How to Make $10,000/Month Writing Online

This is a visualization of each country in the most desired races in the world. Do you see a theme? If you look at Google search data, how to be a writer is the second most popular career search in the world after how to be a pilot, but. We're always told that writers can't

make

money. This article shows that they only

make

a couple hundred a year, but if you think that's all there is to being a writer, then this book might change your mind. It's called the art and business of

online

writing

and it's the work of billionaire

online

writer Nicholas Cole.

Now Cole is one of the most read writers on the entire Internet. He has racked up hundreds of millions of views. He has been the number one writer on quora. He has been paid tens of thousands of dollars as a speechwriter and ghostwriter and has now built his online

writing

business Shi 30 for between 30 and millions of dollars in revenue, anyone can become a writer, all of these skills are easy to learn , so in this episode of the book club, the series course we will distill and discuss highlights and summaries of some of my favorite books. We will use Nicholas Cole's journey and model to talk about three things.

First, we'll talk about what online writing is and isn't. secondly, we'll talk about the tools you need to do this effectively and thirdly, we'll talk about how you can start making money writing online and thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this video, but more about Then, first, what is online digital writing and why most people have never heard of it. The easiest way to explain it is to explain what online writing is not. I do not know what to write. Online writing doesn't last for years. your new book idea and waiting for traditional publishers to come and give you approval to be a professional writer writing online is not slaving for years on your blog or website in the hope that some people will find you on Google .

Because? The hard life of online writing is about publishing where readers are already social media platforms, that is, and that's why most people haven't heard of it because we've all grown up with the idea of Legacy writing, for example, you probably know the story of how. JK Rowling was rejected by 12 different publishers before one finally accepted Harry Potter. Now the Legacy writing business depends on these Gatekeepers, these Editors, and these editors who tell people when they are allowed to be professional writers because in the past they couldn't. make money unless you have a traditional publishing deal.

I think legacy writing has this elitism where it's like not everyone can do it and you have to suffer and you have to accumulate rejection letters and you know you're only rewarded if you're brilliant and there's all this bureaucracy and the world of digital writing. Now anyone can become a writer. All of these skills are easy to learn now, obviously legacy writing has its place and in fact my book Feelgood Productivity is being published. by Penguin in the UK and around the world and McMillan in the US, who are very traditional publishers, but for most people, if you're really trying to make money as a writer, the answer is not to try to get a traditional Legacy publishing deal, the answer is online.

When writing, unlike traditional forms of writing, you have the ability to make a lot more money using the leverage of the internet, which I'll break down in a minute, and not only can you get paid better than most other writers. But you can also build a personal brand and audience as you do so along the journey, which also opens up the freedom to monetize in different ways later if you really want to. For example, Pachy McCormik started writing online with his bulletin. wasn't boring in 2019 and just 2 years later his thousands of subscribers were helping him make a million dollars in income a year as a ridiculously successful writer who just worked from his home office and there's a reason why he only online writing can do this. quickly and that's in a word, feedback, feedback is the key to starting, sustaining and monetizing your online writing journey, so with legacy writing you have absolutely no idea how your work will resonate with the audience until you release the final product, which is pretty mental then The Inherited World of Writing Hemingway sits down, spends four years writing a novel, sells it to a publisher, has to wait another 18

month

s for it to be published, then has to wait another 18

month

s. 12 months for the magazine reviews to come out and then you have to go to a pub down the street and then you hear some person say that the novel was terrible anyway, right, that's the feedback loop, whereas With online writing you can work smarter and faster and you can constantly iterate on what you put into these.

Social Gardens platforms like Twitter and Linkedin and quora and places like that, by sharing smaller works that are judged by the masses, you can see what's working in the journey and you don't risk spending years on your big project. projects only to be published without response, you can instantly find out if an idea is going to be successful or not, the feedback loop is: I have an idea, I write a tweet, a thread, an AIC essay, a LinkedIn post, the I post and get feedback 3 minutes later, now this very short feedback loop is ultimately what helps build personal online brand and online audience while people watch you practice in public.

Are you posting your writing on these social platforms that really resonate with your Then things will join you on the journey and then when you're ready to write the book or make your masterpiece or submit that completed work, the amazing thing is that you already have this built-in audience of people who already Vibrate with your stuff the little snippets and Bobs that you've been posting over time and therefore those people are much more likely to pay for your work and then also read it on the Legacy publishing world if you are a first-time author. In general, most people have no idea who you are, so how do you write online and how do you do it well?

We can break this down into three parts and they are represented by this little funnel, so imagine you are embarking on your journey to becoming a successful writer online and making your own pot of gold now. Cole explains that the first step is to generate lots of ideas and post consistently. Personally, I like to think of this as the idea forest right now. During the process, we have no idea what kind of content is going to resonate with the audience, nor do we have any idea what kind of things we would actually enjoy writing, so the goal of the idea forest is to generate a ton of ideas and to write a ton of it. things and publish them and see what happens next in terms of where you are going to publish this writing, there are a lot of different options, but be careful not to make the big mistake that Cole says. that writers often do when they start out, so some examples of good places to write are, for example, Twitter, now strangely known as X, where another deep dive guest, CLE Bloom, blew up her writing career.

We have LinkedIn for busier content. I have whatpad for fiction this is where Anna Todd famously got her start we have quora we have Reddit we have medium essentially any platform where there is already an audience the key is to make sure you're not just starting out writing online Now on a blog or a website there's obviously a place for the kind of writing you'd put on a blog or website, but in the book Cole talks about how this is often better suited for companies and brands than for people just trying it out. to build a personal brand, so if you want to be known as a solar writer who is known for his insights, stories or original creative thoughts to ultimately build your own personal brand, then the key is to write things on social platforms where there is already a built-in audience or readers, so that was the first step, creating the idea forest and then the second step is wherever you decide to publish these things, the second step is to get feedback from the audience and I like to call this step the comment cave now, why?

Is there a troll you have to overcome in this phase? Well, Cole talks about how dealing with feedback with online writing is very difficult and creates anxiety, as you can get comments from social media trolls and also from normal people on social media who may not Vibe. with your stuff, and unlike legacy writing methods, you can't just camp out in your woods and not have to face any feedback for your writing until your product is released. You are now doomed in the world of online writing. The feedback will be immediate and obviously this can be discouraging because now you have nowhere to hide, but it is also a very good thing because this feedback loop, this rapid feedback loop is ultimately what makes online writing so much more effective than Legacy writing, in fact, as Cole says. says in the book that there are two types of writers today: those who use data to inform and improve their writing and those who fail, now that they have published their writing and started getting data in terms of quantitative and qualitative performance and feedback metrics .

It's time to analyze the data and this is where we get to the analysis set. This is what people like Hemingway and people like JK Rowling never had, which is genuine feedback about which ideas are valuable and which are not, and now this point. based on the fact that you've been generating all these ideas and writing about them consistently over time in the idea forest, you've gone through the feedback cave to look at the feedback and data you're getting and now you're analyzing it. , now it's your job to try to detect patterns within the data and this is exactly what ridiculously rich and successful author Mark Manson did when it came time to write his first book.

Mark Manson didn't sit down and say, I'm going to do it. to write this incredible best-selling book, you know Sellar for not giving it the right thing, but what happened is the editor comes to him and says well, you have a great blog, you have a great audience, you should write a book, he's doing great , that should be? about them, we don't know what your most viral blog post is, he's doing well, it's a blog post called the subtle art of not giving a right and what he did. He simply expanded the blog post into a book.

This example applies to Ryan. Holiday too, so Ryan Holiday initially started his career as a marketing writer, but after a blog post he wrote about Stoicism went totally viral, he decided to double down on the topic which ultimately ended up creating his empire of books on Stoicism, newsletters informative and even physical products. and now Ryan Holiday makes absolutely millions every year selling his writing. He is one of the most financially successful writers you are likely to encounter right now, at some point in your writing career you may have a product you want to sell or start a business around his writing and a great resource to use is Shopify , who very kindly sponsors this video.

Shopify powers businesses by giving you all the tools you need to build your business anywhere in the world, allowing you to sell online, in person or through any social platform. It's a fantastic way to start your first business or side hustle without needing to learn. to code or create a website. Shopify powers more entrepreneurs and businesses than anyone else with millions of businesses using Shopify in over 175 countries. Their mission is to reduce barriers to business ownership to improve commerce for everyone, which is a pretty good goal if you ask me, and we've actually been using Shopify to sell our own stationary brand and also our own online courses, e Even if you're a fairly small business like ours or you're an absolutely massive multi-billion dollar corporation.

Shopify has you covered. Shopify also has tools for new business owners, like the business name generator and Shopify Learn, which is your online learning platform for all things business. and they also provide new entrepreneurs with the really easy-to-use Stu data plan, where you can create an online store in literally minutes. If any of this sounds good to you and you're interested in trying Shopify for your business, then head over to Shopify. com for/ Al abdal and that link that's also in the description of the video will allow you to sign up for a completely free trial of Shopify so you can try it out and see if it resonates with you so thank you so much Shopify for boosting our business. and by sponsoring this video now, at this moment, you may be wondering: okay, but how will it make moneyAll this?

Generally speaking, there are three specific ways to make money from your writing online, so the first and least lucrative of them is the advertising model also known as attention model Now, as we all know on the Internet, attention is the currency Definitely and it's exactly the same for online writers as it is for people like Mr Beast, if you can generate attention-grabbing writing online, you can make money. by earning from clicks by selling advertising space within your own content, becoming an affiliate where you earn a commission every time you recommend a product or landing brand sponsorship.

Now, the advantage of the advertising model is that it is very simple to understand and apply, for example if you are writing on Medium, the more people click and read your articles, the more money they will pay you, as you can see in this screenshot from James Julian, your article. Do these four exercises and you'll be in the Best shape of your life got 38,000 views, netting him $1,741 from similarly jacked medium Rob Low revealed the hard truth about staying fit at 60, got 25,000 views .and made him $1,114, that's not bad at all, but for the advertising model to work and, to quote Cole, it takes a lot of attention, so when Cole was writing articles for Inc magazine, for example, those articles could Get hundreds of thousands of views every month. but you would only make about $11,000 from that, plus people generally don't like having a lot of ads thrown at them and the income can be volatile, sure you can earn pretty well one month on average, but the next month it may be a lot less per month. a lot of reasons that are out of your control and that's why potentially a better way to make money writing is the paywall or exclusivity model.

Now this is the opposite of the ad model where you place your content. It is available for free and you monetize through advertising on the platforms, while in the paywall model, instead of giving open access to your content, you charge for part of it and this can come in many forms, for example For example, you can write behind a paywall, like newspapers. like the New York Times does or you can put the newsroom behind a mini premium newsletter paywall, for example, the popular No Opinion Business Substack account raises about a million dollars a year from willing paying subscribers for access to his two pay per week global publications and a good idea to keep in mind here is the famous Kevin Kelly 1000 True Fans Mantra now if you haven't come across this before basically the idea is that if You want to make a living, you don't need millions of people to follow you. your stuff you only need 1000 true fans 1000 people in the world who would be willing to pay say $100 a year to have access to your stuff you're writing your merch your band's albums all of this and it's much more feasible to get a thousand true fans than try to reach an audience of millions of people;

Alternatively, another example of a payment method would be to create a course like I did with my part-time YouTuber Academy or you can create a product like online writer Daniel Vaso did with his Amazon FBA eBook So, Daniel had been writing online for a while and gaining such an audience that when she launched her ebook she was able to make $40,000 in just 16 days and this is the incredible power of online writing and product creation, the beauty of producing your service is what like what we were talking about before, you are removing the restriction of getting paid for time, that's all, the biggest challenge is that as long as you get paid for your time and not the result, it's really difficult. have some kind of exponential jump in revenue now, generally with the paid model, the content that you would charge people for might be the same type of topics as the stuff you write online for free, but it's You may be getting into them. in much more depth in detail and finally we have the services model, also known as the I will do it for you model.

Now, with this method you are not directly making money writing for an audience, but rather you are offering writing. as a service for companies or individuals who are willing to pay for that service and these are things like content writers and ghostwriters and speechwriters. These are people who make a living using their writing but offering it as a service now, these can be ridiculously well paid, like some ghostwriters for example, who write autobiographies for celebrities, CEOs and executives and stuff, they can charge up to a million dollars for a single book. Quote-unquote ghostwriting leads are everywhere they exist, anywhere anyone with a great YouTube channel exists. you probably need a ghostwriter, anyone with a great podcast probably needs a ghostwriter, anyone with a business probably needs a ghostwriter, but there are also much smaller ways to do it if you think about ghostwriting or content writing for businesses , now Nicholas Cole actually has a new book about this called The Art and Business of Ghostwriting.

I haven't read it yet. It's on my Tob reading list, but I'll put a link below if you want to check it out if you're interested in making money. from Ghost Writing, his writing is fantastic, so I'm sure the book will be amazing even if I haven't read it yet, and the great thing about Ghost Writing is that it also helps you build your own network while you're at it. The point, but when it comes to offering writing as a service, the real money is often made in a field called copywriting and copywriting is writing designed to sell some type of product and the reason why copywriting can often be more lucrative than any other form. writing is because you can potentially earn a percentage of the website, for example there are famous copywriters like Gary Halbert who can apparently make millions of dollars from a single piece of writing.

How do you divide it into six upper figures? Seven figures plus territory. not being compensated for the effort but for the result you generate, the way a lot of really successful sales writers structure their deals, if they go well, let's take a product or take an existing funnel, here's the average amount of revenue you what you're doing right now, if I can write things that increase revenue by 25%, 50%, I get a cut of that, so now you're compensated for the result you get, not the. I spent 20 hours rewriting the landing page correctly. This is kind of an introduction to the world of online writing.

You should definitely check out the book. It's really nice. I've read it, I think, three times and each time I've learned a lot of tips that I can apply to my own business. and my own YouTube channel, even outside of the writing world, and if you enjoyed this video, you'll love the long-form podcast episode I did where I interviewed Nicholas Cole where we talked about the five specific methods you can earn up to a million of dollars as an online writer which will be linked there and it's also available on Spotify, the Apple app, podcast iTunes everywhere you get podcasts, but you should watch it there because it's a video version of YouTube so you can see what there is.

It's happening in real life too, thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video, bye.