How 1 small risk boosted my Medium writing earnings 41% (copy me)
One of my all-time favorite books on wealth creation offers a simple guidepost to follow on the road to success.
In “The 10 Pillars of Wealth” (affiliate link there), one of the most important pillars that author Alex Becker directs you to embrace is this approach:
Focus solely on what gets you paid.
His point is that it’s easy to get sidetracked by over-researching, over-preparing, and going on unprofitable fishing expeditions that lead nowhere.
In other words, if you can make money selling widgets, why the heck are you wasting so much time redesigning your website?
And while I’ll be forever grateful that 10 Pillars, along with a handful of other incredible books, helped transform me from a sad, alcoholic loser and failed entrepreneur into the healthy, positive, optimistic, and profitable online content creator I am today…
… sometimes you gotta bend the rules a little bit.
I do, for the most part, try to focus exclusively on what gets me paid, but I’ve also learned that taking a little risk here and there can go a long way in the content game.
Let me tell you about an experiment I tried with my online writing recently and how it helped boost my online earnings 41% over the course of one month.
A big bump
Before we dig into exactly what I did to earn this boost, here’s a look at what I earned in about 8.25 hours of online writing in the month of April (side note: I’ve calculated it takes me about 45 minutes to write a post, and I wrote 11 that month, thus the hours estimate):
Not terrible, but not overwhelmingly good either.
Despite being one of the most-read writers on this site, I’ve literally never been boosted, so my earnings potential is very limited.
Having said that, $107 per hour for writing online is nothing to sneeze at.
Throw in the currency conversion and I’m up to about $145 CAD per hour.
Now take a gander at what I earned the following month:
According to this handy-dandy percentage increase calculator I use all the time, that’s a month-over-month gain of 41%.
Pretty good!
So how did I pull it off?
Small bets
As I said, I know what gets me paid I primarily focus on that type of work.
But I do like to place little “writing bets” here and there.
Every once in a while, I’ll publish something that I believe has potential, but that I know could very well do a faceplant instead.
And believe me, most of my *hot ideas* do the latter.
But when you roll the dice every once in a while, sometimes they come up 7 (I actually Googled what a good dice roll is in Craps, lol).
Now I like to write about the stock market and the economy, and for the most part, those stories draw nothing but crickets on this site.
And while my YouTube channel is focused primarily on how to make money writing online (which is what gets me paid), I do occasionally experiment with stories about stock market investing because my posts here also serve as video scripts.
Why?
Because the finance niche is massively profitable if you can establish yourself there, and I refuse to give up on that dream.
So, lo and behold, back in May I finally published an economy story that produced more than just sighs from me over yet another failed bet.
And it singlehandedly boosted my earnings by almost half in May.
A new, profitable niche?
I can’t say for sure why this story worked where others didn’t, but I have some ideas:
It focused on the best-known restaurant brand in the world — pretty much everyone has been to McDonald’s
The stock is popular among the retail crowd
People are already mad about macroeconomic factors like inflation, and stories about $18 Big Macs already had people heated
People are more health conscious than ever and ultra-processed food is increasingly seen as the enemy of a long life
I didn’t realize this when I wrote the story, but the company is evidently also embroiled in an anti-Israel boycott
All these factors seemed to coalesce around one successful story, and I’m very happy they did.
My hourly wage for writing about a finance story I was super interested in anyway: $593 and counting.
A warning
A warning before I go: it is possible to go overboard with this.
Over the course of the following month, I tried to replicate this story every which way:
I focused on breaking news
I focused on the intersection between the stock market and the consumer economy
I looked at beat-up brands that people seemed to be mad at
But nothing has produced anything close to what the McDonald’s story did.
In fact, the results mostly looked like this:
*fart noise*
So if you find your fishing expedition is only yielding old waterlogged tires, it might be time to pump the brakes and get back to your bread and butter.
But I will leave you with one more sneaky benefit to taking little risks like this: As much money as you can make producing a certain kind of content, writing can still occasionally be about having fun.
So think like Google: focus on what gets you paid, but set aside a bit of your time for big swings.
You never know when you might hit one out of the park!
Have you written stories you thought would fail but actually surprised you and took off?
Let me know in the comments!
Here are my top 5 trending stories today