The Secrets Behind How I Made $12,184.40 from One Medium Article

If I can do it, so can you

One cold, early morning in late January 2018, I woke at 5:30 to let my new puppy relieve himself.

While he did his business, I brewed a pot of coffee then opened my laptop to start writing. About an hour later, I had written a draft of an article that would forever change my views on what was possible writing online.

That evening, I spent another 10 to 15 minutes editing the article before submitting it to The Mission as a freebie (not behind Medium’s paywall) to the world.

I settled on the title, “The 50/30/10/10 Rule for How to Wake Up Earlier and Work on Your Dream”.

I’ll let the stats speak for itself:

Since its debut, the article has accumulated 900,000 views, 65,000 claps, and has grossed just over $12,000.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have guessed that an article, written off-the-cuff in barely an hour, would end up generating five figures in earnings.

But I guess that’s how it goes — the articles you spend hours slaving over flop, and the ones you spend the least time preparing for make the biggest splash.

You want to know the secrets behind an article like this? Here they are.

I was hardly an “expert” on sleep or writing

Many newer writers think that you have to be an expert, the best-of-the-best, at something for anyone to care. My success with this article proves that’s not true. Though I’m quite fantastic at sleeping and a consistent writer, trust me I’m no Matthew Walker or Ernest Hemingway.

What I am is just a regular dude who loved the IDEA of waking up early but struggled most of his life to consistently get out of bed in the mornings. I’m a dude with dreams, goals, and ambition who, perhaps like you, wasn’t seeing the progress he wanted because his evenings were a shitshow, and the one time of day he had to write — the morning — he spent oversleeping and making zero progress.

So, after a couple of months of successfully waking early, I was over the moon about my newfound habit and wanted to share how I did it with random people on the internet.

This didn’t make me an “expert” on the topic — just a guy who figured out some key pieces to the puzzle and broke it down in a way that made sense to others.

More than anything, the article was a way for me to systematize my efforts as a personal reminder as to what was actually important to keep waking up early and getting my stuff done.

The story did quite well at first, but WAY BETTER later

The Mission proved to be a worthwhile publication for the story. During the article’s tenure there, it racked up something like 11,000 claps and a not-too-shabby one hundred-ish thousand views.

If you look at the graph above, you can see that the article did pretty well the first couple weeks after publishing but dropped off hard for ~ 4 months before SEO kicked in and Google started sending me free traffic in May of 2018.

Prior to the search engine magic, the article averaged just 2–3,000 views per month. Afterward, it surged to 18–20,000. Since it was a free article and Medium’s paid Partner Program was still finding its legs, all views at this point were considered external.

But then, in May 2019 — sixteen months after publishing — I decided to move the article into the Better Humans publication, one of the first pubs specializing in the paywall (and it didn’t hurt that I had a relationship with the editor).

With Better Human’s help, the article quickly became Featured in Medium’s Top Stories.

In addition to the external Google traffic, the article was now getting boosted by Medium’s internal algorithms and received a significant bump in internal views.

At this point though, I had still made $0 from the story (remember, I published it as a “free” story), but that changed rather quickly.

Getting Paid

If you look at the story’s stats, you’ll notice there’s about a 3-month difference from when the article was published in Better Humans to when it started earning money.

This is because the Partner Program was still in its infancy, so Better Humans cut me a check each month for 100% of the earnings from the article. Eventually, it migrated over to a traditional Partner Program story, which is when I made my first $9.99 officially from Medium on September 9, 2019.

One month later, I vividly remember waking up in London while away on vacation, scrolling through my emails, and seeing a notification from Medium that I had received a payment.

“Oh cool, wonder what little amount I made this month.”

I legitimately felt like someone at Medium had made a mistake, and I actually expected someone to call me asking for the money back (no one ever did).

Shortly after that, the story exploded.

A couple of months later, NBC emailed me to request an interview for the article. I called my mom immediately after.

“Mom, NBC asked to interview ME!”

A month after that, Better Humans interviewed me for their podcast — an opportunity that fell through due to the audio quality on my end (I took the interview through Skype, in my car, on my lunch break at work).

With each passing month, I thought “there’s no way I’ll make that much again.” But every month, the article continued to thrive and I watched the earnings pour in.

Eventually, my income from the article tapered down to just a few hundred dollars per month, at which point I figured my luck had finally fizzled out. But then, boom, it spiked again.

And for another couple months, I was graced with 4-figure earnings again. All from just one article that barely took an hour to write.

Only time will tell what the rest of the graph will look like, and believe me when I say that I’m just as curious as anyone to see how it plays out.

Key Takeaways

It’s hard to state just how much I learned from an experience like this, but for brevity’s sake, I pulled out some of the important takeaways for you to note:

Anyone can do it

If I can hit it big, trust me, so can you. Medium money is real and it’s there for those who want it.

Luck has something to do with it

Part of the 50/30/10/10 process (the last 10%) I credit to “luck”. The world is an uncertain place, and you can never entirely control what happens. This article is proof of that.

However, you can increase your chances of getting lucky

Increase your odds of getting lucky by increasing your output. The more you write and the more you publish, the greater your odds of success. You simply never know what’s going to go viral.

Current events articles are great, evergreen is better

There are two options when it comes to viral stories:

1. Write a controversial piece about current events. With this option, the goal is to earn as much money as possible with a huge upfront surge. However, expect earnings to drop off a cliff quickly.
2. Write evergreen content, aka articles (like this one) that are always useful. These might take longer to “go viral”, but the longer-term payoff can be far greater.

Tell your story

On Medium, no one cares about cookie-cutter how-to articles, no matter how useful the information is. People are here for stories. Find a way to share yours.

Be relatable

People don’t relate well with robots. They relate to other humans with humanlike faults similar to themselves.

This was one of the most highlighted snippets from the article:

I found it to be a fun game running to the alarm and seeing how fast I could dive back into bed. My brain is weird sometimes.

People like what they can relate to.

Strike emotion

Many people are dying to unlock their inner superhero and live out their dreams. My article, though somewhat unintentional, struck that chord with my audience. People were motivated by my success and wanted to achieve their own.

Emotion is what gets people to engage with the article. To date, it has 366 responses, which is pretty bananas to me. I’ve tried my best to either clap or comment back to everyone who reached out.

Above all, just write

You honestly never know what’s going to happen, so write a lot, write often, be genuine, and share your unique stories — no matter how much you don’t think anyone will care.

Because trust me, they just might.