How I “Accidentally” Made $600 From One Medium Article
This is for all who feel their writing does not deliver the views, engagement, and money it deserves.
Naturally, we all want our writing to be seen by the masses and have a post go viral. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want more of the above things from my writing.
However, I want to illustrate that your rewards in writing or any online endeavor meant to generate and deliver income will not always be immediate.
If done correctly, building an online organic income stream starts small after months of earning $0 from whatever work you have put in, except for day trading. Those rewards are fairly immediate, but I’m not sure I’d count that as organic, and that’s getting off-topic anyways, although not completely.
Ok, so here’s what happened.
A while back, I wrote an article on Medium about BitsGap, a crypto trade bot that you can connect to your exchange and automatically make trades on your behalf to maximize your gains while you don’t have time to look at the charts.
Now, unless you’re into crypto, you may not care about that.
But the point is that I wrote an article based on something I was interested in while doing my best to provide value to the reader.
In this case, it was a pretty niche tutorial. I know you’ve seen one before on the things you’re interested in.
At the time, it seemed as if nobody was writing about it on Medium, or at least I hadn’t seen anyone discussing it much anywhere. But because I enjoy writing about certain topics or platforms to further my own understanding of them, I wrote up a tutorial and placed my affiliate link somewhere in the article, as anyone else would.
Ok, cool story, bro.
But here’s the thing.
As someone who had made exactly $0 from affiliate marketing before, I wasn’t exactly betting on that link doing much for me. I mean, seriously, look at how many followers I have.
I’d be dumb to have expected my silly little link to generate any amount of money. But I learned an important lesson, and this part is critical.
If you want to make money online, you have to have your systems set up.
Whether it’s a blog, a website to sell products, a landing page to capture targeted leads, or invoicing software to bill clients.
In my case, It was simply placing a link into one of my articles article that would give me a commission each time a person clicked my link and signed up for a paid account.
But here’s the kicker and what makes it so juicy and delicious for me: that article only received about 7 claps and earned probably $3, though it continued to pop up in my most viewed posts since writing it. Almost like the algorithm was trying to tell me something.
This was good to see from an audience analytical standpoint, but I kept wondering why I wasn’t being paid more if the post was so popular?
So that question lingered in my mind for five months until BitsGap contacted me via email and asked if I wanted to partner with them in exchange for a free pro account.
I thought, “This is cool. They’ve finally seen my article and thought it was good!”
Which did feel good enough for me.
But the real cherry on top was when the representative told me about the new affiliate portal that they’ve added and when I clicked the link, it took me to my earnings page, which stated $669.89USDT.
At first, I thought it was a glitch or something, but then I remembered the handy dandy links I had placed in those articles months earlier.
I had never even checked back or expected anything to be there. But in hindsight, it all made sense considering the engagement my analytics gave me on the backend.
Despite not seeming popular on the surface, this one had paid off.
I’m working as a digital marketing TA, and I was even more pleased when I realized that I had successfully pulled off a form of affiliate content marketing by accident, the same unit we’re teaching in class. (Minus the affiliate part.)
So that’s it. It was empowering to execute something like that and have not even realized it. My work was paying off, and even though most of my articles haven’t received much engagement, I kept at it and tried to be strategic about my content while also writing about something I was into.
You could do the same!
Quick Recap:
1. Think about your favorite hobbies and the companies or services affiliated with them. — This works best when you truly love or enjoy the product and can talk about it.
2. Go to their website and see if they have an affiliate program. — Some do, some don’t. Just Google and check.
3. Create a Medium account and join the partner program. — $5/month or $50/year.
4. Write high-quality educational and/or entertaining content that provides your readers with your point of view or how to use or get started with something.
5. Conveniently insert your affiliate partner link somewhere in the article.
BONUS: Forget about it, check back in 6 months, and smile at any earnings you’ve had.
Lastly, don’t be discouraged when your writing doesn’t generate views, claps, or money.
Earning money shouldn’t be the primary reason you write anyways, or you’ll grow to hate it when you don’t see the desired results.
Ok, that’s all :)
I will be writing soon about converting TRC-20 USDT tokens into ERC-20 USDT tokens for withdrawal and spending because that’s something I had to figure out during this process and want to share with anyone interested.
Peace!
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Here is the link to get a free 7-day trial of the BitsGap pro account. Only for those truly interested in automating their way to smarter crypto trading.
