Views are not in our control.

And it sucks.

No matter how catchy your title is and how great a writer you are, you cannot guarantee that your next Article will be a hit.

If anyone tells you something different, trust me — they are lying or trying to sell their Medium courses to you in five minutes.

You research day and night, write your heart out, hit the publish button, and then move on to the next article. And you repeat the same process. Because if you wait for one article to go viral (in other words, actually meet its readers), you’ll have to wait for an eternity.

That’s the plain truth.

I have written 380 stories in the last two and a half years. And do you know how many of them went viral? The number is probably less than 20. Only two of them actually crossed the three-figure mark.

Earning money by writing is that hard.

You already know it.

But by some stroke of luck or whatever you want to call it, one of my articles went crazy in November 2021. So far, it has gotten more than 552K views, 3734 hours of reading time, and, of course, some haters.

On October 25, 2021, I published an article titled “Why Elon Musk Fired His Long-Term Assistant Who Asked for A Raise.”

It was about the firing of Elon’s assistant, Mary Beth Brown, who had worked for him for around 12 years, the reason behind her firing, and some comments about it.

It was just another article and certainly not one of my best writings, but it’s not bad either.

If I find any topic interesting, I explore it and often write an article about it. There are no high expectations involved, and I think most of you do the same.

In that same month, I wrote a total of 28 stories (I was very productive at that time as I gave myself the challenge to write one article a day). And things were going normally until November 01 — the day when I saw a huge spike in my stats.

My Nov 2021 stats | Screenshot by the author

Soon, I realized that most of the views were coming from the Elon Musk Story, and it was getting crazier with each passing day.

All I know is that for the next three or four months, this single story made me a lot of money that I never imagined possible from writing.

How much?

Let’s see.

The story has received over 552K views and 3734 hours of reading time, which eventually earned me $19,578.

For a single story, it’s like a dream come true.

Not only that, as the story got a huge amount of external views, it got me more than 80 referred members.

Before this story, I had only two of them.

Below you can see the external traffic this story received.

Now, if you ask me, “Can you write a similar story and guarantee that it will be a hit?”

The simple answer is — No.

I saw a couple of writers copying the title and writing the same story, but none of them got 1% of the views this story got.

Nobody really knows what the peculiar algorithm of this platform would pick and spread like wildfire, and what our readers would adore or ignore.

It’s a mystery I guess.

So, what can we do?

We can do what we do best: write better articles.

And for better reach, we must:

Craft engaging and click-worthy headlines

Be honest with our stories

Try to engage our readers emotionally or add some value to their life

Write and publish frequently

And most importantly, we must stop overthinking about the money our stories are getting.

Instead, we should focus on telling interesting stories and hope for the best.