Project Avalanche

When it comes to content creation, quantity has a quality all it’s own

Imagine your stories each made you $1 per month.

“That’s not very good,” you might think.

Okay… but what if you had ONE THOUSAND of those stories each generating a few pennies for you while you sleep?

That’s my baseline target with the content creation strategy I’m nicknaming “Project Avalanche”. Because yes, I do in fact need to have an unapologetically dorky name for it that makes me feel like Tyler Durden.

My Medium income already slowly trickles in from 31 different stories. None of which are breakout successes yet. And for our first assumption, let’s suppose no story ever will be a big hit.

Next, let’s assume that the size of my readership, the love the algorithms show me, and the skill level at which I spill ink all stay constant. That’s why we’ll also assume my rough average of $1 never changes.

Now I realize, all these assumptions are completely wrong.

The truth is that each piece of content adds to discovery. New additions can be compilations and they interlink with other work, each article enhancing the value of all others.

I can’t tell you how many times a new reader checks out a story, likes it, and then claps for 4 or 5 more.

But let’s pretend that the amplification factor isn’t a thing either.

These are all are extremely unfair assumptions. We are talking laughably conservative. But let’s pretend this is the reality.

So Project Avalanche assumes no“home run” articles, no improvements to skill, or synergy. We are talking about sheer brute force alone.

For the starting point, I’m still on target to hit my previous goal of $30 as discussed in my best-performing piece. So let’s start there.

Okay, actually before we really start, let me say one more thing.

It isn’t the earnings on any one single piece that I really care about. Income is actually the least significant reason why I think Medium is awesome. For me, it’s about growth. My growth.

But income is measurable and it is on a lot of minds, so let’s talk about it.

In this article, I’m not even going to touch on the myriad of primary benefits to writing. I’m just going to talk about the secondary benefit of the money this approach will make.

Anyway, by stepping up my game and adding just two stories each day, I’m confident that I can pump out 60 articles per month. If they each average just one dollar per month, then here’s how the income can compound as time goes on. Again, this is based on no other improvement beyond the sheer quantity of articles.

At 60 articles per month that each generates just $1 each, here are the monthly income targets.

1. October: $30
2. November: $90
3. December: $150
4. January (2021): $210
5. February: $270
6. March: $330
7. April: $390
8. May: $450
9. June: $510
10. July: $570
11. August: $630
12. September:$690
13. October: $750

After just one year of serious grinding, I’ll have $750 of monthly income streaming in every month from Medium “passively”. The total amount of income my efforts will have brought in by that point is the sum of an extra $5070 over the next year.

That’s cool. But that’s just the start. That’s just the snowball at the top of the mountain. I get to collect that for my whole life.

To paraphrase Tim Ferriss and Niel Strauss, I’ll grind out 2 crappy articles per day. I own my content, not Medium, so I can reuse it off-platform however I want. I’ll have enough material to compile and refine into at least 3 books per year.

Even if these are mediocre books published to Amazon Kindle at a profit of $5 each, and I sell an average of 1 per day of each book, then that’s an extra $420 per month.

With this plan and nothing going in my favor other than the discipline to stick to it, I’ll hit the milestone of $1k per month within the first year.

By now, you might have realized that I am not just talking about me. I’m talking about you too. You can do this, dear reader.

You don’t even need to believe in yourself, really. You just need to crunch the numbers, see that I’m telling you the truth, and grind.

I’m not saying this is the best strategy, mind you. Improvement is the thing that matters. But it is almost impossible to not improve with that much practice! Especially if you’re using apps like Grammarly and Hemmingway which give instant feedback. Good luck writing that much and not getting better. And good luck staying broke by the time you’ve clicked “publish” on your thousandth article.

What if you give up before you finish article #1000?

Well… why would you do that? You didn’t give your Avalanche a chance to build if you quit that early!

Only complain to me that this didn’t work after logging your 1,000,000th word as a Medium writer. Until then, we’re all just dabbling, youngblood.

If you need some encouragement along the way, here are some thoughts about rejection that I hope you’ll take to heart.