This is how it literally changed my life!
Like most things in the digital age, I would check my stats on Medium a few hundred times a day. The numbers were so small and the checking rate so incessant that I couldn’t tell anymore if one article had popped from 1 to 2 views or if it had been 2 views for the past month and I forgot. One thing was for sure, a view or two could possibly pop up in a month, but there sure wasn’t any changes in dollar signs! One day, like a surprise birthday party, that suddenly changed and transformed everything dramatically!
As soon as I saw the 5¢ show up on my old article, I irrationally went through the roof with joy and excitement! I immediately screenshot my stats and shared it with the few people who would even care. Their responses were equally irrational, filled with excessive pride, support and attaboys! Then like all highs in modern digital life, it faded… and very quickly.
5¢?! Just so we’re clear here, it wasn’t $5… it was 5¢! I can’t even buy a single stick of gum from an opened pack at the corner bodega for 5¢! When was the last time you remember paying for anything using a solitary fat nickel? I’m going to age myself here, but I do remember buying Bazooka single gums from a glass jar at the candy store for 5¢. That feels expensive now as I remember that after 10 minutes of chewing they started to taste like a fuschia colored nail polish rubber wad in my mouth.
So what did I do to ease my anxiety and attempt to, nonetheless, take this infinitesimally microscopic achievement and run with it in hopes of creating some momentum? I binge watched 8 hours of “The secret to how I make $278,000 a week as a writer!” videos. After that, I realized I may be overshooting my expectations a bit and instead spent the next 6 hours watching, “I’ll show you the secret to making $86.14 a day on Medium!” videos. What was I taught from all those hours of deep thought and learning?
That it doesn’t really matter what you write and post, just make sure it somehow touches the currently sensitive exposed nerves of society and people and their emotions, post it often, preferably several times every single day and be sure to have titles and thumbnails that are as clickity as possible (Is clickity right or did I just invent that? Sounds to me like when I say TicTac instead of TikTok. No matter what my daughters tell you I do not do it on purpose! I swear!). Then as results and responses come, adjust accordingly.
The trouble for me was there were no results or responses to adjust accordingly with! But now that has all changed drastically! The 5¢ I made was on an article about the challenges I’ve had throughout life with people pronouncing my name. So, personal, relatable (at least for folks with crazy immigrant names like mine), funny (I hope) and kind of a bit of a tiny microscopic life lesson. Oh, and my own final quality, for modern life’s short attention span and a tough one for a verbose guy who rarely shuts up… keep them short. Let’s see where this takes me. If I find any success with it, I may give MySpace a shot or even YikYak!
Hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be teaching everyone how to make $321,000 a day with writing!
Wish me luck!
Renato Passalacqua 