MEDIUM | WRITING
What’s the One Thing All My Highest Earning Articles Have in Common?
I was looking through my earnings stats for the last few months, and I noticed something. All my high-earning articles have one thing in common:
They are all about serious topics.
They are also often controversial in some way. People tend to engage with things that get them all wound up.
For example, take a look at the following list. All these articles have earned me at least $20 in a month at some point. Some of them have earned a lot more than that.
- Why You Need to Be Careful About Helping People Who Can’t Be Helped
- 3 Reasons God Cannot Possibly Exist
- Are All the “Enlightened” Spiritual Gurus Just Bullshitting Us?
- NSR Meditation: Why I Highly Recommend You Start Doing It Immediately
- What Does Enlightenment Mean? This is What 7 Well-known Experts Say
- I Earned $1,041.53 and Gained 836 Followers in My First 6 Months
- The Mind-blowing Meditation Experience I Had in 2006 — What Happened?
- Are You in Control of Your Mind? “No,” Says Neuroscientist Sam Harris
- 2 Problems with Eckhart Tolle That No-one Ever Seems to Talk About
- 8 Ridiculous Things Said by Eckhart Tolle Which Don’t Stand Up to Scrutiny
- NSR Meditation: Why I Wish More People Knew About This
- The Headless Way: a Metaphor for “No-Self”?
See what I mean?
These are all meaningful topics. Most of them are either about self-improvement or the nature of reality. People will tend to have strong opinions about them, either positive or negative.
In fact, the longest comments I receive are usually the negative ones. People don’t tend to write long responses saying how they agree with you. It’s usually to tell you how wrong you are.
And when someone is busy typing out a long comment, this seems to add to the reading time. This means higher earnings. Also, the more comments an article gets, the more the algorithm seems to favour it.
So, get people arguing with you and you’re onto a winner.
Not that you should deliberately set out to annoy people. It’s more a case of not holding back from expressing your views fully.
Take Jessica Wildfire, for example. She’s got over 100k followers and most of her articles get many comments.
Why?
Because she doesn’t hold back from saying exactly what she thinks about serious topics.
Also, a controversial article can do well even if it’s self-published.
In fact, it’s probably better if it is. That way, you won’t have a publication editor telling you, “No, you can’t write that.” You’re free to write whatever you want, as long as you still abide by Medium’s rules.
But do you know what doesn’t seem to earn much money?
Humour and music.
Sure, they are great fun to write. It’s worth writing some lighthearted stuff. It keeps your mood up and adds some enjoyment to your writing time. But they don’t tend to stimulate as much engagement as the more controversial, serious topics.
Why?
Because if you read something that amuses or entertains you, what is there to say? You might post a brief comment saying how funny it was. Or you might say something witty in response. But you’re unlikely to spend twenty minutes tapping out many paragraphs about it.
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