to be a humor writer.

It’s not only humor. It is other stuff too.

The other stuff that works well for me is, as I mentioned before, Relationships. I have also had success with these topics:

• Self
• Tech
• Work
• Sexuality
• Spirituality
• Health
• Women
• Personal Growth
• Mindfulness
• Mental Health
• LGBTQIA
• Equality

The point is, I have only been curated in humor a handful of times, yet I am listed consistently as one of the top three writers in humor on Medium. So I have found a way to pursue my passion — funny writing — while still getting jackpots, by combining it with multiple other topics.

Jackpot Number Four:

Current Affairs

Yes, that is a double entendre. I have had success by writing about things in the news currently, and also writing about affairs I’ve had or am having.

For instance, when WeWork was in the news for going bankrupt or whatever, and its CEO got fired, I happened to write a humor piece about a woman embalmer who is embalming a body at WeWork and is annoyed at her neighbor who is loudly editing porn.

It was funny. It did get curated in Humor. But lots of people who were interested in reading about tech and work and so on must have found the story and enjoyed it. These are people who do not normally go looking for “humor” stories.

Another example, when that show Killing Eve was hot, I wrote an article “Why are Bisexual Women Always Depicted as Homicidal Maniacs?” It got curated in LGBTQIA, Equality, and Humor. People want to read about what’s happening now, not six months ago.

Jackpot Number Five:

Fellatio, female ejaculations, and felines

In other words, blowjobs, squirting, and cats. Yes, any article you write about any of those topics will be curated and win you a jackpot — I almost guarantee it.

It was the squirting article I wrote that was my first really big jackpot. I had made a bunch with the Beautiful Woman article, but I had no idea that I was just scratching the surface of the potential earnings here in Medium land.

I don’t know why of all the different things you can write about sex, these two topics — blowjobs and squirting — are far and away the most eagerly consumed by the Medium masses. I really don’t. I actually don’t find them that fascinating to write about.

Remember that thing I said earlier about losing your soul to jackpots? Here I was trying to come up with another blowjob idea and I thought, screw this. I just don’t want to.

And cats. You really can’t go wrong. Yet, I don’t like cats that much, sorry. I love my dog. For some reason, my dog article didn’t do that well. So should I go out there and pretend to be interested in cats. I’m allergic to cats. Forget it!

Don’t sell out. If you are in the middle of an article and you are starting to sound inauthentic to yourself, hit delete.

What you really care about will get you there — I promise.

Jackpot Number Six

Blind them with science

Yes, it’s best to throw a little science into almost anything you write here in Medium. For example, in my article “Does Oral Sex Cause Throat Cancer?” I did a lot of research. Most of the self-help publications here demand that you not just throw a bunch of new-age opinions out there — they want you to reference some brain wave study done at Harvard or something to give it some street cred.

You can combine this suggestion with suggestion number four about current affairs, and write something about science that’s been in the news. For example, I wrote about that repeating signal the astronomers found sending a fast radio burst every 16 days. I changed it to 28 days and made a menstruation joke out of it. But people less silly than me might write something actually thoughtful about that thing.

Articles about which computer language you should learn and how to do it are also guaranteed to make you a thousand bucks. I would do those, but I’m not a nerd, I’m cool.

Alright, I am a nerd.

But not a cool nerd who knows about computer languages. I know about artificial limbs. That’s not a jackpot topic. Nobody likes to think about losing their foot. They like to think about learning Python and starting Facebook like Zuck did.

Science is not that hard to find, people. I am associated with an institute so I get access to the science databases — but most of the time it’s something searchable on Google. In the middle of your fantastic opinion piece, why not take five minutes and have a glance at the literature online — it will really help.

And now, as promised, the short listicle of things to do to your article, once you have arrived at the jackpot topic, that will give you a better chance of hitting big.

1. The Title

Titles are the most important thing, no question. My first title, “Is it Hard Being an Incredibly Beautiful Woman?” did the job. It caught people’s attention. Look at your title, put yourself in the reader’s shoes, and ask yourself, do you need to read on? If not, change the title.

They must NEED to read on. They won’t be able to enjoy their day unless they read on and find out the secret sauce that you are offering.

For instance, who can resist this title: “How to Rail Me Harder”. Now that is an interesting one, because half the readership — older people — won’t even know what rail means, so they have to read it. The other half will actually want to know how to rail harder, so they will also have to read it.

2. The Photo

This is the second most important, because we are very visual, of course. The photo I think might have been the biggest reason my beautiful woman article hit. Take a look:

Isn’t that a fascinating photo? I mean, those freckles, come on!

I got in on Unsplash. But I actually don’t recommend using Unsplash. Especially for relationship articles. We have seen all those photos, guys. We are sick of them.

There are a million better places for photos, but make sure you put the attribution and a link to something that shows you have the rights because that will prevent curation if you don’t have it. The two I use are Adobe and Shutterstock. It’s $29 a month, but it is worth it.

3. The Subtitle

You don’t need it. Everyone says you do, and every article I read seems to have one, but the subtitle is not needed. I have hit the jackpot without it. The important thing is that the title and the photo have grabbed you. Sure, if you want to put a subtitle, do it, but it won’t make or break you.

4. The First Paragraph

Don’t start with a “scene”, as in traditional journalism. We don’t have time for that. Medium is not traditional journalism. Look at your average reading time — two to three minutes. In traditional long-form journalism, you start with some scene, without telling the reader why they should give a shit about the scene. They are expected to find that out later.

“Todd looked at the fire and thought, it needs another log. He looked at the bearded man sitting next to him and thought, will he put another log in or not?”

No. Just no. Who is Todd? Who gives a shit about the fire? And this guy next to him? No!

That was fine when you read it in the New York Times Sunday Magazine section in 1981 with two bagels from Zabaars next to your cassette answering machine on the side table.

It’s a faster world now, folks.

Get into it. Right away.

5. The Headings

You must have four headings. This is where I am at right now. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t want to just write crap that I don’t care about. And yet, it seems the readers want listicle type things. So I write what I want, and then I give it a listicle feel by going back and dividing it up into four or five sections. I will even number them. I might even put that number in the title. “Five Ways to ____”

But the article itself should have more than just this list quality. Why? Because we are not list makers. We are artists. We are writers. We are authors. We are engaging with literary devices. Experimenting. We are playing with form. We are narrating interesting stories.

Not just giving you Five Great Hacks for Your First Date.

Alright, I wrote that article. I’m not proud. I’m a whore. But I want to be less of a whore. And I am having success with not doing lists.

But if you really, really, really, want to hit the jackpot, absolutely:

MAKE IT A LIST!

Seriously, I am not kidding. If you look back at what you just read, you will see that it totally looks like a list. First I have my Six Jackpots. Then I have my Five Ways to Make Your Article Better. But when you were reading it, what did you experience? You experienced a story, about Christine, about how she thinks about the Medium eco-system. About her journey toward mastery of it. It is a personal story, not just a list.

One of the most effective things about this story, looking back at it, is the opening to the opening. That kind of leads with an emotion — gratitude. If you lead with any emotion, you really have a crack at the jackpot. You really do. We are here to be moved, aren’t we?

So anyhow, we’ve reached the end of my story disguised as two listicles. I want to end on emotion too. I want to say I really do wish you success and I’m very excited to read your stories. I also want to extend an offer, it’s a limited time offer — 50 percent off for the first ten people to respond — for my How To Make it Big by Sex Blogging on Medium video webinar course that I will be hosting from my bed in my bra and panties.

Kidding!

(How much do you think I could charge for that, btw?)

Kidding again.

EDIT: This post has passed two thousand five hundred claps and is poised to go jackpot!!! Thanks for publishing it, Better Marketing. Thanks everybody for reading. I hope it helps.