Speaker 1: This is a visualization of each country in the world's most desired careers. Do you see a theme? And if you look at the Google search data, how to be a writer is the second most popular career search in the world after only how to be a pilot. But we're always told that writers can't make money. This article shows they only make a couple of hundred dollars a year. But if you think that that's all there is to being a writer, then this book might just change your mind. It's called The Art and Business of Online Writing and it's by multi-millionaire online writer Nicholas Cole. Now Cole is one of the most read writers on the entirety of the internet. He's racked up hundreds of millions of views. He's been the number one writer on Quora. He's been paid tens of thousands of dollars as a speech writer and ghost writer. And now he's built his online writing business, ship 30 for 30, to millions of dollars in revenue. Anyone can become a writer. All of these skills are easy to learn. So in this episode of Book Club, the ongoing series, where we distill and discuss highlights and summaries from some of my favorite books, we're going to use Nicholas Cole's journey and model to talk about three things. Firstly, we're going to talk about what online writing is and what online writing isn't. Secondly, we're going to talk about the tools that you need to do to do it effectively. And thirdly, we're going to talk about how you can start to make money from online writing. And thank you to Shopify for sponsoring this video, but more on them later. So firstly, what is digital online writing and why have most people never heard of it? Well, the easiest way to explain it is to explain what online writing is not. I don't know what to write. Online writing isn't grinding for years on your new book idea and waiting for traditional publishers to come along and give you the approval to be a professional writer. Online writing is not slaving away for years on your blog or website in the hope that a few people might stumble across it on Google. Why is life so hard? Online writing is about publishing where the readers already are, i.e. social media platforms. And that's why most people haven't heard of it because we've all grown up on the idea of legacy writing. For example, you probably know the story of how J.K. Rowling got rejected by 12 different publishers before one finally took on Harry Potter. Now the legacy writing business relies on these gatekeepers, these publishers and these editors that tell people when they are allowed to be a professional writer because back in the day, you couldn't make money unless you had a traditional publishing deal.

Speaker 2: I think legacy writing has this elitism to it where it's like not everyone can do it and you have to suffer and you have to stack rejection letters and you only are rewarded if you're brilliant. And there's all this red tape. And the world of digital writing now is anyone can become a writer. All of these skills are easy to learn.

Speaker 1: Now, obviously, legacy writing does have its place. And in fact, my book, Feel Good Productivity, is being published by Penguin in the UK and worldwide and Macmillan in the US, which are very traditional publishers. But for most people, if you're actually trying to make money as a writer, the answer is not to try and land a traditional legacy publishing deal. The answer is online writing. So unlike traditional forms of writing, you have the ability to generate a hell of a lot more money by 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 out there, but you can also build a personal brand and an audience while you're doing it along the journey, which also opens up your freedom to monetise in different ways further down the line if you really want to. For example, Paki McCormick began online writing with his newsletter, Not Boring, in 2019. And just two years later, his thousands of subscribers were helping him pull in a million dollars of revenue a year as a ridiculously successful writer just working from his home office. And there's a reason that only online writing is able to do this so quickly, and that's in a word, feedback. Feedback is the key to starting and sustaining and monetising your online writing journey. So with legacy writing, you have absolutely no idea how your work is gonna resonate with the audience until the final product is released, which is pretty mental.

Speaker 2: So legacy world of writing, Hemingway sits down, he spends four years writing a novel, he sells it to a publisher, he has to wait another 18 months for it to get published, then he has to wait another 12 months for the magazine reviews to come out, and then he has to go to a pub down the street, and then he overhears some person being like, Hemingway's novel was terrible, right? That's the feedback loop.

Speaker 1: Whereas with online writing, you can work smarter and faster, and you can constantly iterate on what you put out there into these social gardens, platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn and Quora and places like that. By sharing smaller, bite-sized pieces of work that are judged by the masses, you can see what's working on the journey, and you don't run the risk of spending years on your big projects only for them to be released with no response. You can find out instantly if an idea is gonna hit or not.

Speaker 2: The feedback loop is, I have an idea, I write a tweet, a thread, an atomic essay, a LinkedIn post, I publish it, and I get feedback three minutes later.

Speaker 1: Now, this very short feedback loop is ultimately what helps build the online personal brand and the online audience. As people watch you practice in public, i.e. you're putting your writing out there onto these social platforms, the ones that really vibe with your stuff will then join you on the journey. And then when you're ready to write the book or do your magnum opus or ship that footy-fledged work, then what's amazing is that you've already got this built-in audience of people that already vibe with your stuff, the little bits and bobs you've been releasing over time, and therefore those people are way more likely to actually pay for your work and then also read it, whereas in the legacy publishing world, if you're a first-time author, generally most people have no idea who you are. So how do you actually go about online writing and then how do you do it well? Well, we can kind of break this down into three parts and these are represented by this little funnel. So imagine you're setting off on your journey to become a successful online writer and make your own pot of gold. Now, Cole explains that the first step is to generate lots of ideas and publish consistently. Personally, I like to think of this as the forest of ideas. At this point in the process, we have absolutely no idea what sort of content is gonna resonate with an audience. We also have no idea what sort of stuff we would actually enjoy writing. And so the point of the forest of ideas is to generate lots and lots of ideas and to write lots and lots of things and put them out there and see what happens. Now, in terms of where you're gonna post this writing, there are a bunch of different options, but be careful you're not making the big mistake that Cole says that writers often make when starting out. So some examples of good places to write are, for example, Twitter, which is now weirdly known as X, where another deep dive guest, Cy Hill Bloom, blew up his writing career. We've got LinkedIn for more businessy content. We've got Wattpad for fiction. This is where Anna Todd famously started. We've got Quora, we've got Reddit, we've got Medium, essentially any platform where there is already an audience. The key thing is to make sure that you are not starting your online writing journey on a blog or a website. Now, there is obviously a place for the kind of writing that you would put on a blog or a website, but in the book, Cole talks about how this is often more suited to businesses and brands rather than to individuals trying to build a personal brand. So if you want to be known as a solo writer who's known for their original creative insights or stories or thoughts to ultimately build your own personal brand, then the key is to write stuff on these social platforms where there's already a built-in viewership or readership. So that was step one to creating the forest of ideas. And then step two is that wherever you decide to post these, step two is to get feedback from the audience. And I like to call this step the feedback cave. Now, why is there a troll that you have to get past in this phase? Well, Cole talks about how facing feedback with online writing is really hard and creates anxiety as you might get comments from social media trolls and also just normal people in social media who might not vibe with your stuff. And unlike with legacy writing methods, you can't really just camp out in your forest in the woods and not have to face any feedback for your writing until after your product is released. You're doomed. Now, in the online writing world, this feedback is gonna be immediate. And obviously this can be daunting because now you have nowhere to hide, but it's also a very good thing because this feedback loop, this rapid feedback loop is ultimately what makes online writing way more effective than legacy writing. In fact, as Cole says in the book, there are two types of writers today, those who use data to inform and improve their writing and those who fail. So now that you've posted your writing and you started to get data in terms of quantitative and qualitative performance and comment metrics, it's time to then analyze the data. And this is where we get to the pool of analysis. Now, this is what people like Hemingway and people like JK Rowling never had, which is genuine feedback on which ideas are valuable and which ones are not. And now at this point, based on the fact that you've been generating all these ideas and writing about them consistently over time in the forest of ideas, you've gone through the feedback cave to actually look at the comments and the data that you're getting. And now you're analyzing it. It's now your job to try and spot patterns within the data. And this is exactly what ridiculously rich and best-selling author Mark Manson did when it came to writing his first book.

Speaker 2: Mark Manson didn't sit down and go, I'm gonna write this insanely amazing best-selling book, you know, Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***, right? But what happened is the publisher goes to him and goes, well, you have a big blog. You have a big audience. You should write a book. He goes, great. What should it be about? They go, we don't know. What's your biggest, most viral blog post? He goes, well, it's a blog post called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***, right? And what did he do? He just expanded the blog post into a book.

Speaker 1: This example applies to Ryan Holiday as well. So Ryan Holiday initially began 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 about stoicism, newsletters, and even physical products. And now Ryan Holiday makes absolutely millions every year selling his writing. He's one of the most financially successful writers that you're likely to come across. Now, at some point in your writing career, you might actually have a product that you wanna sell or start a business around your writing. And a great resource to use is Shopify who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Shopify powers businesses by giving you all the tools that you need to create your business wherever you are in the world, letting you sell online or in-person or across any social platform. It's a fantastic way of starting your first business or your side hustle without needing to learn how to code or to make 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 the barriers to business ownership, to make commerce better 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. And even if you're a fairly small business like ours is, or you're an absolutely massive multi-billion dollar corporation, Shopify has you covered. Shopify has also got tools for new business owners like the Business Name Generator and Shopify Learn, which is their online learning platform for all things related to business. And they also give new entrepreneurs the really easy to use starter plan where you can create an online store in literally minutes. If any of this sounds up your street and you're interested in trying out Shopify for your business, then head over to shopify.com forward slash Ali Abdaal and that link which is also in the video description will let you sign up to a completely free trial of Shopify so you can try it out and see if it vibes with you. So thank you so much Shopify for powering our business and for sponsoring this video. Now at this point you might be wondering, okay cool, but how will all of this ultimately make money? And broadly there are three specific ways of going about making money from your online writing. So the first and least lucrative of these is the advertising model also known as the attention model. Now, as we all know on the internet, attention is the ultimate currency and it's exactly the same for online writers as it is for people like MrBeast. If you can generate online writing that grabs attention, you can make money by earning from clicks, selling ad space within your own content, becoming an affiliate where you get a commission each time you recommend a product or landing brand sponsorships. Now the upside of the advertising model is that it's very simple to understand and apply. So for example, if you're writing on Medium, the more people that click and read your articles, the more money you're gonna get paid as you can see from this screenshot from James Julian. His article, do these four exercises and you'll be in the best shape of your life got 38,000 views, which has generated him $1,741 from Medium. Similarly, Jacked Rob Lowe revealed the one harsh truth about staying fit at 60, got 25,000 views and earned him $1,114. That's not bad at all. But to make the advertising model work and to quote Cole, you need a shit ton of attention. So when Cole was writing articles for Inc Magazine, for example, those articles might be getting hundreds of thousands of views every single month, but he would only be making like $1,000 from it. On top of that, people generally don't like lots of ads being thrown at them and the revenue can be volatile too. Sure, you can earn pretty well one month on Medium, but the next month may be much less for a bunch of reasons that are outside of your control. And that's why potentially a better way to make money through writing is the paywall or the exclusivity model. Now, this is the opposite of the ad model. In the ad model, you put your content out there for free and you monetize through advertising on the platforms. Whereas in the paywall model, instead of giving open access to your content, you charge for some of it. And this can come in many forms. For example, you can write behind a paywall like newspapers like the New York Times do, or you can put writing behind a premium newsletter mini paywall. For example, the popular business sub-stack account, No Opinion, pulls in about a million dollars per year via subscribers who want to pay for access to his two paywalled posts per week. And a good idea to keep in mind here is Kevin Kelly's famous 1,000 true fans mantra. Now, if you haven't come across this before, basically the idea is that if you wanna earn a living, you don't need millions of people to follow your stuff. You just need 1,000 true fans, 1,000 people out there in the world who'd be willing to pay, let's say $100 per year to get access to your stuff, your writing, your merch, your band albums, all this stuff. And it's way more doable getting 1,000 true fans than it is to try and go for an audience of millions of people. Alternatively, another example of a paywall method would be creating a course like I did with my part-time YouTuber Academy. Or you can create a product like online writer, Daniel Vasallo, who did with his Amazon FBA ebook. So Daniel had been writing online for a while and building an audience such that when he released his ebook, he was able to make $40,000 in just 16 days. And this is the crazy power of online writing and product creation.

Speaker 2: The beauty of productizing your service is that you, like we were talking about earlier, you're removing the constraint of being paid for time. That's like the biggest challenge is as long as you're being paid for your time and not the outcome, it's really hard to have some sort of exponential jump in income.

Speaker 1: Now, generally with the paywall model, the content that you would charge people for might be the same sort of topics as the stuff that you're writing online for free, but you're maybe going into them in way more depth and detail. And then finally, we've got the services model, also known as the I'll do it for you model. Now in this method, you're not directly making money by writing for an audience, but you're offering writing as a service to businesses or to individuals who are willing to pay for that service. And this is things like content writers and ghost writers and speech writers. These are people who are making a living using their writing, but offering it as a service. Now, these can be ridiculously well-paying like some ghost writers, for example, who write autobiographies for celebrities and CEOs and executives and stuff can be charging up to a million dollars for a single book.

Speaker 2: Potential ghostwriting, quote unquote, clients are everywhere. They exist everywhere. Anyone with a big YouTube channel probably needs a ghostwriter. Anyone with a big podcast probably needs a ghostwriter. Anyone with a company probably needs a ghostwriter.

Speaker 1: But there's also way smaller ways of doing this if you think of ghostwriting or content writing for businesses. Now Nicholas Cole actually has a new book about this called the art and business of ghostwriting. I've not read it yet. It's on my to be read list, but I'll put a link down below if you wanna check it out. If you're interested in potentially making money from ghostwriting, his writing is fantastic. So I'm sure the book is gonna be amazing, even though I've not yet read it. And the cool thing about ghostwriting is that it also helps you build your own network while you're doing the thing. 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 that is designed to sell some kind of product. And the reason why copywriting can often be more lucrative than any other form of writing is because you can potentially earn a percentage of the upside. For example, there are famous copywriters like Gary Halbert, who apparently can make millions of dollars from just a single piece of copywriting.

Speaker 2: How you break into upper six figures, seven figure plus territory is you have to not be compensated for the effort, but for the outcome that you drive. The way that a lot of really successful sales copywriters structure their deals is they go, okay, let's take a product or let's take an existing funnel. Here's the average amount of revenue that you're doing right now. If I can write things that lift the revenue, 25%, 50%, I get a piece of that. So now you're being compensated on the outcome you drive, not on the I spent 20 hours rewriting the landing page, right? So that's a bit of an introduction

Speaker 1: to the world of online writing. You should definitely check out the book. It's really good. I've read it, I think three times. And each time I've taken lots of tips away that I can apply to my own business and my own YouTube channel, even outside of the world of writing. And if you enjoyed this video, you're gonna absolutely love the long form podcast episode that I did where I interviewed Nicholas Cole, where we talked about the five specific methods that you can earn up to a million dollars as an online writer. That'll be linked right over there. And it's also available on Spotify, Apple app, podcast, iTunes, everywhere you get podcasts, but you should watch it over there because that's the YouTube video versions. You can see what's going on in real life as well. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye.