Your 1st $100 Story? How Long Will It Take? (Deep Analysis)

How many reads? How to keep your stories alive? Free Medium strategy.

Hi, all!

I’ve been back on Medium for almost 4 months now and have made over $600. I know this is a modest amount but being modest means it is something closer to being doable.

I started with only making $0.19 for all of November but made a huge jump in December, another jump in January, and another one in February:

I first joined Medium in April 2022 and posted my first article the same month. I was very new to writing (not counting writing research papers for school, of course) and was extremely uncomfortable with the art of recording and rearranging words on a blank page.

Back then, I was only able to write and publish one article per week. All of my articles were over 8 to 15-minute reads on philosophy and topics of positive psychology.

A few combined factors made me a terrible Medium writer.

(we shall discuss these factors further down the page)

I was averaging 2 views and 1 read per day by the time I left Medium after 4 months of unsuccessful trials.

These were my follower stats:

Improvements require an open-mind for deeper reflections and exploration.

I was trying really hard at my level… I did not realize there was much more to what I was trying to do. I was also dealing with a lot of issues and did not have better clarity on what my goals are…

My life goals — my purpose, so to speak!

Enough background story, here is what y’all are here for —

Stats of my $100 story:

(You should read this only AFTER reading my analysis because I have a lot of points to make here that will be highly valuable to your journey.)

I wrote this story at the end of December. It did not pick up until 2 or 3 days after publication but once it got traction, it took off:

I went from having only a few followers and a few dollars worth of earnings to this:

But $50.48 is only half of $100!

The rest of the earnings for this article came after the weeklong virality died in January: (just look at that steep drop!)

$50.48 + $24.47 = $74.95

Still not $100 but we can all guess that I’ve made the difference in the weeks after. But how?

We can only take educated guesses on how algorithms work and not completely understand these industry secrets since algo change all the time (for good reason)!

B A C K L I N K I N G

(the art of linking back to previous and relevant articles)

Here’s how it works:

1. Write a new article that is related to your old article. This could be a point you would like to add, taking another look at a previous article, etc…
2. Put the link into your article. There are 2 ways to do it:

the “hidden” backlink & the “box” link —

(highlight and right-click the words you want to add link to and click on the chain icon):

(paste link into box after you click on the chain icon):

For “box” links, all you need to do is copy the link of the story you want, paste the link into the story that you want the link to appear in, and hit enter.

P I N N I N G

I also pinned my best-performing posts to the top of my profile page:

I made the other 25% of my earnings from backlinks.

This is my full earnings of the article as of the time I am writing:

Yes, I am still $1.63 short but the title of the article wouldn’t have been as attractive if I had said: “Your 1st $100 Story? How Long Will It Take? (Deep Analysis)”.

It took about 2 months to make the other 25% of my earnings for the article.

I hope this was helpful to someone.

DeryaSefer