The Anatomy of My First $1,000 Article on Medium

It happened quicker than I expected

Just a few days ago, I published an article explaining the anatomy of my first $500 article on Medium.

I was sure at least one of my articles would hit the $1,000 mark in February but, admittedly, it happened faster than I expected.

On top of that, not just one but three of my articles hit the $1,000 mark in the past few days!

That’s pretty crazy.

I enjoy writing here, exchanging ideas with beautiful people, sharing my ideas, and reading the work of other amazing writers so much that it feels crazy to make so much money from it.

I never aspired to be a writer and I still struggle to call myself one. I prefer to introduce myself as an entrepreneur. But the majority of my income this month came from typing words.

When I first published my numbers and how the Medium journey is going for me, I was anxious.

I was insecure about whether readers would accept such an article or if I would attract haters for openly unveiling my numbers.

I can’t explain how relieved I was after receiving the first uplifting, grateful comments. It showed me that the Medium community is eager to learn and that there are many unsolved questions for new writers.

Even though I mainly write about personal growth, I committed to also sharing my major milestones and insights about Medium and my writing journey.

I realized how useful some of those golden nuggets are to new users — I want to give my best to support and encourage those who are just starting. Because when I first stumbled upon Medium in 2018, it was the success stories of other writers that motivated me to hit publish for the first time.

I honestly hope the following insights into my first $1,000 article will help you to hit this milestone soon.

Here’s the article I’ll be analyzing:

The Title

I’ve already summarized almost aeverything I know about successful headlines in my previous article about my Medium journey:

So I will only glance over the most critical points.

Here’s the #1 rule when it comes to making it big on Medium:

The title of your story can make or break its succcess.

Yes, people might spend a lot of time on Medium, scrolling through the feed — reading articles, clapping, commenting, engaging — but they won’t even click on your story if it doesn’t sound sexy. Period.

No one will ever click on your story out of compassion. Never.

Your reader will always decide whether to click on your story or not based on one question:

What’s in it for me?

I believe my article went so well because it was promising.

Everyone knows about morning routines, and many people already have one. We all know about the cliched morning routines, like exercising, taking a cold shower, or meditating. So I compiled a list of unusual morning routine habits. Clearly, many people are interested in making little adjustments to their mornings.

Besides the sexiness of the title, numbers and listicles work exceptionally well for me.

Here are my best performing stories of February so far:

Obviously, Medium loves listicles. Or Medium readers love listicles.

Other than that: strong words — in this case, “exceptional”, “change”, “forever”, “harmful” — can make a difference in whether your article gets clicked or not.

If you want to dig deeper into optimizing your headlines, I strongly recommend reading some of the articles of Cynthia Marinakos. Her stories helped me to up-level my title game and understand some of the critical factors for successful headlines.

The Subtitle

Along with the title and the cover picture of your article, the subtitle is one of the three most important factors in the success of your story. Unfortunately, many Medium writers ignore this part of the game for too long.

You don’t have much time to catch your followers’ attention. Sometimes, you don’t even have a second. Not necessarily due to bad content, but simply because there’s so much going on.

Your subtitle is a powerful tool you can use to get a few more (milli)seconds of a potential reader’s attention — make use of it.

Here are the most common types of subtitles I use in my stories on Medium.

A clear statement underlining the original title

As in my second best-earning story covering quotes of Buddha:

Quotes that fit the message of the title

As in my best-earning article of February:

Picking one of the bullet points

This one works perfectly for listicles. Here’s one of my examples:

An addition to the original title

This is one of my favorites. I have no proof, but I feel it easily catches readers to stick with the story. Here’s one of my favorite examples:

The Cover Picture

In my story covering my first $500 article on Medium, I described how I don’t have a valid rule for successful cover pictures yet. Unfortunately, I still can’t say more about it.

The image for your story is incredibly important. It’s one of the three factors based on which your readers decide whether to click on your story or not.

Using high-quality pictures (that you own the rights for) is the #1 rule.

However, unfortunately, there’s not much similarity in the cover pictures of my successful posts.

In January, these were my best-performing articles and their cover pictures:

Here are my first three articles making more than $1,000 :

As you can see, unfortunately, there’s just not much similarity.

The only common ground is that they don’t show people.

I’ve heard many times that cover pictures with people, especially women on them, work best. However, my personal experience is the contrary.

I always give my best to find a fitting cover picture. Sometimes I scroll through the Unsplash gallery for several minutes, but I only decide according to my gut feeling. As I don’t have a proven formula (yet), there’s not much else I can do.

Read Time

The read time of an article is the estimated time a reader will need to consume your story.

In this article, Casey Botticello explains everything you might want to know about read time.

In the case of my first $1,000 story, the read time is five minutes:

This is, however, an exception. Most of my stories on Medium are much longer.

The average read time for my articles in January was about 8 minutes. In February, it’s around 7.5 minutes so far.

For no particular reason, I mostly publish long articles. However, the success of my first $1,000 article taught me to write more short-form stories as well.

I see many articles (even three-minute reads) doing extraordinarily well on Medium. Admittedly, writing short articles is not easier, but rather harder than writing long ones, at least for me. However, I’ll accept the challenge and try to publish more of those five-minute stories as readers obviously prefer them.

Formatting

If you look at some viral posts on Medium, you’ll find a few similarities between most of them:

• They all have catchy headlines.
• They have nice cover pictures.
• They are part of successful publications.
• They consist of several paragraphs, which are not too long.
• They are formatted beautifully.

I guess one of the significant strengths of Medium is that crafting beautiful articles is incredibly easy for any writer. Unlike on Wordpress, it takes you only a few clicks to make your Medium stories look stunning.

With formatting, Medium provides many essential rules itself. If you stick to these rules, not only will your chance for curation rise, but your readers will thank you because you made their lives a whole lot easier. Beautiful articles are just more fun to read.

Another incredibly valuable post about successful formatting is this one:

Last but not least, one more effective guide for formatting your stories by Jason Weiland:

If you already know some of my posts, you will have realized that most of them look pretty similar. I just stick to what works for me, especially to what worked on articles that were curated and succeeded.

Curation

All of the tips I’ve mentioned are nice, but they don’t help much if your stories don’t get curated — at least, that’s my experience.

Of course, writing good articles is essential even if you don’t reach hundreds of thousands of readers — otherwise, you’ll never build a solid following. However, the crazy results I achieved (like three articles earning more than $1,000 in one month) would not be possible with the help of Medium itself.

My first $1,000 story got curated in Lifestyle. That’s pretty uncommon for me as most of my stories are curated in Self.

However, I realized that my best-earning story of January was also curated in Lifestyle. Obviously, this tag works pretty well!

Without curation, I would not be able to reach 88,000 people with one story.

For me, this number is insane.

As you see below, most of the traffic comes from Medium itself — that’s the power of curation.

External referrals are nice. They might lead to new followers or even important people hearing from you for the first time and reaching out for potential collaborations, etc.

But if you want to make it big on Medium, the internal traffic is what matters most. That’s why curation plays such an important role.

Bottom Line

It feels pretty crazy to write an article about my first $1,000 stories on Medium.

I joined the platform in 2018 and I’ve surely spent a few hundred hours reading the stories of other successful writers on what their success journey on Medium looks like. I’ve consumed those stories for 2.5 years, and I’ve written more than 200 articles until my numbers exploded.

I remember how earning more than $200 in one month in 2018 already felt insane to me.

Honestly, I believe hitting the $1,000 mark for one single story feels so surreal because it’s so much fun.

Writing an article on Medium never feels like work to me.

Back in 2018, I woke up at 5 am to write stories before going to my internship, or I stayed awake late at night after an intense study session only to type a few more sentences on Medium. But it never felt like work. Right from the first minute, I enjoyed every word I typed. I was just grateful for the opportunity to share my ideas with the world so easily.

Submitting each story comes with a little adrenaline rush, even after more than 200 published stories.

I read and answer all responses (some exceptions for the extreme-haters though), and I believe each second I spend here is so well-invested.

It’s cool to write articles about self-improvement. And it’s cool to know thousands of people are reading those stories. It’s also pretty amazing to make a few thousand bucks doing all of this. But what’s really inspiring is the connections with other writers and especially with the readers.

Seeing those crazy numbers is fun. But receiving thoughtful responses from real people is incredibly impressive.

I am beyond grateful for every reader I can reach through Medium, and I will surely keep going and sharing my journey as long as I feel I have something to say.

Want to succeed on Medium? Join my free 5-Day Medium Writing Course.

If you want to dig deeper into my Medium journey, here are a few more stories you might find interesting: