Why I Illustrate My Medium Posts with Dog Photos

And Sometimes Pigs or Giraffes

I’ve finally crashed through Medium’s Glass Paycheck Ceiling and into the Lucky 7% of writers who make a whopping $100+ a month on Medium.

Which means? It’s time to write the obligatory I Make Actual Money On Medium and You Can Too article in which I share my oodles of accumulated experience and Medium Wisdom.

So here we go! Let the Wisdom commence!

I post every day, and I work to make my stories as good as I can before publishing them, and I am a dedicated reciprocal reader (which means that if you read my work I’ll try to read yours, unless all you write is right wing balderdash or really bad poetry.)

But my real actual secret? The reason why readers click on and often actually read my posts?

I illustrate them with photos of dogs.

For instance?

If you read this post (Go ahead. It’ll only take you 3 minutes.) you’ll notice that it has nothing whatsoever to do with dogs. So why illustrate it with a dog photo?

Why not? Who doesn’t enjoy a cute dog photo?

Plus, it’s a story about an editor. Wouldn’t you rather look at cute pug than an editor?

Illustrating Medium stories with dog photos wasn’t anything I planned to do. My method of defaulting to dog photos began totally by accident.

I was scrolling through stock photos for a humor piece about library work and all of the available library-related photos were incredibly dull. So I took a little break to enjoy scrolling through dog photos. And I happened upon a photo of a dog that seemed to evoke the mood of my piece. So I used it!

Nobody seemed to mind. And the post did well.

So I kept on doing it.

The truth is that your photo doesn’t have to absolutely match your content. Or match your content at all. It just has to evoke the right mood.

Dogs are very expressive. What I’ve learned is that no matter what mood I want to evoke, I can always find a dog photo to match that mood.

And scrolling through dog photos in search of the perfect illustration is way more fun than scrolling through photos of, for instance, writers. (Like everyone else on Medium, I write about writing a lot.)

Do I always use dog photos to illustrate my work? Nope. If I find a photo that matches the content that I like as much as a photo of a dog? I’ll grab that. (I will also, occasionally mix things up by using a photo of a pig or a giraffe.)

But defaulting to dogs keeps the process fun and simple.

And, of course, I often write about dogs, which gives me the opportunity to spend even more time scrolling through dog photos.

So what’s the takeaway for you? Free yourself from the burden of selecting photos that exactly match your content! Do you really love parrots or ferrets or space ships or trees or kittens? Try illustrating your posts with those instead.

Or, if you, like me, are a dog lover? There are 59,610 dog photos on Unsplash. You’re welcome to join the Writers Who Default To Dog Photos Club.

You’ll be a member of that lucky 7% before you know it.

Writing Coach and editor-for-hire Roz Warren, who writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times, can help you improve and publish your work. Drop her a line at [email protected]. (That’s Ros with an “s,” not a “z.”)