One of my first articles on Medium made $10,000.

Now what? Seven notes to self from six months of writing.

Matthew Boutte

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I got started on Medium by writing a few articles last fall, but didn’t have much of a grasp on how it all works. I started back up in early 2020 while on an extended trip and committed to writing a few articles each week. That small commitment to consistency has paid off many times over. One of my first articles published in 2020 just crossed the $10,000 mark — which has been particularly helpful to me in the age of quarantine. As I reflect back over six months of writing on Medium, here are a few of the things I wish I had known starting out last fall.

1. There are a lot of processes that determine which articles successful and none of them make sense.

There are a lot of processes that go into determining how successful an article on Medium is. Being a math and data guy, I wanted to fully understand how each of these algorithms worked before striking a single key on my keyboard.

  • How articles are selected by curators for distribution.
  • How articles are selected by publications.
  • How articles are suggested to Medium members.
  • How articles are ranked on Google.
  • How the age of an article affects its likelihood of being found by Medium members.
  • Why do some pieces catch on with Medium members and others don’t.

I did spend some time trying to answer these questions, but quickly realized that they’re mostly black boxes and that most of the information out there is merely speculation. In hindsight, any time spent researching these issues would be much better spent writing high quality content.

2. Quantity AND quality.

Some of my best pieces on Medium have done relatively poorly. None of my low quality pieces have done well. The takeaway is that only a subset of well written pieces do well. You can pull your hair out trying to figure out why some well written pieces do well while others flop (see point 1), or you can focus on pumping out a steady stream of quality pieces. Some of those will totally…

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