Why You Need To Set Up Every Article As If It Will Go Viral
Because it might, and if you have a low read rate, you’re torching your earnings.
I honestly don’t know how it happened. I set a goal last week of writing an article about Medium every day for seven days. The pressure to research and write those pieces meant my regular topics slipped through the cracks.
In a bit of a freakout to get back on track, writing something more substantive every day, I dashed off a piece about my gym experience and hit publish.
I figured it would be good for a few reads to fill in the holes on my dashboard.
I’ve written about fitness from the perspective of an aging gym-goer and always had a good response. So I had my fingers crossed that this would at least make up for some of the articles I didn’t write, but had planned to.
Head down with client work, I paid little attention to the piece until my earnings soared the other night. What the frig?
It was my gym piece. Hallelujah! I didn’t pay much attention to the specifics due to above-mentioned client deadline. I had a lot on my plate.
Next morning, that would be yesterday, I had this green flagpole on my dashboard and over 200 notifications.
Once I closed my mouth and picked myself up off the floor, I realized the piece had gone viral, or at least it became my most successful story, confirmed last evening when I had tripled my usual earnings for the day.
In a Facebook group last night (stay with me, I’m getting to my point), a member talked about his earnings. Five figures on one article for the month. I asked how many reads, and it wasn’t much more than what I had. But my piece was earning in the hundreds, not the thousands.
How’d that happen? Time for that deep dive.
Most of my reads were internal from Medium members, so I scratched my head to figure out I wasn’t earning more. I finally got around to checking the read time. Under a minute.
Picture me face-palming myself for not taking more care with that article.
My typical article of that length, 5 minute read, will usually get a longer read time. And as we know, the longer the reader spends on the page, the more we earned.
For some reason, the title/image/topic caught the imagination of my readers, like big time. But they didn’t stay until the end. Or, they skimmed, or they got interrupted and didn’t go back to finish. Or they were felled by a wicked witch. How do I know?
What I do know is that I dashed off that piece just to fill a spot on my publishing schedule. So I could pat myself on the back for publishing two articles in a day.
How much better it would have been for me if I’d taken the time to make sure I had formatted it for screen readers, shortened some parts that were long-winded, inserted a link or two to some research articles to pump up the credentials.
I may never get another chance for an article to hit the stratosphere, even at my relatively low ceiling. But you can bet I’ll be prepared. No more sending a piece out into the cosmos half-dressed. How much better I’d feel with 5.52k reads at 2 minutes, even if I’d spent a few more hours polishing the piece before I hit publish.
So always assume the best.
My late sister never emptied the garbage without putting on her lipstick. “You never know who you’ll meet,” she always said.
Good advice for publishing our articles. Put some lipstick on them, dust their noses with some powder. Pay attention to formatting, including enough white space, keeping the vocabulary to a grade level everyone can understand.
Because you never know when the viral gods are watching.
