Fixing This One Mistake Helped 2x My Earnings on Medium

It goes against everything I knew about traditional SEO

Screenshot taken by the author.

I’ve been writing on Medium for over 9 years. Most of my “real job” is writing traditional SEO content for my own websites. I viewed Medium as a gym/playground to improve my skills and just have fun with my writing.

I only started monetizing my posts this past year, mostly out of curiosity. The immediate results were insignificant—barely cracking $10 per month at best.

I considered making everything public again and using my content to build my brand and reputation. That would be more valuable than the Chipotle burrito (without guacamole) level money I was making.

But then I had a couple of articles finally land.

I became interested once some articles earned actual money. Image taken by the author.

I thought, “OK, this is fun; I’ll play this game a bit more seriously.”

Digging In

I started analyzing my articles to see what made these work while the others didn’t.

Did they do well simply because they were better articles? Their quality played a role, of course, but I put in the same effort in…