I've posted hundreds of how-to type topics over the years. I started simply recording instructions for myself that I didn't want to forget. Most of those posts get single digit traffic, some of them get an early boost on Reddit, but a few of them gain popularity via search and those ones stay popular (a couple of them has been popular for a decade).
I can never predict which will gain popularity and I often don't know why they stay popular. I hear odd stories on some of them such as an associate at a store sharing it with a customer.
I often look at my site stats and try to monetize the pages that are getting a lot of organic traffic. I've had mild success with that. Most of those pages get their traffic from Google but a recent article (which got a bump from Reddit) is getting 16% direct traffic. It's hard to tell why. I highly doubt people are typing in my very long URL.
I've never figured it out so I write to help people and some of that becomes popular.