This One Trick on Writing Movie Reviews Delivered the Money
I discovered it by accident. Feel free to copy it.
Do you have a niche?
It is an endless battle between one should have a niche and one shouldn’t have a blogging niche.
I try everything once. That sounds racy.
This year I have been writing movie reviews, and most of them were curated, but I never got the readership I was hoping for. You know the drill by now if you have been writing on Medium.
More readers, more money, if they are Medium members.
After a few movie reviews and the money wasn’t coming in, I decided that writing movie reviews aren’t a niche worth my time, even if I wish I had more time to watch films.
I’m pretty proud of when I wrote a movie review of Drive My Car, only a few people have heard about it, and now it is one of the films nominated for Best Picture in the upcoming Oscars.
And there were more movies and TV shows that I have reviewed, some did get readers, but most came from Google traffic, which means zero dollars.
Until I paid attention to one thing that writers like myself sometimes forget is the most important thing about our stories: the headline.
The Writing Mistake That Is Never Too Late To Correct — Napoleon
While you must have read it a thousand times but it is true, and since I have been paying attention to my headlines, I crossed the $100 earnings last month after so many months of trying, so if there is something you can learn from reading this is — not to give up.
Good headlines help you get good money
Here is the golden tip:
I used to write my movie review titles as;
Review:<name of movie>
And while it works on YouTube, it will take more than that to attract readers. When I watched Netflix’s Pieces of Her, instead of the usual title, I wrote instead:
Daughter Finds Out Her Mother Is Lying to Her for 30 Years
Yes, so far, I have made $4.51. While it looks like a pittance to some, for me, any money I receive is a blessing to be grateful about. It also happens to be my best-performing article this month.
Thank you, ILLUMINATION, for publishing my story.
Final words
Lesson — Write better headlines!
If there is a lesson you can learn after reading this story is to keep on practicing writing better headlines. It is the first step in getting readers.
Everyone is competing for the reader’s attention, and the best performing writers here know this ‘trick.’
There are tools to help you craft better titles, and you should take time to explore them, like this one from Sharethrough.
As writers, we sometimes lack inspiration, especially if it starts to feel like writing is work, the only way I fight it is to stay curious and do a lot of experiments.
Money isn’t everything, but it helps with the coffee.
