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My Earnings Increased by 1,091% in October — How Did This Happen?

Half of it was due to one controversial article

mage by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

October was when things really started to take off for me here.

After only a few months at Medium, some of my articles started to get a lot of attention.

The question is, have I found the formula that works? Let’s take a look at what happened. But keep in mind, I’m still a Medium newbie, so I still might not know what I’m talking about.

My earnings so far

I joined Medium in July 2021. Here are my monthly earnings for my first four months:

July: $0.71
August: $7.75
September: $27.11
October: $295.64

WOAH! What happened there?!

I’ll tell you what happened. Some of my articles rapidly started to get a lot of reads and comments. In fact, one article earned almost half the month’s money.

My top 10 highest earning articles

Why did this happen?

The highest-earning article — 2 Problems with Eckhart Tolle — I wrote in August. At first, it didn’t earn much — only $0.63 in August and $0.56 in September.

In fact, in September, the NSR Meditation article was doing much better. That earned $5.56. Even in the early part of October, it was still my highest earner.

Then the Eckhart Tolle one suddenly started to get a bunch of comments. Most importantly, some of the comments were rather long and negative.

I imagine there are a lot of people on Medium into the whole meditation and spirituality area. Some of those will like Eckhart Tolle. So they will feel compelled to respond to an article that criticises him. They feel the need to tell me how mistaken and misguided I am.

And of course, some people agree with me and thank me for finally saying what needed to be said.

An article with lots of long comments gets noticed by the Medium algorithm. It thinks it must be interesting, so it shows it to more people.

But why did it earn so much money?

Writing a long comment probably counts towards the reading time. Longer reading time means more money.

Also, the article contained a video. When someone watches a video embedded in an article, that will add to the reading time too.

But not all of October’s money came from criticising Eckhart Tolle

Let’s not overlook how well the NSR and Headless Way articles also did. Those were not negative articles. Meditation and spiritual enlightenment seem to be popular topics. Articles that aim to help people with those things seem to do well.

What can we learn from this?

The #1 lesson here is that controversy can earn you money on Medium. People tend to engage a lot with things they disagree with. They often can’t stop themselves from responding.

This doesn’t mean we should deliberately set out to upset people. It’s more about writing honest articles on topics you know people will have strong views on.

But people also like to read things that solve problems or fulfil needs. This is why my meditation articles seem to do well.

But what don’t seem to do so well are the more self-indulgent articles. If you write what appear to be personal journal entries, you won’t get as many reads or responses.

The articles that do the best often tend to do one of the following:

Provide something people are looking for.
Express an opinion people disagree with.

For the first type, people will be keen to read it and may respond to thank you. For the second type, people won’t be able to resist telling you at length how wrong you are.

The way forward for me

I’ll be straight up with you. I’m here to earn money.

Yes, I like writing and reading and engaging with people. Blah blah blah. That’s all great, but it’s not the main reason I put so much time into all this.

So, expect to see a lot more articles from me on controversial topics. If that’s not your thing, you can click the three dots and select “Mute this author”. I’m not forcing you to read my stuff.

I’ve already written a great follow-up to the top-earning Eckhart Tolle article:

8 Ridiculous Things Said by Eckhart Tolle Which Don’t Stand Up to Scrutiny.

That already earned $7.18 in the last 5 days of October, plus a further $14.16 in the first four days of November. It will be interesting to see whether it does as well as the other one.

Of course, there is only so much I can write about Eckhart Tolle. So I’ll need to find other controversial topics. Anything I find interesting that other people might have strong views on will be fair game.

But it’s not the only type of article I’ll be writing. I also need to keep myself amused, so I’ll still write some silly things.