6 lessons from my $825 Medium story
I think reviewing what’s working for your side hustles and what isn’t is a very important exercise
The viral run of my most profitable Medium story ever is dying off.
Now it’s time to pick it apart and see what we can learn (and duplicate).
I think reviewing what’s working for your side hustles and what isn’t is a very important exercise.
Although it’s nearly impossible to replicate the exact factors that led to any piece of content going viral (there is a measure of luck involved, too), I do think there’s a lot of value in identifying patterns that can contribute to long-term success.
I touched on this viral story a couple of times in the past as it started to skyrocket and give my Medium earnings a massive boost, but I’m going to revisit it one more time here as it dies off to see what I (and you!) can take away from it and apply to our future work.
Here’s where we stand at the time of this writing:
Without further ado, here are 6 lessons learned I’ll take away from my most profitable Medium story ever.
1. The Publications Myth
One of the reasons I thought it would fail was because I’d had two stories published in the preceding couple of weeks in a significant health and fitness publication and they went nowhere.
After that piss-poor performance, I started looking at how other people’s stories were doing in large publications to see if that was a significant factor in their success overall.
I found plenty of stories in pubs with literally thousands and thousands of followers and they were getting maybe a hundred claps and no comments.
I really do believe it’s a myth that you need to chase publications to be successful on Medium.
I would much rather have full control over my content, formatting, and publishing schedule.
2. Headline, description, photo
If you ever listen to YouTube gurus talk about the biggest factors in their success they talk about two things: your headline and your thumbnail.
You need to put a great deal of thought into how you’re presenting your story to the world because if you fail at this important task, nobody will ever click through to actually read your amazing content!
If you slap a cryptic headline like “Reflections on the past” on your story and put an Unsplash picture of a random guy looking at a mountain, that doesn’t really tell anybody anything (I use that picture example because that’s the kind of thing I used to do when I was just starting out).
Honestly, I don’t love the headline I had on my viral story— it’s one of the reasons I thought it would fail.
But I honestly believe my decision to use a picture of myself had a part to play in its success.
It was the first time any of my readers had actually seen my face outside of a small avatar.
People want to get to know you as an author.
3. Tags matter
I think the way you tag your stories is way more important than whether or not it appears in a publication.
I see people on here trying to gain some traction but they’ll only put one tag on their story (you can have as many as five). I’ve seen stories on here with zero tags.
If you aren’t putting time and effort into your tagging, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Once you publish a story, it filters out to the category pages where people looking for info on a specific topic can find them.
I like to add a tag or two to each story for much less popular topics so my story will hang around for a long time on that category page where people looking at a certain niche might find it.
In order to be read on Medium, you need to be seen.
If you publish in a massive category like Health (1.6 million followers), your story will leave the trending screen quickly (if it makes it there at all).
What tags related to your chosen category can you add that have much smaller followings but that might actually get your story seen by people and build some momentum?
4. Take some risks
Prior to publishing this story, I’d written almost exclusively about health from a quit drinking perspective.
My first couple of fitness stories fizzled, as I mentioned, but I really did want to branch out.
I do think this is a smart way to build a following on Medium: start with a very specific niche, build an audience there, then start branching out into subjects that are tangentially related and build an audience there without alienating your earliest followers.
If you stick with subjects that are at least a little bit linked, you won’t scare anyone away.
That’s why fitness was a natural place for me to branch out. As it turns out, one of my earliest attempts to branch out went viral!
5. Bring yourself into it
I already mentioned that the feature image of this story was a picture of me just getting back from the gym.
But I also sprinkled my fitness advice with personal anecdotes about my quest to quit drinking, a joke about my weight gain, getting COVID, slipping discs in my back, etc.
That’s what made it stand out versus the million other “Try these exercises to get fit” stories on Medium.
I tried to make it interesting by drawing out what actually happened to me in real life.
6. Consistency is everything
The first week or so after I published the story, it was struggling to find an audience.
It was getting between 5–10 views a day and I was like, “I knew this would fail.”
But then it started taking off.
Had I published the story and left the platform for two weeks, it may have died on the table the way I expected it to.
But I kept publishing and bringing new eyes to my work and whatever combination of traffic that created led enough people to light the fuse for my viral story.
Algorithms love consistency.
They want to point people toward content creators who are always pushing out something new.
As you provide that fresh content and it resonates with your audience, that audience will start digging into your back catalog to see what else you’ve touched on in the past, too.
As I’ve said before: one home run can turn your past singles into doubles.
In summary
Again, trying to create almost exact duplicates of past viral stories is unlikely to provide the exact same results.
All you can really do is learn something new from every piece of content you create, and use it to make the next piece even better.
The more effort you put into improving your work, the more people will naturally gravitate toward it.
For me, that means:
Staying away from publications and building my own personal audience
Putting as much thought into headlines, photos, and descriptions as I do the story itself
Always thinking about how tagging and publication time can give my work a boost
Rolling the dice and taking risks sometimes
Bringing my personal experience into my work
Staying consistent
And always be publishing.
Publish, publish, publish.
The reason most people fail is that they quit.
Don’t be one of those people.
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