A Viral Story Earned Me $500 And Taught Me A Valuable Lesson
I never knew I already had a niche
After silently existing 1.5 years here on Medium, I can finally say I got a VIRAL HIT.
Like many of you, writers, my Medium journey wasn’t smooth. Though I preached to people not to get hooked to stats, not to burn out, not to envy top writers and unexpected viralites¹, and not to blame the algorithm, I didn’t follow my own advice most of the times.
- Getting five fans,
- an hour of reading time,
- and a dollar of earnings… was really tough.
If that happens, I’d party that day. Most of my articles (curated included) made only few pennies — literally most. My 900 odd followers didn’t make any difference.
But today, I’m happy to share one of my recent articles finally impressed Ev’s algorithm. It’s not only got curated, but it also got enormous member reading time and earnings (at least for me). Here are a few insights I derived from its stats that help me write my next articles that might replicate it.
The Story
What might have blew it up…
The Title
Most viral pieces I’ve read on Medium had this One thing in common: A negative word. Ex: Died, Cheated, Killed, Ditched etc.
Same way, for my article, I put the word “Never” (Notice the inverted commas that grab the readers’ attention) in the title to evoke a negative mood inside readers’ minds.
And the title apparently dispels a strong, age-old belief of the readers. It suggests them not to shut down their MacBooks, which they’ve been doing for years. This might have evoked curiosity in their minds and made them click.
Subtitle
Subtitle is as important as the title is. Yet, most writers fail to estimate the power of it.
The first thing readers see after an eye-grabbing headline is the subtitle. Note it in bold.
What is an ideal subtitle?
According to my experience, subtitle has to uncover a bit,— just a bit of additional information of what else the article’s gonna give them. And you can put it to the best use by evoking curiosity.
For example, I could have also titled it as “You Should Shut Down your MacBook Only if this Happens”. And the subtitle as — “Else don’t do it. Here’s why”
But, see how obvious the subtitle looks. This subtitle has just become another version of the title. It doesn’t evoke curiosity, or clickability, and doesn’t uncover any info. This subtitle is useless. And if I’d have done this, I’d have wasted my subtitle superpower.
The body
I’ve meticulously tried to make the article engaging and reader-friendly. Every now and then, I used the words Yup, Hmm, Yeah, Oh yes, and used second person pronouns that’d make the readers feel as if I’m personally conversing with them.
All the subtitles are just the questions the reader might ask me at that point. Like: Hey Nikhil!
- Why shouldn’t I shut down my Mac?
- What bad happens if I shut it down?
- Then, doesn’t my Mac suck up all the battery?
- Then why is the shut down option for?
- — — —
- — — —
- — — —
And I answered them appropriately.
The whole article is just those questions and their answers. I made sure the article doesn’t preach things, instead I made the readers think and decide why.
And few jokes (few lame) and emojis here and there that give readers that dopamine hit to move forward.
Now for the stats breakdown and insights part
The article outperformed all my previous articles COMBINED.
My numbers jumped with joy.
My 30-day views jumped:
My stats jumped:
My earnings jumped:
I jumped:
PHOTO NOT FOUND | 404 | Out of nothing, nothing.
For the first week, every other day’s stats were higher than their previous day’s. Every morning, I’d already have got a couple of hours of reading time even before I woke up. And by night, it 10x-ed.
It got 10.3k views, 213 hr of reading time, and 201 fans by the time I wrote this article.
Also, when it was consistently gaining views Every Single Minute, I wondered how. But when I opened a Mac O’Clock article on my friend’s PC, I discovered this. The article was featured below every article in the publication!
Thanks Medium!
The insights I derived
Though I’ve written tens of curated self-improvement articles or articles focused on a single person, they didn’t gain as much traction as I expected. Most ended up making just above a dollar.
Now I feel maybe that isn’t my niche. Other writers write those topics way better than me. What I found from the above table was I’m more of a technology and gadgets writer.
12 of the 21 mentioned articles are of technology. And 8 of my top 10 articles are about technology. Thanks to this Chrome extension that I knew this.
The highest a self-improvement article earned me was barely $5.12 — And for history it was $7.72, a bit higher but still low. However, my top 5 tech articles earned me $567.29, $44.43, $42.15, $29.25, and $10.35. Now that you’ve understood.
So perhaps I need to focus my articles more on my favourite topic ‘Technology’ for a better Earnings/Effort ratio. Like my inspirations Mark Ellis and Anupam Chugh. Else, I’d just keep banging my head to my keyboard writing self-improvement and history articles only for a couple of pennies.
Negative comments
When I received negative comments for my first almost-viral non-curated article, I replied to all of them to convince I was right. It sucked all my brain up. Few people pay for Medium only to demotivate its writers. All they do is just put negative comments on all articles they find (See their profiles for proof). For this article,
- One said it’s all utter garbage,
- One said I knew nothing about technology,
- One said he’ll stop paying Medium for promoting such BS. lol.
This time, I didn’t reply. And I was never so happy before.
Acknowledgement
Thank you everyone who supported me by your claps and kind comments. Thank you BichoDoMato, William Murphy, Arthur Caracoza, and Per Jahn for subscribing to my stories via email. It really means a lot letting me into your inboxes.
Thanks again Arthur Caracoza for using my referral link for Medium membership!
Final words — If you ever get viral:
As Rui Alves wrote, never, I repeat — Never attempt to edit even a comma or put links in your story you think that’s getting viral. Treat it like a delicate wire in a complex circuitry.
As long as your circuit is working fine, you don’t want to move the wire. Else, the whole circuit stops working. And then, you can’t blame the algorithm for your stopped views.
¹People who get viral. I call them so.
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