My Backlog Of Articles Is Keeping Me Afloat
By: Benny Lim
Tags: Writing, Writer, Writers On Medium, Writers On Writing, Writing On Medium

When someone reaches a certain level within their organisation, it usually comes with quite a number of perks. It could either be really great benefits or even the chance to travel around for business meetings or just for work purposes.

To a certain extent, it’s no different within my organisation. Most of the time, once you reach a high enough level, you get to travel around to nice places for work. You get benefits like allowances for personal and business purposes.

Unfortunately for me, I haven’t quite reached that level just yet.

In a few years time? Maybe.

Right now? Definitely not.

Which is why my travels for work are not to nice cities or countries, rather, my travels are mostly to really remote areas. Still nice, but just remote.

And because of the geographical location of most of my travels, getting stable internet access is always a challenge when I’m travelling for work.

This week is another perfect example as I’ve had to go into a couple of my company’s estates which are all located in remote areas, deep into jungles some of them, and needless to say, connectivity has been an issue. Even the guesthouse that I’m staying in which supposedly has decent coverage is pretty bad.

It’s been hard to catch up on work emails and just doing my work in general.

Writing and publishing on Medium? Yep, that’s been hard too. If you may have noticed, I’ve not published much over the last week and that’s due to the fact that I’ve not been able to get a decent connection most of the time.

This has definitely screwed with my plans to publish more consistently this month and try to get my earnings up for the year-end holidays and early year spendings.

Fortunately for me though, I had a backup plan.

Over the last 18 months of so that I’ve been writing on Medium, I’ve probably published well over a few hundred articles. I think I’ll need to actually count how many articles I’ve published to date but what I do know that it’s definitely over 500 or so articles.

If I’m to be honest, more than half of those articles probably bombed, with many not making even a single cent to date.

But, there are quite a few that not only have helped me to make pretty decent money on the platform but have also been consistently earning despite some being more than a year old.

It’s now the 11th of the month and I’ve only published 3 articles to date (this will be the 4th) which normally would mean not so great income.

However, when I checked my earnings to date, It shows that I’ve made just over $40 so far which honestly, is not so bad all things considered. When I went into details, it shows that the bulk of it is from older articles, some published months ago. The highest-earning article for the month so far is one that I wrote and published back in October 2019, more than a year ago.

These backlog of older articles have been saving me time and time again, especially during months when I’m not or am unable to be as productive as I would like to be.

Sometimes, an old article unexpectedly takes off and goes viral for a while and brings in money months after it was published.

I have an article that earned peanuts the first 4 months it was published. Then suddenly, it took off and within a few weeks, made over $100 which was unexpected.

There have been times when I thought of deleting older articles that are not performing and this particular article was one of them. I’m glad I didn’t delete it because it did well later on and I honestly don’t know which article will take off and which won’t. I don’t know if articles that don’t take off straight away might take off later or just don’t take off at all.

It’s honestly hard to tell so I’ve just left all of my articles alone in the hope that hopefully, they’ll continue to do well or for those that have not, to someday be able to do well.

Right now, it’s these oldies that have helped keep me afloat when I haven’t been able to write as much as I would like to.

If you have a backlog of articles, keep them. Even if they don’t do well, just keep them. You’ll never know when one or a few of them (or even all of them) may unexpectedly take off and do well.

But of course, in order for you to even get a backlog of articles, you gotta keep writing and publishing.

A year from now, 2 years from now, these articles that you’ve been publishing over time may well help keep you afloat and earning even when you’re not particularly productive, just like how it is for me right now.

So, write and publish as often as you can. Build up that backlog of articles because it may well come in handy someday.