5 Ways To Make $1 Million As A Writer - Nicolas Cole

Hello.

Before you check out this episode of Deep Dive, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about an exciting new project that we are running this summer and it's called the 1K Challenge and it's basically a six week bootcamp to help you on your journey to financial freedom. The whole idea is that in the six weeks we are going to be helping you make your first thousand dollars online.

So if you are a beginner to.

The world of financial freedom and you haven't yet made at least a thousand dollars on the Internet, and you would like to join this six week live bootcamp where I teach you stuff and we tell you exactly what to do and, and we give you accountability and community and support that you need to get started, then there will be a link in the show notes or in the episode description or wherever you happen to be listening to this to join and get more information about the challenge. I know lots of people that listen to this podcast are interested in the business side of things and maybe if you have a desire for financial freedom, time freedom, creative freedom, then you'd like to get started on the journey and if we can help at all on that journey, then that's cool. And if not, then, then that's also totally fine.

Either way, I hope you enjoy this episode.

You are not the main character of your story. The reader is the main character. The moment you realize that, you realize that you are in the business of serving the reader. People don't buy the asset, right? No one buys a book. What the person's buying is an answer to a question.

Hello and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week it's my immense privilege to sit down with authors, academics, entrepreneurs and creators and other inspiring people. And we talk about how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Nicholas Cole. And the main theme of what we're gonna talk about is how you can make money on the Internet through online writing.

You can make money as a writer. It's just you need to differentiate between are you saying, I wanna write this? And then you go out into the world and go, who's willing to buy it? Or are you starting in the opposite direction? And go, what do you need? What question do you have? And can I provide it?

He's done basically everything as it rel making a full time income from the Internet through writing. And so in the video we break.

Down how to get started with this.

How anyone can make money writing on the Internet, how to build an audience through writing on the Internet, and lots of like super tactical stuff.

Further in the episodes, anyone can become a writer.

All of these skills are easy to learn and it's possible. You just need to invest the time to learn some of these skills and put them into practice.

Now, before we get into this episode, I've got a very quick announcement, which is that I'm launching a telegram community for the podcast. Now, I'm going to be honest. Initially, the reason for starting this podcast was quite a selfish one, in that I wanted to learn from cool and interesting people and apply their insights to my own life. And it's just generally easier to hang.

Out with people if you invite them onto your podcast rather than if you just want to have a chat with them.

But over the last 18 months of running this podcast, it's grown ridiculously fast. And actually we've had so many messages.

And YouTube comments and emails and Instagram.

DMs and stuff from people talking about.

How much value that you guys have gotten from the episodes as well.

And so we're planning to change direction a little bit in that instead of.

Me just treating these conversations as a personal therapy session with the guests we, which we might still do a little bit of, I actually want to learn.

More about you guys who are listening.

To the podcast or watching the podcast and understand what are the things that.

You would like to see from the podcast. And I really want to better understand what challenges you're going through, what struggles you're going through, so that we can.

Then kind of tailor the guests and.

Tailor the questions to that. So that's why we are starting up this completely free telegram community. If you hit the link in the show notes or in the video description, wherever you're watching or listening to this, you'll be able to sign up completely for free. It's always going to be free. You will never have to pay a penny. The group is called the Deep Divers.

Which I think is kind of funny. And it's basically a group where I'll.

Be posting some of the behind the.

Scenes stuff from the podcast.

But also as we get new guests.

Coming on, I'll be asking in that.

Group if you guys have any specific questions for the guest, so that can.

Help inform the direction of the interview.

I'm also going to be posting a few polls and questionnaires and surveys in that group.

So if you're interested in kind of sharing more about you and about your life, Then you can do it through that group. And then again, that'll just help us figure out how do we best make this podcast as value add for you guys as possible. And we're also going to be using the telegram group to give away some freebies. Like, for example, often authors on the podcast will come and they'll gift us, like, 50 of their books. For example. I don't need 50 copies of an author's book, but it's the sort of thing that we can absolutely send to people around the world completely for free. Anyway, if that sounds good and you'd like to join the community, then do hit the link in the podcast show notes or in the video description, wherever you're seeing this or listening to this. And now let's get on with the episode. Thank you so much for coming on the pod.

This is it. We're kicking it off.

This is going to be so fun. We've known each other on the Internet for the past one year, plus, I think. And now you're here in London on Thanksgiving break, and here we are on Thanksgiving recording this.

I'm so happy we made it happen.

Thank you so much for coming down. Yeah, I was thinking, like, you are the kind of, I guess, a professional at making money through online writing. I guess. How do you introduce yourself to people these days? If someone asks, what do you do? What do you say to that?

I like to say I use language to change how people think.

Okay.

So I used to get paid. I frame it this way. I used to get paid as a ghostwriter. And as a ghostwriter, or earlier on, as a content writer, you get paid to write words. So someone's like, I'm going to pay you to write 800 words. I'm going to pay you to write 1200 words, 1500 words. And it took me a long time to realize that great writers don't get paid to write lots of words. They get paid to write two or three words that then dictate the direction of the 800 words, the 1500 words, the 3000 words. So now I focus on using language to change how people think. Writing two or three words, that that changes the direction of which way the wind is blowing.

Oh, okay. Definitely want to dig more into that. I was thinking we would talk about kind of a handful of different ways to essentially become a millionaire through online writing or through writing of some sort. And given that you've done this in various kind of fields, I feel like you'd be the perfect kind of expert on the topic. But before we Go there. You have a fantastic book, the Art and Business of Online Writing, which I've actually ordered a physical copy on Amazon, which is arriving tomorrow because we're showing it off in a video like on Friday. Oh, cool. That'll be cool.

Thanks for supporting the art.

No, it's all good. I've been recommending that book to so many people when they ask questions like, should I start a blog? And hey, I want to make money on this Internet thing, but I don't really want to show my face on YouTube. I want to become a writer and I just send that book to a lot of people. But in that book you talk about your origin story, which is like a World of Warcraft pro gamer or something. Yeah, I had a World of Warcraft phase during Wrath and Cataclysm as well.

Really?

But I always loved the idea of being in a raiding guild, but I could never make it work with my mum calling me down for dinner as a freaking 16 year old and then having to leave the raid and all of this kind of stuff. So what was your background in World of Warcraft? How did the origin.

We had the same story, first of all. Hoarder alliance.

Oh, I was Horde.

Okay, good. That's the right answer. Yeah, same thing. I was a really hardcore gamer as a teenager and I didn't know that I had celiac disease Till I was 18. So I was really sick growing up. And I also wanted. I had dreams of playing in the NHL and fractured my spine when I was 14 and then tried to come back to the sport, fractured it again when I was 17. So those two things, you don't have a lot of other time or options. So I just sat in front of my computer and I got really, really good at World of Warcraft. And yeah, by the time I finished high school, I was competing at a pro level. And a lot of the guys that are at the top of the space now are guys that I remember playing against 10 years ago. I was just a little too early. Let's see, I was 17, 2007. So that was the very, very beginning of the esports trend.

Oh, okay.

So I missed that boat by like 18 months.

Yeah, that was like end of Burning Crusade, wasn't it? Because wrath came out 2008, I think. Yeah. So were you like on the rating side or on the PvP side? Oh, PvP. Really?

Yeah, same thing. I never had time. My parents, they were always like, you have to sit at have dinner with us. You can't raid on school nights. So I would just PvP. And I would just compete against all the best players in the world.

So where did the interest in writing come in? Because journalism, fiction. You must have had some sort of background in writing.

Yeah, I've just always had it. I think my earliest memory is my mom signed me up for a poetry club when I was in fourth grade. And I don't know that I wrote anything fantastic, but there was something really cool about that, and I don't know why, like, words just always stuck. I was not good in math, was not good in science. I really struggled in school. But writing always made a ton of sense.

Okay, so you're at university, you're side hustling as a music producer, you're side hustling as a barista while doing your degree. What happened next in the story?

I sat in my last class of college, and the very last class I was taking from this professor who was kind of. He was locally famous in Chicago. He was an author, and he had written this book called Hairstyles of the Damned. His name is Joe Mino, and I loved him as a teacher. He was great. And in the city, everyone was kind of like, oh, my dream is to write a book like him. And he kind of embodied the goal of being a locally famous writer, at least to me. And we're sitting in the very last class and he's like, okay, everyone, you're about to graduate. I'm going to tell you how to become a successful writer. So we all pull out our notepads and our notebooks. I'm sitting there and I'm like, this is what it was all about. I put in my time, you're going to give me the answer. And he's like, okay, here's what you do. You spend a year minimum on your story, and then when you're done, you go down to the bookstore and you pull these magazines off the shelf and you look for agents at these. Because at the backs of magazines they'll say, who are the publishers? And usually who are the agents? He's like, you find the addresses of the agents that you want to reach. Then you go down to ups, you get yourself a manila envelope, and you put your story in the manila envelope, and then you put it in the mail and you ship it to them. And then you wait and you just wait, and you just keep waiting. And then in six to 12 months, they're going to mail you back a rejection letter, and you're going to put it on top of your desk, and that's where you're Going to stack all your rejection letters and then you're going to do that for 30 years. And that's how you become a successful writer. And he was serious. He was like, in order to be a writer, you need to get comfortable with rejection. And half the class was just like, it was like a doomsday parade. It was just, here's everything that's wrong with publishing and here's why it's so hard to make a living as a writer. And I was sitting there and I got my iPhone in my pocket and I'm like, I have more technology in this phone than the space shuttle that we originally landed on the moon with. How is it that the most effective way to make money as a writer is for me to go print off my story and then just go wait for a rejection letter? And I was furious. And so I left school basically being like, okay, thanks for teaching me things about writing. Thanks for teaching me how to read my work out loud. That was a really big thing that I learned and I loved that. But there was no preparation on how to actually monetize your craft. And so when I graduated, I was like, I'm going to have to go figure this out on my own. And I was talking to a friend at the time and the question that I posed to him, he was a YouTuber as well. He was a gaming YouTuber. And I was like, if models and foodies and other archetypes have Instagram and gamers and educators and filmmakers have YouTube, where do writers write? What is the writing equivalent? And he said, oh, you should check out this platform called Quora. And Quora was a question answer site. I had never heard of it. It was 2013. And immediately fascinated. Like I spent hours reading Encora. And what I noticed is every question was the way I saw it. Every question was basically a writing prompt. So it wasn't really a question answer site. It was a social question answer site. And every question was this jump off point. And all the highest performing Quora answers were stories. So someone would be like, what is it like to be an entrepreneur? And the answer wouldn't be, here's a formal definition of entrepreneurship. The first sentence would be like, when I was 22, I was worth $8 million and six months later I was worth nothing, sleeping on my parents couch again. And you're like, obviously, I'm going to read the story, right? And so I had this aha. Where I noticed that I didn't have to wait for permission anymore. What my teacher was trying to tell me. And Us and all these students is there's a way that the game is played and you have to wait for permission, or you have to have someone else give you permission and they have to validate you. And you have to wait, and you have to wait, and you have to wait, and your success is based on someone else deciding when you're successful. And the Internet made me realize, well, no, I don't have to wait for anyone. I can just start writing. And if the quality of my writing reaches people, then we're good to go.

In that position.

A lot of people might be thinking, well, how am I going to make money from this? It's all well and good answering free questions on the Internet. I was writing on forums back in the day, but there's no obvious path to monetization there. Whereas in the at least old school traditional industries like publishing, it's like, hey, J.K. rowling got 57 rejections or whatever it was, and then the 58th one became. Made her a billionaire. We have that kind of model. So I guess, how were you thinking about the monetization? Were you thinking about the monetization? That fear of, okay, cool, I'm writing on the Internet, but what then?

Totally the whole time, I mean, I could say I've been at it for 10 years now. And the monetization question is really hard to answer. That's part of why I'm so passionate about talking about it. Because 10 years ago, there weren't a lot of resources explaining how to make money. The first. So in college, I started writing my first book, the book about being a gamer. And my goal was, I want to finish this book. And I kind of had the pipe dream that I think every writer has where you think, my first book is going to be my magnum opus. It's immediately going to be this incredible bestseller. The world is going to notice my talent. And you just kind of think magically you're going to make a ton of money from it. And I spent hours researching about, should I do self publishing, should I try and get a publishing deal? All this stuff, because I wanted to be educated on the business side. I didn't want to just accept whatever happened. That first book did not make me a lot of money. I had a very real moment with myself where I spent four years writing this book, and you hit publish, and then you're like, cool, I made 1,000 bucks. And then you start to realize that the way that you're taught to think about monetizing your writing is only that model. It's I hope the world recognizes my genius. I don't even know what a publishing contract is, but I hope I sell enough copies so that I just magically have enough to live on. And then you start doing the napkin math and you're like, this is not going to work out the way that I think it's going to work out. So, yeah, I spent a lot of time reading forums and studying other digital marketers and trying to understand, like, what is a funnel, you know, what are ads, what's a landing page, what's an. What's a free email course, you know, and just year after year, I just kind of kept piecing all these things together, learning how to monetize.

So at the time, you were writing on Quora, but it sounds like you weren't thinking, or were you thinking that, okay, if I can do well in Quora sudden, then. Then, yeah, how are you thinking about the monetization?

I mean, in the very, very beginning, it was a. I have no idea. I'm just going to try stuff. My assumption was if I get enough people reading my work on Quora, something will happen. So what I did is. Because that's the only place you can start from. And so what I did is I challenged myself to go, okay, I'm going to commit to this new thing. I was extremely disciplined in my 20s. I still am, but I was way disciplined in my 20s. And I was really into bodybuilding. I was lifting every day. I was eating six meals a day, every day. I know I don't look at it anymore. And to me, it was really important that if I started something that I baked it into my daily schedule. And I did it every single day because I knew that that was the only way that you would really see is it working or is it just. I'm not putting in the effort. I wanted to run a clean experiment. So I was like, I'm going to write every single day on Quora. One answer a day for a year straight. Worst case scenario, I do the thing I love, which is write. Best case scenario, something happens. And I had this moment where, you know, it's how it always goes, where you start a new habit, and then you get like a month in and you start getting in your head about it, and you're like, I don't know if I really want to do this. And one day I was like, I really don't want to write today. I'm just tired from my job. I don't want to hit publish. Forced myself to stay an extra 15, 20 minutes. At my job because I didn't have Internet in my apartment. I didn't allow myself to have Internet for four years until I finished writing my book, because I knew I would waste it on YouTube. So I removed that option and I did all my writing at. If I needed to use the Internet, I would just use it as a coffee shop or at work or something. I wrote this Quora answer. I hit publish, got on the train, and by the time I got home, it was on the front page of Reddit. It was over a million views very quickly. And it was basically my story of going from really sick as a teenager not knowing I had celiac disease, to this bodybuilder. And I had this before and after photo at the top. And it was a really short answer. And immediately I got all these emails from people, a lot of guys that looked like me on the left hand side, which was, you know, skinny, scrawny, insecure. And I got the same two questions over and over again. What's your workout routine? And what are you eating? And so I saw that and I had this connection moment where I was like, oh, a huge part of monetizing your writing is you need to write things that people want answers to, right? Like you are trading information for money, at least through the nonfiction lens. And so I spent all weekend writing these two ebooks, and on Monday, I put them up for sale. I connected the website and where I was selling them to that viral answer that was still going crazy on Quora. I remember sitting in my Monday morning meeting and my phone's just going nuts with stripe notifications. And that's how I made my first five grand, something like that. And I had this aha moment where I was like, oh, you can make money as a writer. It's just you need to differentiate between, are you saying, I want to write this? And then you go out into the world and go, who's willing to buy it? Or are you starting in the opposite direction? And go, what do you need? What answer are you looking for? What question do you have? And can I provide it? And that was the. As soon as I realized that, everything changed. And I went from the fallacy of I'm going to sit down and write what I want to write about, now I have to go hustle it right with starting in the inverse. Who's the reader? What do they want?

I was doing a session for our YouTuber Academy yesterday where we were doing a little Q and A, and people always struggle with this question of, what's my niche? And One way of approaching it is, what do I want to make videos about? But the more successful way of approaching it is, what do other people want and how can I serve them? And just kind of thinking like an entrepreneur rather than thinking like a hobbyist who's like, hey, I have these 100 different interests. I want to make videos about productivity and entrepreneurship and personal development, like, okay, as do 5 million other people. Like, come on, where is there a market? Where is there something that we can serve someone?

Yeah. I mean, the hardest thing, I think, to wrap your head around is your niche is not about you. Your niche is about your reader or your viewer or your listener. So where I notice a lot of writers go wrong is they spend their whole lives just going, well, I want to write what I want to write about. And you should. That's great. But also, you are in service of the reader. And I think a really important thing to differentiate between is if you want to write whatever you want to write about, go for it. That's the beauty of the Internet. That's the beauty of self publishing. You have that freedom, but don't, two seconds later, then complain when the external result isn't what you want. So someone goes, I want to write what I want to write about. And then they go, and why aren't I going viral? Or, where's all the money? Or why don't I have a gazillion followers? That's because you're not being clear about whether you're doing this for yourself or you're doing it for an external outcome. And I think you need to be honest and go, I want to write to make money. Great. Make decisions that unlock that outcome. Whereas there's a lot of things that I want to write in my lifetime that I want to write. And I'm not confused about the fact that those things are probably. Maybe it might be a home run, but probably not going to make as much money as if I start with the end in mind and go, well, what does that person need? And how can I use writing to serve that need? You know what I mean?

There's this famous artist. I don't know if you're familiar with this. I think Aziz Ansari was at a party and he asked this really big musician who releases stuff every 10 years or something like that. And I'm blanking on the name, but essentially he asked him, like, hey, man, it seems like you just kind of do whatever you want. You just release music when you want.

It seems like you're not caught up.

In the Trappings of the industry. How do you do it? And the guy was like, it's easy. I just make a lot less money. And it's like the way we teach this on a youtuber academy is I always say to people that there is a spectrum between I'm doing this as a hobby and I'm doing this as a business. Where are you on that spectrum? From 0 to 10. And everyone says 10, 10, 10, 10, 10. Otherwise they wouldn't be in the course. Whereas when we do our free workshops, everyone's like, 2, 3, 4 is like the average. But then the same people that are like, I want to do this 10 out of 10 as a business are still also kind of still struggling with this thing around, like, oh, but I have all these 10 different passions and I want to make videos about all of them. Whereas you wouldn't make a grocery store. Well, a shop trying to. A shop trying to sell absolutely everything because you'd be competing with Amazon. You'd be finding a niche where, you know there's, there is a market for the thing and just focusing on that even if you have these other 10 interests.

Yeah. I mean, the example I love we use this in our course ship 30, which is we ask the question, what's Ryan Holiday's niche? And immediately the whole chat all blows up with the same one word. Everyone says stoicism. And then I go, okay, great. How do you know that?

Right?

Like, why did you type that? And we don't realize that we associate niches with people because they educate us to do that.

Right.

It doesn't just happen. Like, the reason we associate stoicism with Ryan Holiday is because he writes book after book after book and he makes YouTube video after YouTube video that says stoicism.

Right.

We would not do that if every single thing he wrote or every video he created was a different topic. So I think that's point A. Point B is realizing that you can do both. It's a fallacy to think you're a one dimensional person. You're not. We all have many interests. You can do more than one thing. Most people don't know that. I have like, I don't even know three poetry books published.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, right.

Most people don't know that. And that's fine because I'm not confused about which thing I do because I want to do it and which thing I do that is my money maker. That's the whole question, is you want to make the niche. If your goal is how do I make money.

Right.

You want to make the niche your moneymaker, but that doesn't mean you can't do other things. You can just don't expect those things to have the same external outcome as your money maker.

Right.

And I think remembering that gives you so much freedom and it allows you to do all the things that you want to do and you aren't confused about what to optimize to make sure that you can still put food on the table.

Right.

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I want to come back to this stoicism stuff in a moment where talking about the field of category design and stuff. But before we go there, you said that you decided every day I'm going to write something on Quora and I'm going to do this for the next year. This was I guess, equivalent to my thing for YouTube, which was I'm going to make a video every week for the next two years and fingers crossed, something will happen. But even if not, I'll learn stuff. I'm sure it'll be interesting in some kind of ways. Maybe I'll get a few sales for my medical admissions course or something like that. Having now taught a couple thousand people for YouTuber Academy, and I'm sure you've done the same thing for ship 30, the writing course. That's a pretty unusual kind of mindset to have. Most people I know don't have that attitude of, all right, I've decided to do a thing. I'm just going to do it every day for a year. What was it about you that made you more inclined to go down that route? And anything that you would any advice you would give for people who are struggling with this idea of just committing to a thing and doing it consistently?

Well, first of all, it's curiosity. I'm just a very curious person and I think anyone who makes that decision is inherently curious. But really, just stop and think about it. No one paid you to go to middle school, but we all have a lot of memories and a lot of lessons learned from being in middle school. No one paid us to go to high school, but same thing, no one paid us to have hobbies growing up. But yet we all look back and are like, oh, I learned so much playing a musical instrument, or I learned so much playing a sport.

Right?

We inherently do it. It's just for whatever reason, there's this fear of choosing to do it yourself. Whereas when you're younger someone else tells you you have to do it and there's something comforting about saying, oh, well, someone else told me that I had to do this and so thus it must be the right thing.

Right?

And once you get comfortable making those decisions yourself, you realize that there really isn't any wasted time. No one paid me to get into bodybuilding for six years, but the lessons I learned from that have shifted my life massively. No one paid me to learn classical piano growing up, but I learned a lot doing that. And so all it is is just realizing that the outcome is positive. And even if you did it every day for a year, extend the time horizon, your life is long. A year is not that much time. And I think the fear that everyone has is I'm going to waste time. But then meanwhile they go right back and they're scrolling on Twitter or Instagram, it's like you're already wasting time. So there's something about just committing to the process and enjoying the journey and trusting that whatever skill you gain, that skill is probably going to be universal. It goes back to what we were talking about. You said there's a theme of gamers, musicians getting into. Well, what is that? That's just acquiring other skills. It's not really the skill of being a gamer, it's not really the skill of being a musician. It's all the underlying stuff, work ethic, commitment, creativity.

Right.

Yeah, I see this a lot with medical students in particular, where medics are. And I guess like any kind of traditional career which attracts a kind of risk averse kind of person who has done well in school, the attitude is always, essentially, how many CV points am I going to get for doing this thing? And increasingly, and it's easy enough in medicine because it's like, okay, cool, if I publish these two papers, then four years down the line when I apply for residency, I'll have an extra two points on my thing and that will give me an extra 5% boost over the other people that maybe only have one publication. It's a very kind of points based, like, I'm doing this thing because it will look good on my CV further down the line type of attitude. Whereas if I think of, I guess, kind of the entrepreneurs and stuff that I know they almost never had the attitude of like this will look good on my cv. It was almost always an attitude of, let me try this out and see what happens. And I'm sure something interesting will happen further down the line. I can't tell you what it's going to be, but we'll kind of see what happens.

Yeah, I think it's a very rare human trait to focus, to want to focus on the skill more than wanting to focus on the outcome. I really don't care about a lot of outcomes. I like them, it'll be fun when I get there. But I am way more obsessed and interested in mastering a skill or knowing that if I'm in the same room with other people that are mastering skills, I want to know that I am able to play at that level or that I'm able to surpass that level. For me, it's all about skill. It's not about some title. Because titles are worth, you know, they matter for a moment, you know, and then two days later everyone's like, oh, that title doesn't matter anymore.

Right.

So it's not the title that you care about. The second thing is when you're first starting out. This is why one of the big goals that we set for people in ship 30, and especially after ship 30, we have kind of a follow on area called the captain's table and we go. The goal is to make your first dollar on the Internet. It's not to make a million dollars, it's just you need to make $1. Because if you start there, the moment you feel that there's a different direction that's possible, that's when you become excited about it.

Right.

But if you're risk averse, chances are it's just because you haven't felt that there's another option. But the moment that you feel, oh, there is another way that I can go, then it just becomes a well, are you curious enough to keep going or not? And the decision keep going or not is a lot easier than start something totally new or don't.

Yeah, I've been doing a bunch of writing around this for the book that I'm working on. Kind of the law of inertia, like Newton's first law of motion, that something at rest continues to stay at rest, but something in motion continues to be in motion unless acted on by an external imbalanced force. And I often think of that when it comes to struggling with procrastination or struggling with anything that is just like it's way harder to get started than it is to just keep going. And so when it comes to procrastination hacks, if I'm struggling with it, I'll literally set a two minute timer on my phone.

I'm just going to do it for.

Two minutes and then I trick my brain into just doing it for two minutes. But then that extends into Hours. Whereas the thought of doing something for hours then starts to feel like a real like. And just taking that next step. Yeah, I really like this thing of make your first dollar. Thinking about it now, a lot of the conversations I've had on this podcast with other entrepreneurs is, like, the moment that they made their first dollar on the Internet is the moment that changed their life.

Everything changed.

And that was, for me, that was like, when I was 13 and I was doing freelance web design, I was like, shit, I can make money on the Internet. It's like my PayPal account that I've lied about my age, which later got, like, banned 10 years later because I had to give him my driving license. And they said you lied about your age 10 years ago when you were 13. I was like, God damn it.

I'm surprised if you experienced that so early then, that you decided to go to med school. Like, what made you then leave that?

Yeah, so I decided to go to med school.

I didn't say this in my interview at the time, but I reasoned that everyone says university is the best time of your life, and med school is six years rather than three. So that's cool. And it was between medicine and computer science, because I was into the whole coding Y type thing. But I just thought it would be more interesting to be a doctor who knows how to code than to be a dude who knows how to code. And so my plan was always like, hey, let me get really good at medicine. And then I'm sure with a coding background, something interesting will happen in the intersection of medicine and technology. And it was only as I got kind of further through it where I realized that I cared a lot less about medicine and a lot more about teaching medical students. So there's something about teaching that really made my heart sing that practicing medicine never did. And that's what kind of took me down this avenue rather than that.

That's really interesting. I feel like you kind of made that decision then of if I have this not status symbol, but it's almost like an intuition on your niche.

Right.

There's a difference between being a coder and being a doctor. And being a coder doctor.

Right.

And it's often at unlikely intersections that opportunity hides. That's why I love looking back on my years as a gamer, because pair almost anything with gaming and you have an unconventional niche. And most things actually are like, that is if you take two things that shouldn't be in the same room and you put them together, all of a sudden you've created a new Thing the problem is we all say we want to stand out, we all say we want to be different, but deep down, we all just want to fit in. We all just want to be the same. And so what's hard about creating at unlikely intersections is it requires you to be the first one. And I'm sure even as you were going through your journey or especially when you were thinking about leaving medicine, there probably weren't a lot of models to look to, which is what makes the decision so uncomfortable is you're like, I've never seen the thing that I'm about to do before, but that's also where all the opportunity is.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good way of putting it, because I think, yeah, at the time, my intuition was very much that, like, because everyone I knew was a doctor and everyone I knew who was a doctor complained about being a doctor, and I was like, okay, this is an interesting data point. And I didn't even know that other careers existed outside of medicine really, because, you know, my mom was a doctor, all of our friends were doctors. Just like, so, so standard, like amongst the kind of people I hung out with to be, to be a medic. I was like, yeah, I don't want to quit, just be a doctor. I want to. I want to stand out. And I was like, cool, let's. Let's like, given that medicine is like the only thing I can really imagine, let's combine other things with that. I think if I, if I think of like, if I think to YouTube channels that have, have like really succeeded as well, it's because they've combined a niche interest in one thing with an interest in another thing. Like, there's a channel called tierzoo, which is combining gaming with ecology and evolutionary biology to sort of gaming esque videos around. Like, why are snakes overpowered? And why are lions. Like, why should lions be nerfed? And just using that kind of terminology, it's got like 3 million subscribers. Like, stupidly profitable business. There's another one, Wendover Productions, where the guy's obsessed with aeroplanes and like aviation. And he does explainer videos about how airplanes and aviation and like, the logistics of Formula One and what flight they're taking as they move this. And people just love that shit. It's just like this guy's like super obsessed with aviation, but has combined it with an ability to write and an ability to animate, and suddenly no one in the world is able to do that. And he's carved out this niche for himself that's gotten like 4 million subscribers on YouTube and makes a business. And it's so hard, I think, like, to. If I just think of the YouTube example and I guess maybe similar for writing to just try and dominate a single word category. Like, it's really hard to be a productivity YouTuber. It's a lot easier to be a productivity combined with gaming, combined with health YouTuber for example.

Yeah. I mean, here's another way of framing it is which game do you want to play? Do you want to play the competition work ethic game, or do you want to play the creativity have fun expression game? And if you are trying to compete in an existing category or usually a single word category, all you're doing is going, I'm better than all the other people here. You know, if you want to be a doctor, the whole game you're playing is, I'm a better doctor than all the other people who say they're doctors. And that game is predicated on work ethic, long hours, I'm better than you. Incremental improvement. Or you can go, I'm a coder doctor, or I'm an educator doctor. And you combine it with a different category, you create a new subcategory. And now you're not playing a competition game because everyone goes, well, all the doctors are over there and you're a coder doctor. So I can't put you guys in the same room. And when you do that, that allows you to then play a creativity game. And now you can go create all the opportunities that you want. And so it's so simple that it's complicated, you know, and it. We can make it sound simple, but I understand why people have the hesitations they do and the fears, but a lot of those fears to me are more underlying. It's a. I want to be different, but deep down I really just want to be the same. You know, I want to stand out, but deep down, I really just want to fit in. And you have to overcome that feeling in order to play the creation game, you know, and that's really hard for a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah, it really is. Like, I think, yeah, I was speaking to someone earlier just again on the. On the YouTube example, because I'm just in the middle of this course now, who's like a lawyer, like super successful lawyer, and has started a YouTube channel which has started to get some traction. And she's really worried what if people at work are going to see this? And it's like she kind of knows that to unlock this dream life where she can do what she wants, she needs to stand out. But at the same time, it's that tension between like, oh, but I don't want my colleagues to think of me as a loser who started a YouTube channel when I had this illustrious law career, even though that's actually what I want to do. Yeah. How do you, I guess kind of the writers that you coach have this kind of issue as well? How do you approach dealing with it?

Yeah, it's the same thing we talk about in ship 30. And to me, the easiest solution is you just start by being surrounded by other people that are doing the same thing.

Right.

There's benefit to being. I had a mentor in Chicago who used to call it hanging around the hoop. You know, you're just going to get better if you hang around the hoop with other people who are getting better versus if you just try and go do it by yourself. And again, we all want to fit in. So if the underlying feeling is I want to fit in and then you try and go do it on your own, that is a very viscerally uncomfortable feeling.

Right.

But if deep down we all want to fit in and then you are part of a community where everyone is doing that thing, all of a sudden you are going to try to fit into that community, which is going to make it a lot easier to do the thing that you want to do. So there's something really helpful about just being surrounded by other people. Just like I'm sure you've realized how many inflection points as being a YouTuber came from you just being friends with other YouTubers.

Right.

There's this compounding effect that happens. And so for me, whenever I'm starting to get into something, the first thing I do is I look for where's the hoop? Like, where are the people? Because if I just go spend time around the hoop, I'm going to get better 10x faster than if I just try and go do it on my own.

Yeah, I like that. So, yeah, we talked about kind of focusing on the skill, focusing on mastering the skill rather than focusing on the outcome. Another thing that you said when you were talking about the, I guess, consistency, discipline stuff was also focusing on enjoying the journey. This is like my whole spiel as well is just like with anything. Yes, okay, set a goal, but the goal is kind of meaningless. What matters is just enjoying the journey along the way. Do you have any kind of practical tips on how one can nudge themselves more towards enjoying the journey along the way?

That's a great question. Reminding yourself of it daily. Because I think the crazy part is, no matter what you achieve, the day after you achieve it, you're going to look at it and go, well, that was nothing. So what's next? I still go through that. I wake up every day being like, oh, I still haven't made it as a writer. I've done everything I wanted to do and I still feel like, oh, I haven't made it as a writer. And so recognizing that that feeling never goes away, and taking little moments consistently, I try to every day remind myself, dude, 10 years ago, you were in a really not nice studio apartment with a heater from the 1960s. Sleep on an air mattress with no furniture. You know, I mean, remembering all the things you had to do constantly is a really helpful way to just stay connected to, wow, I'm having the time of my life. This is amazing.

Yeah. The only thing I have. I'll show you after this. Just on my computer monitor is a little post it note saying, remember to enjoy the journey. Smiley face. And it's weird, but like just a little reminder like that when I see it in my profile vision. Oh yeah. It's just like a little reminder that encourages me to actually try and enjoy the present moment and not just be so fixated on the goal at the other end.

Yeah. And just always remembering that again, it doesn't matter what you achieve, it's never going to be enough. You think it will, it won't. And the goalpost keeps moving over and over and over again. So get comfortable with it.

Nice. Okay, so we're back to this weekend. You've written your ebooks overnight around bodybuilding routine and nutrition routine, and the next day you're made 5k over the weekend. How did, how did that feel at the time? And like what happened next?

It was game over after that. That, that was the beginning of the end. I started tracking all my income before that. I hadn't done that. You know, you just show up to work and you're like, I get my paycheck. I started tracking my income outside of work. So I was like, what's my side hustle making me? And it took me a while. You know, I think from the time I started tracking my income, probably took me about a year, maybe a year and a half to build that trust with myself. Because that's really where the fear is. You go, well, that's great. I just made 1000 bucks or a couple thousand bucks, but can I do that consistently? That's the real question before you can quit your job. And go do something else. So I kind of pieced together a couple side hustles, and I wanted to gather data to go, okay, for six months, can I prove that I can consistently generate a certain amount of income outside of my job? And once I got around 50% of my monthly paycheck, I was like, I bet if I had eight more hours in the day, because I was only doing this at night a couple hours. If I had eight more hours in the day, could I fill in the other 50%? That was the bet I was making. And I was like, yeah, I think I can. And so in 2016, same day I published my first book, actually, so Book Goes Live. And it was my last day of work, which is really cool. I didn't mean for that to happen. Just happened.

And.

And I left my job, and two weeks later, I freaked out because you don't have a paycheck, hit your bank account, and you're like, oh, I need to start making some money here or I'm not going to pay my bills. And my burn rate was super low. I was living in a really rundown apartment in Chicago, and it's not like I was living lavishly at all. And that's how I fell into ghostwriting. It was my first. My very first real paid writing opportunity after I quit my job was at ghostwriting.

Okay, that brings us very nicely to our five different ways to make a million dollars as a writer. What were your, like, what side hustle income was getting you to this 50% point while you were still working?

The big one was in end of 2015, I want to say maybe early 2016. So I. A little backstory in 2015, 2016, Quora had a really cool partnership with all of the major publications. So they partnered with Inc, Forbes, Fortune, Time, cnbc, all of these. And what they were doing is they had a team that would crawl really great Quora answers, and then they would pitch the Quora answers to the major publications. And I figured this out, and I spent, I don't know, 20, 30 hours going through Quora and just researching what are all the things most likely to get republished? Like, what's the. The signal for CNBC is going to take a core answer, you know, And I. I mean, I basically came up with a. Well, here's what they're looking for. Here's the type of topic, here's the structure. A lot of them just wanted listicles, you know, And I started deliberately writing my Quora answers in that style. So I was like, that's the Goal, you know? And again, to what end? I didn't know. I was just curious. And I was like, I bet if I get a bunch of Quora Answers republished, something will happen. So I started writing in that style, and I'm pretty sure I set the record in 2015, 2016 for the most Quora Answers republished by other major publications in a year. I had dozens and dozens and dozens, and I got them in every major pub. And there was a point where Inc. Magazine was republishing one of my Quora Answers every week for months. And so I ended up getting a column with them. And how their columns worked. They changed it. But back then, how their columns worked is you would get paid per page view, so they'd pay you like a penny per page view. And to me, this was the mechanism that never existed, right? For writers, there is no YouTube and AdSense. So I was like, okay, that's fair. You're going to pay me per page view. If I can bring you traffic, I'm going to get paid. I. I had already figured out how to write viralcore answers, so I was like, okay, game on. Let's play. And they gave me this column and they were like, hey, can you do two to four columns per month? And I literally came back and I was like, can I do one a day? I will write 30 columns for you a month because I want to generate enough page views so that I can make enough money to quit my job. And they were like, you're nuts. But sure. And I did it. And literally every single day for a year and a half, I wrote an Inc. Magazine column, like, insane level of output. And I was still writing on Quora.

This was while you still had the job?

While I still had the job. So this was like approaching peak. It got even crazier in ghost writing after. But like, this was approaching the peak of what I could handle in a day or a week in terms of writing. And I ended up bringing in millions and millions and millions of page views for them. And it amounted to roughly. I mean, it's funny to look back on now, but I forget how the math worked out in terms of page views, but I probably was making three to five grand a month writing for ink. And I wasn't making that much as an entry level copywriter. So that was like 50% of my paycheck. And so once I had that, I was like, okay, if I had eight more hours in the day, my thinking was, could I write two columns a day? You know what I mean? I was like, Could I just double the input and double the output? So that was how I was making half my salary.

That's really cool.

There were easier ways to do it looking back, but it was an interesting mechanism at the time.

To what extent were. A bit of random question, but to what extent were these. Were these like evergreen content or like, was this literally a trade of time for money or was it actually a trade of. Because I feel like the moment you decorrelate your income from your time input, that's another inflection point that changes the game for a lot of people.

Yes. That didn't come until way later. So I thought that there would be a compounding effect. I thought as my library grows, there will be some evergreen effect and then my average monthly page views will go up. And it did. My average did go up a little bit, but it was not. There was no inflection point. And so in order for me to keep earning three, four, five grand a month, I needed to be churning out 20, 30, 40 columns a month. So there was a while, like it was until I got into ghostwriting, which was still trading time for money. It's just. It was a premium on my time.

Right.

But that inflection point didn't come till later.

Oh, okay. All right. So your day job, which I don't think we've mentioned yet, you were doing copywriting for an ad agency.

Yeah.

What is copywriting? I only recently realized, I was so confused. Like, copyright with a W versus copyright with the R, I, G, H, T.

And just like, yeah, copywriting with the W is. And there's different definitions for it. My job at the time was I was doing like all the work that nobody wanted to do. You know, I was writing social media copy for brands. I was proofreading proposals to try and land new clients. Like, anything with writing in this agency is what I was responsible for doing as a small agency. The real definition of copywriting is normally in the context of sales copy. So you're specifically writing things with the goal of selling a product or selling a service. So you're writing landing pages or you're writing emails or whatever it is. And there's a very specific. I don't even know if you call it style, but there's like rules to copywriting and sales copywriting and things that you need to do. Biggest thing is benefits, not features even that most people don't know. Don't talk about what you do. Talk about what you're going to unlock for the reader, for the customer, whoever. So my job, quote Unquote, as a copywriter was very basic. It was just sales copy proofreading or social media copy proofreading, stuff like that.

Oh, okay. And how much were you earning at the day job?

Oh man, like maybe 45k a year salary. I mean it was not a lot.

Yeah. And so when you started earning Those sort of 3 to 5k month from Inc. Magazine, that was, yeah, I guess like 50% of your, yeah, your thing.

And I didn't spend any of it. I didn't upgrade my life. I didn't go buy new clothes, I didn't. I just saved it because I wanted that as Runway, you know, I wanted to, when I quit my job, know that worst case scenario, I was good for like three months, four months, you know. So each of these were like very deliberate decisions along the way. But none, none of it was rash. It's not like I was jumping out the window going, oh, I just magically hope this all works out. Like it was always the next logical step and I tried to minimize the risk as much as possible.

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Let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking, I want to moonlight as a ghostwriter. What does it physically look like? Is it like if you find a client and then you hop on a zoom call with them and be like, hey, what do you want to write about? How does it work?

Yeah. So there's a ton of nuance, obviously. But the simplest way to explain it is recognize that anyone with a business or anyone with a fund or anyone with a profitable product wants to share who they are on the Internet. Because if they build an audience, they are going to attract more opportunity.

Right?

Or they're going to sell more of their product or service. So, first of all, recognizing that 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. And it's becoming less and less stigmatized. The same way that you go, I want to make videos, I'm going to hire a video editor. Well, writing's the same way. You're like, I want to write tweets, LinkedIn posts, articles, newsletters, whatever. You're like, I need a writer. So that stigma doesn't really exist anymore or less and less the what it actually looks like is you just get on the phone with the person or get on Zoom or whatever and you just go, okay, let's Forget the whole 30,000 foot strategy. Like this one thing. What do you want to say? Like just one. It's a tweet, it's a thread, it's an article. I always tried to remind people, like, we're not going to figure out your entire life mission here.

Right.

That will reveal itself.

Yeah.

You know, mentor had a great quote, which is, you can't steer a stationary ship.

Right.

If you're just sitting at your desk and you're just looking out into the world, you can anticipate it all you want, but the moment that ship leaves the harbor, if it starts raining, your plan is out the window. Right. So I would say that to these people over and over again and be like, the end will reveal itself. For now, let's just focus on what is the one thing you want to write. And all you're doing is just hurting their thinking. You're just kind of whittling it down, getting clear on what it is that they want to say in this one piece. And the process that I did is I would take the phone call, I would record it, and I would use this website called Rev, which allows you to transcribe things. I would get the transcript. And I liked to think of ghostwriting myself as, I'm not writing, I'm. I'm deleting. So you have a, you have a transcript and they're giving you all the information. And your job isn't really to sit down and recreate it. Your job is to remove all the tangents and all the fluff and all the things that don't have to do with the one thing that they're trying to say. And then you're just using their words and reorganizing it. That's the way I liked thinking of ghostwriting. And it's a skill, but if you can get good at it, you can make a killing.

Yeah, it's only recently I work with a ghostwriter for LinkedIn posts and stuff, because it's like I want to convert my videos where I've already said the stuff, into Tweet threads and LinkedIn posts, but I sure as hell don't want to do that myself. So, Kate, who wants to help out with this? And now that I've kind of seen what that process of working with a ghostwriter is like, I'm just kind of thinking like one of the, one of the ultimate side hustles these days is to be, is to be a video editor. Because now, having tried hiring video editors, it's just an absolute nightmare. And most people are suck at it. And if someone just took my skillshare class over a weekend, they could become like really good at video editing. I'm just like, why don't, why don't more people do this? It's only time people email me and be like, hey, I'm a student and I want to make money on the side. And was like, look, video editing is like a good starting point. Teach yourself the skill. Find YouTubers who need editing, because they all do, especially like podcasts, everything except content stuff. But increasingly I'm starting to say to people that's like, hey, you've got two options, video editing or writing. Actually, if you are good at writing, if you're a student and you've written essays and you can appreciate what blog post writing is compared to essay writing, there's zillions of the local orthodontist, the local lawyer, the local accountant. They all need ghostwriters. Way more so than video editors, actually. And it seems like an incredible opportunity.

It's. Yeah, it is incredible. And to be honest, it's even. I even think it's even easier now than even five, six, seven years ago when I was getting into it, which is just think about how many creators there are and how the whole game, if you are a profitable creator, if you have some sort of business or product or service connected to your creation attention engine, right, you need to scale yourself on the Internet with words. 50% of it could either be video, audio, and the other 50% is actual words and language. And so the lowest barrier to entry is a writer going to someone like you and going, I'm going to take your entire archive of YouTube videos. You've already done the work. And I'm going to extract all of the written content that you haven't created yet. And so as a ghostwriter, it's almost like humbling yourself and realizing you aren't getting paid to sit down and be brilliant and ghostwrite or ghost think. You already did the thinking. The ghostwriter just needs to go through your library and go, I'm going to scale you with words. And you can make six figures doing that from your bedroom in your sweatpants. I mean, that is not a hard job to get. And the way I like to frame it to people is, the easiest and fastest way to do it is to do it for free. First. Go find a creator. Go find an Entrepreneur, Go find someone that you think should be scaling themselves with words on the Internet and go, I'll do your first week of content for free. I'll write 10 threads for you for free. I'll write five blog posts for you for free. If you can do it well, that person will throw money at you.

Yeah, absolutely right. I'm thinking if someone emailed me and was like, I see you've got these 13 Skillshare classes. Your how to Study should be an ebook. I've written the first five chapters for you. I'd be like, oh, my God, join my team full time. I will do whatever it takes to hire the hell out of you. And no one has ever done that.

Yes, exactly.

It's so easy.

And so funny story. I went back to my college maybe like 5 years ago at this point, right at it was 6 to 12 months after I quit my job, and I went back to my school, and I was meeting up with a professor, and I saw another professor down the street or down the hall, and he happened to be teaching a class at the time, and he was one of my professors, and it was a small class, 15 students, and he was like, hey, as long as you're here, why don't you come talk to the class, Share some of your lessons learned? Because he had kind of seen some of my Internet writing and was like, oh, wow, there's starting to be some traction here. And I go in front of the class and he's like, all right, Cole, why don't you tell the aspiring writers here how they can start making money from their writing? And I literally said, don't start by trying to make money from your writing. Do it for free. And everyone in the class looked at me like I was crazy. And my teacher jumped in and he was like, well, no, no, no. I think what Cole's trying to say is, you know, charge your worth. You know, charge like an hourly rate or something. And I was like, no, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying start for free, prove you can do it, and then the opportunities will just waterfall all over you. And the problem with the reason people don't do that is because they're so afraid that they're going to get taken advantage of, or they're so afraid that they're doing something wrong, when really, if you offer to do something for free, what you're doing is you're removing all the friction if someone DMs you and goes, I want to write for you, but this is how much it Costs. You now have to allocate time and mindshare to think about whether or not that's a good idea.

Right?

Which you don't have the time to do. Any successful person doesn't have the time to do that, at least on command.

Right.

But you can easily remove all that friction by just going, hey, I already see what you're doing. I've already consumed 30 hours of your content. I've already extracted these five threads and these five blog posts for it. I want you to read it. Here you go. If you don't have time to read it, pass along to your team. And if you want more of it, let me know, mate.

This would be, like, literally my dream come true if anyone wants to DM me with that exact message.

And this is. This is what people don't understand is that the free work, the roi, like.

I'm tearing up at the thought of, like, how incredible it would be if someone actually did that. And, and. And the amount of emails I get from people being like, bro, what's the best business idea? I'm like, God damn it. Exactly. And what.

What people don't realize is I still do this. Yeah. Like, I still. When I meet the right person, I still go, you know what? Don't pay me for that. Even though I know that they've got the money and I know that I'm worth the money and they know I'm worth the money, I still, in the right circumstance, go, you know what? Don't pay me for it. I'll do it for free. Six months ago, I met a guy, really successful entrepreneur and investor, and he wanted help writing his speech. He was giving a commencement speech, and I was like, I could either charge money for this now or I can do this for free and I can call in a favor later. And I chose free because I knew, oh, okay, you know what? I see all these other outcomes that I could get later, and I bet if I do this for you for free, you are going to constantly think about ways to pay me back.

Right?

Because that's how that type of person thinks. And the reason I still make that decision is because people don't realize that the ROI on free work is exponential, whereas the ROI on paid work is not exponential. It's just fixed. It's like, hey, I'll pay you five grand, right? But I've done so much free work for people over the years that that's why my network is the way that it is, because people go, well, I remember when you helped me write my commencement Speech. So what do you need? Trying to raise money. Here's 10 people you're trying to do this. Here's the right person to talk to. You have a question about that, you should go talk to that person, mate.

It's game changing advice. Like the ROI on free work. I was just thinking, I was saying this to a friend the other day. I've worked with. Of the various coaches I've worked with, two come to mind and they were both people I knew through the network who were getting into coaching. And one offered to do it for me for free and the other one charged me for it. And the one who offered to do it for free, I have sent so much shit his way, so much traffic, plugged his course, whenever he's doing a course, plugged all of his stuff because I feel this profound sense of like, even though I could have easily afforded it and I knew he was worth it, we knew what was going on there. But the fact that he offered to do it for free makes me feel so indebted to him. Whereas the friend of mine who charged me for coaching, when he asked me to plug his stuff, I'm like, kind of. It's just, I mean, even even though he's a friend, it's a bit, it feels a bit more totally. Yeah. Weird. And a bit more transactional. I'm like, well, I mean, I could charge 20k for a sponsored video, like, et cetera, et cetera.

And here's, here's the. Exactly. And here's the thing is it often translates into paid work, right? If you start for free, it doesn't take very long for the person to go, this is amazing. Now I want to pay you, right? They will throw money at you. And that's the point is like, if you can prove that you can do it, the money is easy. But if you can't do it and they're not happy with the free work, then you shouldn't be charging for it in the first place. So it's an uncomfortable forcing function for you to learn. Am I creating something for this person that's worth being paid for? And if it's not, you have more work to go do more free work to get your skill up, right? And if it is, they throw money at you. It seems like it's the longer road, but it is the shortcut because it's the forcing function for your skill and the skill is the hard part.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm just. So many dots are connecting in my mind. One thing that I've been saying to kind of team members of mine who are now getting into like YouTube consulting and stuff on the side. And I'm always just like, hop on a free call and give as much value as you possibly can on that free call. And I guarantee at the end of it they're going to say, how can I, how can I hire you for this thing? And a lot of them are like, oh, but like, should I charge? I was like, no, no free call. Just give as much value as you possibly can. Similarly, my old housemate used to kind of help me out with like business type stuff. And she then met a few kind of massive YouTubers and helped them be like, oh, let's draw out an org chart, let's see how you're going to run the business. And they were like, shit, this person's incredible. I want to hire you for whatever amount of money you want. And it's just amazing how much people who are profitable and successful will throw money at people who are good. Because it's so hard to find people who are good at a thing and can demonstrate that they're actually good at the thing.

Yes, that's why. So we talked about, you can make a million dollars as a ghostwriter. And when I had my agency, we scaled that up to several million in revenue and that was, we did it the hard way. Like we made so many mistakes and the pricing should have been so much better and like, if I could go back, that business could have been so much more profitable than it was. But it was my first company and I made every mistake in the book. But the second one that now we're talking about is productizing yourself. So turning your knowledge in whatever domain and using writing as the ability to scale yourself and productize yourself. So we did this with ship 30 for 30, which is our course. So it's all the things that I and my business partner Dickie talk about in terms of writing. And then we scale it through an education course that's writing based. You can also do that with ebooks and you can do that with other assets. But the goal is instead of providing whatever you're doing as a service, so being like, I'm going to be a ghostwriter for you or I'm going to be a consultant for you or an editor for you.

Right.

It's all one to one, you're using time as your measure. Now you're just packaging it digitally and that allows you to scale it. 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 the whole. 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. You need to divorce the two.

Yeah, but I guess, like, you know, it's very useful to start up being paid for your time, because I think another mistake people make is jumping to let me create a course. And it's like, no one's going to buy it.

And that's why one of the things that I often encourage is start by providing a service. So it's like, start for free, prove you can do it. When you can do it, people will pay you. Trust that that will happen and they'll pay you well for it. And then use the paid work to learn what questions do people have, what problems are they facing? What are your unique frameworks for solving those problems?

Right?

Once you get paid to learn all of those things, then when you go to productize yourself, you're not sitting in a room going, well, how do I magically come up with all these answers? You already got paid to do it, so now you're just transforming your service into a digital product. And the whole model for this going back to free work is give away 99% of what you know for free.

Right?

The mistake everyone makes is they go, I'm going to productize myself. And before I tell you anything, you have to pay for it. Well, it's the same mistake as providing a service, right? You don't walk up to someone and go, hey, before you know what I can do, here's how much it costs. They're like, get out of here. But if you start by going, here's everything, here's how to think about it, here's how to solve the problems, here's the interesting frameworks to frame the solutions, here's everything you need to know. The person then goes, well, if all the free stuff was so great, then what's in the paid stuff?

Right?

And what most people don't realize is most courses, most books, most like paid membership communities, all of that, you aren't really buying information. What you're buying is implementation. You're buying accountability. You're buying access to the person that you want to learn from so you can use all the information in your course as your free content. It's just when someone pays, they're not buying just the information, right? It's that you packaged it. You're saving them time, you're Giving them access to you. You're answering their questions. That's what someone's paying for.

Yeah, I think one of the, one of the things that people seem to struggle with in this is like thinking. Thinking like, how do I phrase this? Like, almost like thinking like a consumer rather than thinking like a business.

Totally.

Kind of thing where I, where I.

See this where like just that thing.

We were talking about earlier about how someone like me will literally throw money at anyone who is good, who's demonstrated the ability to do the thing that's like unfathomable for people that don't have a business because it's like, well, of course I'm going to kind of try before I like, I mean, like, it's just a very kind of individual way of valuing money which, which tends to be very, very price sensitive and not appreciating what the ROI is for someone, someone with a business.

Totally.

And similarly, when we sell our YouTuber course, people tell us it's like, it's, it's too cheap because a business or a brand for whom that's like pocket change is almost going to think it's like scammy because it's so cheap, even though we charge several thousand dollars for it. And so just the way an individual values money versus the way a business values money or someone who is already making money just is just completely worlds apart.

This is, this is on my later list. You know, a book I want to write at some point is the different ways that people think about money and how quote, unquote, successful people think about money. And I want to help educate other people on the different ways that people who make money think about money in the sense that when you go to start a business or you pitch your services as a freelancer, you need to understand that the person you're talking to thinks about money totally differently than you do. Now that I have made some money, the way I look at money is totally different. And I make decisions not on, oh, how much does it cost? I make decisions around, well, how much time is that going to save me? Or a really great one is when I was broke, I would look at a $5,000 a month service as, oh, that's so expensive. But then as soon as you have a business and a business that's doing a million, 2 million, 3 million, 4 million, right. You start looking at the 5K a month as a negligible expense. And you don't realize that when you're starting out, right. Because when you're living in the rundown apartment, you're like 5k a month is a lot. Who would spend that? And same thing with now restaurants. It's like I noticed that my default, if I'm in a new city and I'm looking for a restaurant, what's the first thing that I do? I pull up Google and I sort by most expensive. Because there's a bias of, well, if it's more expensive, it's probably better. If you're pitching your services and you're pitching them at a discount, the person that you're trying to sell to is like, I don't want the Honda Accord, I want the Ferrari.

Right.

So it's all these very interesting ways of thinking about money that I. It takes a while to see it from the other side.

Yeah. I think one of the ways that I often think is these days is just in terms of sort of very back of the envelope ROI calculations. I booked a flight last night. I'm going to Pakistan in the new year for a cousin's wedding. And the economy class flight was £200 and the business class flight was £3,000. But doing the business class flight would allow me to leave a kind of team annual planning thing an extra two hours later and I was like 100% valuable. Because me being there with a team of 13 people to give two hours more input on vision and direction of the business is worth way more than £2,800. Hell yes.

That's a great example.

That's something I just would not be even able to fathom had I not. Were I not running a business. Because it's like, why the hell would anyone spend 3k on a flight where you could spend 200 quid for exactly the same thing total? That's like, you know, the, the value of money just completely, completely changes.

Yeah. Where are you staying? Do you have access to Internet or not? Does that allow you to work, yes or no? You know, can you make use of your time by meeting someone else there? There's so many other things that have to do with the decision than just the price tag. The price tag is often the easiest part. That's not what people get caught up on, it's how much. Every. Every single ghostwriting client that I had, it wasn't the price. They would ask me, how much time is this going to consume of mine?

Yeah.

So if I pay you three grand a month, four grand, five grand a month, do you need an hour of my time or do you need 20 hours of my time? That is the decision, it's not the Amount of money. And again, that takes. That's really hard to wrap your head around when you're. Especially when you're first starting out and you're trying to charge for things. Like, you can't understand that decision.

Yeah, I'm kind of seeing this from the other side now that various people on our team are doing this side hustle stuff. And they all say to me that, oh, my God. Kind of just speaking to people with businesses just makes me realise just how differently they think about money and how differently I think about money and now what they do. One of our ghostwriters is like, the way he negotiated a pay rise was basically being like, this thing does not require any input from you beyond 10 minutes a week. You never need to check the things. No one ever complains that this was not written by you. This is saving you a lot of time. And I was like, sure, let's 3x your thingy. Which was what he was asking for because it was still totally worth it.

Amazing segue. So we talked about ghostwriting and we talked about productizing yourself. So third, being sales copywriting. So the beauty and how you can make a lot of money as a sales copywriter is you want to divorce again. You want to divorce being paid for the effort versus the outcome.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of copywriters, sales copywriters that get paid, like, per asset, you know, so they go, hey, I want to charge, you know, five grand to rewrite your landing page, or I want to charge you, you know, 10 grand to redo your email course or whatever. And you can easily make six figures doing that. 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.

How does that work?

So, for example, 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.

Because if I know how, there's. I mean, what's the great. Is it the Picasso story where he sees the woman in the park and she's like, draw something for me. And he draws something on the napkin and then she goes, how much should I pay you for that? And he goes, 10 grand? She goes, what, it took you two minutes? You know? And he goes, yeah, but it took me a lifetime to learn how to draw like this. Right? So if I'm being paid to drive an outcome, it shouldn't matter whether it takes me 20 hours or two hours. I want to be compensated on the outcome that I drove, not on the effort. And so that's how a lot of especially really legendary sales copywriters, Gary Halpert, Eugene Schwartz, all these guys, how they made their fortunes was they would take a piece of the upside that they unlocked for the business or the product.

And it's so worth it for the business. Like, if someone. Again, like at the moment, when we do landing pages and stuff, we do it per, like, effort kind of unit. But if someone were to be like, hey, look, I will measure your conversion rate and. Or whatever, and I'm going to aim to double that. And I want, like, 10% of the upside. I'd be like, hell, yes.

Like, exactly.

Of course that's a trade I'm making any day of the week, because it's.

The exact same thing as a salesperson.

Yeah, right.

You go, hey, based on how much new revenue you bring in, we're going to give you a commission.

Yeah.

So you, as a writer, are basically being paid as a, quote, unquote, infinitely scalable salesperson. And if you can write things that prompt people to purchase or take an action, you should be rewarded for the fact that you unlocked that outcome.

How does one get good at becoming a sales copywriter?

I mean, like anything, you do it a lot, but study the greats. There's a lot of really amazing sales copywriters over the years. My personal favorite is Gary Halpert. I like saying Gary is what Hemingway would have been if Hemingway had gotten into advertising. Him and Hemingway have very similar, terse, minimalist styles, but Hemingway went the novel route and Gary Halpert went the I'm gonna sell products route. And also try and sell something yourself. The fastest way you're gonna learn is when you start writing things that prompt people to buy, and when you notice, oh, when I wrote this, no one bought, and when I wrote this, some people bought. Your subconscious is going to soak up all of those lessons and you're going to start to piece together your own framework on, well, how do I get people to buy? Nice.

Okay. Sales copywriting. So you said that kind of your first year as a ghostwriter, or your first few months as a ghostwriter, you were up to like 250k a year. But then you said that kind of changed and what happened at that point?

So now I like to, I call it the valley of death for freelancers who want to build agencies. So what happened was I got up to maybe like 20 or 30k a month as a ghostwriter and I, I mean I was working four hours a day talking to really smart people, making way more than I was making as a full time employee and having a blast. It was best case scenario. I was talking to a close friend of mine and I told him what was going on and he was like, we should turn this into a business. Think about what you're doing. We can break it apart. So we'll have editors who talk to the clients and we'll have writers who do the writing. He said, I will train the editors and I'll do the phone calls. He was in sales and that was a great skill for him. He's like, you'll do the writing and you'll train the writers. And in about 18 months we scaled that from me and him on his apartment couch to more than 20 full time employees, a couple million in revenue, and like 80 plus concurrent clients. And we had, I mean, just CEOs of publicly traded companies, Grammy winning musicians, New York Times bestselling authors, like all over the board and in every industry. And the problem was ghostwriting is such a subjective skill. You know, you're not selling plastic widgets, you're, you're writing something that the person on the other side goes, I want to put my name on that, that reflects me. And the misunderstanding that people have is ghostwriting is often not ghost thinking. Right. So these people aren't saying think for me, they're saying, I have my ideas, I just need you to clean it up and scale it.

Right.

And that was a very challenging business because first of all, everyone was full time, everyone was on salary, there was no contractors. So we had a ton of overhead. And even though we had no problem attracting and getting clients, the business was unstable in the sense that clients would churn, but the overhead was fixed. So you constantly needed to be filling up the bucket faster than the water was coming out. And it was no problem when it was a small agency and it was five people. But the more that we tried to scale, your sales machine needs to get more and more powerful in order to do that. And so the reason I call it the Valley of Death is there's this gap where a freelancer ghostwriter or a very small agency, so from, I'll call it like a quarter million to maybe a million in revenue.

Right?

Perfect. Yeah, right, perfect. Like just enough clients, just enough demand for you, just enough take home income to be worth your effort. But then between a million and like, I'd say the real number is like 8 million. That is the value of death. And your margins go down, your profitability is down, right? You're taking out less and less cash of the business. The sales machine needs to get more and more powerful. The, and basically the net of it is if you can't get to 10 million plus, your agency is going to just make you gray and unhappy. And I saw it everywhere. Every agency owner I talked to, it was like they were, you know, their whole life was a mess and gray hair and disheveled and stressed. They were all in the valley of death. And I ultimately came to the same realization. We got two and a half, three years in and I was stressed out in my mind and there was a point where I ended up in the hospital with shingles because I was so stressed and I was on painkillers and on antibiotics in my bed. Interviewing the next two full time people and the next two full time people. And I'd had enough. And I had this talk with my co founder and we were like, let's be done. Let's just fire everybody, go back to just you and me. We had been paying ourselves half of what I was making before we were in the valley of death. And I was like, I'm done. And so very weirdly, six months before the pandemic, we let everyone go. We scaled the business back to just us two. And then the pandemic hit five, six months later. And if we hadn't made that decision, the business would have been dead for sure.

Have you come across a guy called Daniel Priestley? He's written a book called Oversubscribed and Key Person of Influence and like stuff.

The name rings a bell, but not familiar.

So we had him on the pod a few months ago and he's actually in London as well. And he's become a friend and mentor. He has a model that's almost identical to yours, just coming at it a different way. The way he phrases it is that kind of zero to three people is like, okay, whatevs, three to 12 people. That's where you're either a struggling boutique or you're a lifestyle boutique. And the difference there is if you have 100k revenue per employee, you're a lifestyle business. You're like living the dream. Fun, freedom, flexibility. So from like 300k to 1.2 million if you have 3 to 12 people. And then for him, 12 to 40 people is the desert where companies go to die, where you're too big to be small and too small to be big. And beyond 40 people, it's like, okay, now you're in performance business territory where you've already got all the systems and processes and blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you're optimising for fund freedom flexibility, cap your team size at 12. And what we have found is that when we had like 18 to 20 full time employees, it was a nightmare. Now that we have 12 full timers and everyone else is a contractor, it's such a breath of fresh air. I feel like I have zero stress. I spend all my time e just writing or filming or doing podcasts, which is what I love, and 0% of my time in meetings. But there was something magical about something magically bad about having kind of 18 to 20 full time employees where everything just felt like it was going to shit.

Yes.

And that seems to mirror your experience as well.

It's the same thing. And, you know, it's kind of a whole separate nuanced conversation, but oftentimes. So I'll say, I'll speak for myself. The mistake that I made was I equated success with headcount. So to me, it was like my ego. I was proud of myself when I said, oh, we have 15 full time employees, we have 20 full time, we have 23 full time, you know, and you start to realize that a, that's a horrible measure of success because you're literally bragging about the fact that your overhead is going up and your profitability is going down. So that's. I don't know what I was thinking. But the more important thing is when you're focused on headcount or you think about hiring in terms of roles. Most people start from the perspective of, okay, I need a project manager, I need a social media manager, I need a whatever.

Right.

So they think of the role. The more effective way of thinking about it is what is the task, what is the lever that you need and is that directly correlated to growth in the business? So are you a revenue critical employee or no? And the mistake that I found we were making was we were adding all these employees that even though, yes, they had things to do, they weren't revenue critical. You know, and that's where things start to fall apart, is you start looking for roles or you assume that each role is a full time thing. It's not most of those levers and Those tasks are not full time, they're part time and can easily be contracted out. And to your point.

Right.

Is if you can keep that below the 12 people. Ish. Mark. It's a really nice forcing function to go. I'm not going to think about hiring as the measure of success. I'm going to think about the levers that have to do with profitability as the measures of success. And actually less headcount is more successful than more.

Yeah. I think I kind of fell into the same trap a year or 18 months ago where initially I was doing the YouTube thing myself for two years. And then I read the E. Myth Revisited and had a mentor who encouraged me to hire and we got an editor and we got a writer and it was like, oh my God, incredible. Like so good having like two, three, four people on the team. And then we were like, hey, we're making all this money through courses. What if we got like someone to help produce the courses? Cool. 5, 6, 7 people on the team. And then our cohort based course really took off and suddenly we had more money than I knew what to do with. It's like, well, all this millions are sitting in the business account doing absolutely jackal, so let's hire some people. And that was the mistake. The mistake was thinking that there is a linear correlation between a new employee doing a thing that theoretically should contribute to revenue and the real world of that thing, the communication and managerial overheads associated with having an extra person on the team, even if their thing is contributing to revenue. The whole system ended up slowing down. And I was in my mind trying to figure out like ROI calculations for every employee and all this kind of stuff and it just turned, turned into an absolute nightmare.

Yeah, but most people, most people are not revenue critical. And that, that was one of the harder lessons for me in that first business.

So if you were to do it.

Again, would you only hire full timers who are revenue critical and then contract the rest? How would you be thinking about that?

I would either do it as I would keep it very, very small. Like we had an, we had such an amazing business when it was just five people.

Yeah.

Like, and looking back on that, I was like, I wish I knew how good I had it at that moment. Because me and my co founder were essentially out of the business. We had just, we had just enough people to run it and we could just oversee and focus on bringing in new clients. And we didn't need a ton of clients because it was a small team. You know, it was like it was perfect. And so I would either do that again and keep them full time and just. And almost operate at a deficit intentionally. Like I'd rather have a wait list for clients than constantly be like we need 10 new clients a month, you know, So I would either do that or I would go the contractor route. But same thing, I would probably keep it small. And the thing that I try and educate talented writers on is you will probably make more. So that valley of death. You will probably make more money just doing what you do individually and scaling your pricing in a niche and being the best person in that niche. Just working for yourself. You will probably make more money. You don't need an agency. And whenever someone thinks about scaling themselves with an agency, I always try and stop them and I'm like, you do not need this. You're actually probably going to make the same or less money because now you have other people to take care of. So if you're a really talented writer, you might as well just work for yourself.

Yeah, it seems like the agency game is becoming like. I feel like a few years ago if you looked at the category of make money online on YouTube, dropshipping, affiliate marketing was all the rage. These days it's all about social media marketing agencies. And there's like a few kind of big YouTubers, one of whom we had on the pod a few months ago, who have courses teaching people how to set up agencies and stuff. And broadly young and broke people who watch these sorts of videos how to make money on the Internet are thinking that an SMMA social media marketing agency is like the key to riches and wealth. But I think that thing of the genuinely is a valley of death between 1 and 10 million where things start to break.

And there's a nuance here which is you can be a one person agency.

Right.

A lot of times the, the agency education is really just about productizing your service and organizing it and, and you know, you can have the service and then you can scale it with some digital products like, and you can do all of that as a one person shop. That's fine. The myth though is, oh, if I hire more people, my income just goes up to the right. That's not how it works. And your headaches go up and it demands a totally different skill set. And you go from being a writer or practitioner into being a manager. Your whole life is different. And so if that's what you want, go ahead and do it. But if you're a writer or you're really great at a specialty skill set, you're better off just scaling and increasing your earnings and charging more and working with higher and higher quality people than you are going. Well, let me scale horizontally.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. One of the. One of the ways I think about this, which kind of really actually helped shape a lot of decisions in the business, is that if I won the lottery or if I took money out of the equation, how would I want to be spending my time? And I found that, like, when we had 20 people on the payroll, the ways I was spending my time were radically different to how I wanted to be spending my time. Whereas now that we have basically the same people, but, like, half of them are contractors and the other half are employees, now I'm spending all my time doing the things I actually want to be doing. And I find that this is a good. Similarly, I know people who just really enjoy writing, who actually want to do writing. They don't want to manage an agency of writers. They want to do the writing because it's fun.

Right.

I was that person, and it took me. Yeah, it was a hard lesson to learn. Like, I don't want to manage 20 writers. You know, I'm really good at what I do. I just want to be paid a premium to do what I do.

Nice. Okay, so so far, we talked about kind of five different ways to make seven figures as a writer. We talked about writing as a service like ghostwriting, and how essentially by just starting for free, doing it for someone really well, they're going to throw money at you and also throw referrals at you because, you know, it's just a thing in the world of business that people who are successful know other people who have made. Made lots of money and who need the same thing. So that's just like, easy. Easy enough in inverted commas. We've talked about productizing your service and turning it into more of like, well, agency, slash digital products. We talked about sales, copywriting. We had, like, paid. Paid newsletters. What's the deal with that?

Paid newsletters are. They're both an older category, and now it's being reinvented by substack. So all a paid newsletter is is you just being paid for your ability to scale a certain type of idea, framework, news, whatever the benefit is to the reader. And so when someone goes, I'm going to start a paid newsletter, they think, oh, just because it's a paid thing, I'm going to make money from it. No, that's not the case. That's like saying, just because I wrote a book People are going to buy it. People don't buy the asset. No one buys a book, no one buys a paid newsletter. What the person's buying is an answer to a question. They're buying a certain type of outcome. And the paid newsletter is just a way of delivering that or scaling that. To me, there's really only two types of paid newsletters that work. You either have timely newsletters where the benefit is, you're saving me time. So you as the newsletter creator, go out there and you're going to dig through all the information, you're going to do the research, you're going to round up all the statistics and the facts and you know, and you're, I'm paying you to go do all of that time and you're going to compress it down for me. And because you're saving me so much time, I'm going to pay you for that.

Like trends that are.

Yeah, so that's one side of the barbell and then the other side of the barbell is the complete opposite. You go, I want access to quote unquote, insider information. I want expert level insights. So this person is a domain expert. They're going really deep. And you are. It's almost like you're paying to get the, I want coffee with you at scale.

Right?

So someone's like, I'm an expert in this thing. You pay me 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, whatever it is, and you're getting access to my frameworks, my insights, my. And I'm going to take you down the rabbit hole. And that's the barbell. You're either in super timely or super timeless and shallow or deep. And any newsletter that sits in the middle, like, the biggest mistake is people go subscribe to my newsletter. Nobody cares about your newsletter. They care. Is this a trade for time? I'm paying you to save me time, or is this a trade for expertise? I'm paying you to shorten my growth curve.

Yes. So like Ben Thompson, the stratecheries of the world are like the in depth analysis on a topic that this guy's been in for the last 20 years. Totally. And then the trends of the world are like, we've got a team of researchers who are going to research the best trends and we're going to save you time as an investor, as a business person to be able to see what the market wants.

And that's the barbell. Yes, there are outliers, but 99% of the time successful paid newsletters fall into one of those two Categories. And again, you have to start from the thinking place of you are not writing what you want to write about and then charging for it. You have to start from the place of, I am starting a business called a paid newsletter business. And what am I in the business of doing? Saving people time or giving people expertise? Those are the two businesses. And you need to be clear on which business you want to start.

Yeah.

And I guess a mistake that people make with this is almost thinking of a paid newsletter as sort of a Patreon equivalent of like, hey, you like my newsletter every week where I share my. My what. What I'm getting up to in my life, you know, as with some. Some percentage, feel free to support me kind of vibe.

Huge mistake. Yeah. Because nobody. I mean, look, it's not just creators who make this mistake.

Go.

Go to any multibillion dollar company's website on the sidebar. They go, subscribe to our newsletter. You're like, why? Even free newsletters can't get people to read it.

Right.

Because the val. The value to the reader isn't you have a newsletter, the value is which one is it? You're saving me time or you're saving me years and shortening my growth curve. And so you going subscribe to Ali's newsletter. Yeah, some people might, but that is not the lever that makes the paid newsletter go.

Yeah. And I guess even in the creator zone, if we think of Tim Ferriss 5 bullet Friday, the way he pitches it is that every Friday, it's just five things that I've curated because I come across interesting things and I will save you time because. And you can try these things out. And it's not even a paid newsletter, it's just a free one.

And you can go the free route and monetize with ads, which is what he did, which is the hustle. Morning brew. All ads work, but subscription revenue is king.

Right.

And it doesn't take very much for you to go, okay, if I can get a thousand people on my paid newsletter, I'm living now. You're making six figures. That's amazing. The math is it's not that hard to make six figures as a writer on the Internet. If you can unhook your thinking from, I'm writing what I want to write about and people are going to pay me. You're starting a business. The business is you're in the business of serving readers with your writing. And so the only way, like, I think you can get to six figures just fumbling around, but the only way that you're going to get to seven is by being really clear which side of the barbell are you on?

Yeah, this is like an.

I feel like I've only, I've only recently developed this appreciation of like, almost like the difference between six, seven, six figures and seven figures. Because having, like, I've now been in that zone for the last, like many years, but I have zero, like, at all, like zero experience at the eight figure range. And so when I speak to like, you know, I interviewed Alex Formozi and he was just like, oh, well, you know, six figures, single channel, single target, single avatar, single product, easy, seven figures, blah, blah, blah, easy. I suppose you get to 5 million by blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, 15 million is a lot harder because I'm just, and I'm just like, okay, this is now a level of knowledge that I just cannot even appreciate because I'm kind of stuck in the seven figure category myself. And similarly, a lot of viewers or listeners are stuck in the five figure category where they've got a job and they aspire to get to six figures. Where it's like, oh my God, if I could make six figures doing what I love. Are you writing for four hours a day? Hell yeah, sign me up. And then you get to that point and you almost kind of realize that, yeah, this thing of six figures isn't that hard, but seven figures is, is like my current model. But someone like hwamozi might think 7 figures not that hard, 8 figures maybe is. And it's just like different levels of experience get you to different kind of number of zeros on the end of your, on the end of your balance sheet.

Totally.

Yeah.

It's. There's different models and mental models for each one. And also it just depends on which business you're in. And are you, are you okay with the business that you choose? You know, like, for example, I love writing books. You can make millions of dollars writing books, but it's a lot easier to make millions of dollars providing a service or, you know, like being a ghostwriter as a service or productizing yourself or building a course or an education product. So it's possible to do all of these things. It's just, is it the thing that you actually want to spend time doing? And that to me is the more important question, you know, like, are you playing the game that you want to play?

Yeah, yeah. I was speaking to another entrepreneur friend the other day, and one a dilemma that I put to her was that, like, yeah, I feel like, you know, now that we're you know, this YouTube channel is at least somewhat successful. There's all these like different ways of making money and I just like, don't really know which way, like which ones we should be going for. And the analogy that she used was like, she was like, oh, you know, the way I think of this is that there's all these different money clouds in the air and you can make any of them rain. But the point is you just want to figure out which ones align with what you actually want to do and your own values. And then you just ignore all the other 99% of them and just actively decide, these are the ones I'm focusing on.

Yeah, sick.

Cool. So writing books. How does one make money through writing books?

So the big question with this is self publishing versus traditional publishing. So just for a little context, so most people don't know that a conventional publishing deal goes like this. They give you an advance. That advance is predicated on your existing audience, right? It's often not the quality of the book, it's your existing audience. And how the deal structure works is they'll probably give you a, we'll call it 8% on the really low end, 15% on the high end, royalty. So the real way to think about it is the advance they're giving you. They're buying 85% of your book. So imagine your book is a business and an investor comes along and goes, I want to buy into your business. I'm going to take 85% and I'm going to give you this advance. The advance for most people, I mean, I'll say probably the average is somewhere between 10, 20K all the way to maybe 100, maybe 2, 250K. Anything above that, you have a giant audience or you're a celebrity like period, and anything below that. The reason they're giving you that is because your audience is growing and they believe that you will be bigger tomorrow than you are today. So it's worth asking the question, if the publisher is willing to give you that, why are they willing to give you that? And if they're going to give you 100k, that means they think they can make a million. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about your deal. The other side of it is self publishing. Most people don't know how easy self publishing is. You can do print on demand on Amazon. You upload your book. Anyone can do that. Every time a book gets sold, you get your share. And if it's a print book, all Amazon does is they extract their printing Cost. So say the printing cost is $3, so they're selling the book for 10, they extract the three because that's what it cost them to print. They ship it to the person and then you get your split something like 65%, you know, whatever it is. And that's how self publishing works. And so there's a bit of an irony in the sense that you are only going to get a publishing deal if you have an audience. But if you have an audience, you could and should just self publish because you're going to make more money. And it's important to do the napkin math on how many copies do you need to sell if you're only getting 15% of every sale, or if you're getting 65, 70% of every sale on Amazon or 100% on your own site. And after you do the math, you realize you need to sell close to 10 times more books with a traditional deal than if you just self publish. So oftentimes you will make a lot more money just self publishing. And the only time, in my opinion, the only time you should take a traditional publishing deal is there's three criteria. It's either a personal development book, it's a personal finance book, and you are swinging for I want to write a New York Times bestseller, Wall Street Journal bestseller. And by the way, the only way that you're going to hit that list is probably if you're writing a personal development book or a personal finance book, because that's the vast majority, right? And even further, if you want a chance at hitting that list, be prepared to spend a lot of your own money as well. So to me, that's the only time you should be playing that game is like, I've got everything in place. I want to swing for the fences, I want to do this thing right. If not, if you just want to make money, self publish a lot of this stuff.

Like, I mean, I guess maybe not ghostwriting sales, copywriting and productizing your service, but certainly paid newsletter and writing books and certainly selling a course and stuff all seem to be predicated on building an audience. I know this is a huge ass question, but how does one build an audience with online writing? What's the playbook?

The starting point is if you want to build an audience, don't focus on building an audience. The fallacy that people have is if a gazillion people are following me, then I can do something. And that's really not how it works. How it works is you are consistently delivering something that's valuable to people, and then they follow you as a result. And the other point is, just because you have a big number of followers doesn't mean that they're the right kind of followers. It doesn't mean that they're the people most likely to then go buy a product or service. So if you start by going, I just want to build an audience. Well, if you build an audience around one thing, and then you go and launch a product or service or business that is unrelated to that, those people aren't going to convert, right? So if you're just out here making memes, getting half a million followers, and then you're like, and here I'm starting a ghostwriting company, there's going to be a mismatch. And so the whole key is you want to take a. This is like the biggest thing that we share with people in ship 30, which is you want to take a data driven approach. The whole idea behind digital writing is that you've accelerated your feedback loop. So legacy world of writing. Hemingway sits down, he spends four years writing a novel, 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. That's the feedback loop. Whereas today 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. And if you do that and you constantly take a data driven approach, every time you write something, you should be learning, who is this resonating with? Is this something I want to keep writing about? Every time you see a breakout data point, you go, oh, maybe I should double down on that. And you just keep accelerating your niche over and over and over again. I'm sure as you've been making videos over the years, you started to recognize, oh, when I make this type of video, the chart goes up and to the right. And when I make this type of video, it flatlines or it goes down. And intuitively you and every other creator goes, I'm going to keep doing the thing that's working.

Right?

And so what we try and educate people on is just make that decision conscious right from the very beginning. Notice what's working. And you can accelerate your feedback loop and your growth curve by just doubling down on the winners and cutting the losers.

Yeah, we get this problem a lot in our YouTuber course, where people get so hung up on what's my niche and I always try. And the way I describe it is like the architect approach versus the archaeologist approach, where it's like an architect has the plans for the whole house before they lay a single brick. Whereas an archaeologist kind of goes to one site, they do a bit of digging, then they go to another one, dig some more, go to another site, and then, oh shit, I've struck some gold. They keep on excavating, they dig some more. And unless you are, for example, in the world of YouTube, a kind of Matt D' Avella, where you've been making documentaries about documentaries on Netflix for 10 years and you already know how to make a bang video. Even then he did a lot of archaeologisting to get to his niche. Or a Peter McKinnon where it's like, I've been a photographer videographer for 10 years and now I'm going to teach the thing. At that point maybe it makes sense to sort of come in with actively thinking I'm going to stand out in the space of photography tutorials. But for most other people, especially while you're learning the craft and figuring things out, like you just gotta throw loads of spaghetti at the wall, dig in loads of sites, and the ones that seem to stick, you double down on those and kind of keep your mind open.

It's the way we call this lean writing. So just you acknowledging that you are not the genius at the table.

Right?

Just create data points and double down on the winners. It always looks cleaner from the outside. But what most people don't know. Okay, so Ryan Holiday is a great example. Ryan Holiday was a marketer and his first book was about marketing and his second or third book, Same Thing, was about growth hacker marketing. Then he goes and writes this blog post for Tim ferriss called Stoicism101. And the blog post goes crazy. And he gets all these emails and he gets all this feedback and data saying there's something interesting about this. So he goes, I'm going to double down on it. And he writes a book called the Obstacle is the Way. He even tells the story. He goes, I didn't get a very big advance for the Obstacle Is the Way because it was new and it was an unproven data point. And the publisher goes, well, we're valuing you as a marketing writer and you want to write about this new thing. And now he's the best selling, most well known stoicism writer in the world. It looks really clean from the outside. They're like, oh, you constructed this from the beginning. That's not true. He literally just created a data point, saw that it won and doubled down on it. Most people don't know the same thing about Mark Manson, right? Mark Manson didn't sit down and go, I'm going to write this insanely amazing best selling book sell r of not giving a fuck. 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 Fuck.

Right?

And what did he do? He just expanded the blog post into a book. There's so many examples of lean writing out in the world and it's just from the outside, as consumers, we think it's this beautifully orchestrated, everything's perfect from the beginning. It's not.

Yeah, yeah. I think the other cool thing there is that even though Ryan Holiday and Mark Manson are like deca millionaires by this point, from their various things, still most people have not heard of them. And it's just like, you know, I.

Was at a dinner the other day.

And I just casually throw out the name Jordan Peterson and like half of people were like, who's that? I was like, what? Come on. And when I mentioned Ryan Holiday amongst like normal people, almost no one has heard of him. And it's just like this guy's like stupidly successful and is like making tons and tons and tons of money, doing the thing that he loves and working four hours a day and spending time with his family and his farm. Deca millionaire, probably. And like most people haven't heard of him, which is very like a comforting thought, that you don't actually need to be like Ed Sheeran levels of famous to make loads of money and have a really successful career.

I was going to say there's a positive takeaway from that, which is you don't need that many people. Paid newsletter. Great example.

Right?

You don't need that many people to start making six figures as a writer. If you're self publishing books, you don't need that many people buying your book for it to start being really profitable for you. So that's part of what I love. Again, no one educated me on that. I had to figure a lot of this out on my own. But what I love sharing with other writers is realizing that you don't need to be J.K. rowling to live an awesome life. You know, you don't need to be this insanely best selling, I smash all these records. Success is a lot easier if you just focus on a small number of people focusing on solving their problems, answering their questions, and using writing as the vehicle for scaling that information.

So let's say someone's listening to this and they're like, cool, I want to get started with writing online. And they might have come across the advice that I was actually peddling a few years ago of like, start a blog. How do you feel about starting a blog these days?

My favorite, my favorite question. Blogging is the digital equivalent of being a legacy writer. You know, it's. You think again, what is a blog? It's your website. You think you're the important part. There's a saying I love repeating to writers in chip 30, which is, you are not the main character of your story. The reader is the main character.

Nice. I like that. I'm going to steal that.

The moment you realize that, you realize that you are in the business of serving the reader. That is literally what you are being paid to do. And so a blog is like, well, what is that? It's the writer going, I'm super special. Here's my fonts, here's my website, here's my writings, here's my color scheme, here's my pictures. The reader doesn't care about any of that. Point A, they care about what you can do for them. Point B is there's no distribution. Flywheel. So how is anyone going to find your writing? The only people who know about your website or your blog are your mom and your dog.

Right?

So it's. You have no mechanism to get in front of readers.

I mean, I guess, I guess the kind of I think people might be thinking if they're in legacy mode is, well, if I write enough, eventually either people will share it and quote, it'll go viral through sharing, or I'll get traffic through Google.

Yeah. So, okay, so I'm feeding you basically.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just like a layup.

Right?

So what is traffic through Google? You know, the only way that you're going to rank. Who's going to rank for productivity on Google? Is it going to be you, or is it going to be Forbes, or is it going to be Skillshare or Udemy?

Right.

When Google is a search mechanism that businesses spend an insane amount of time, energy and money to own, you are never going to outrank Udemy for productivity. It's just not going to happen. And most writers, again, this is where it's like you have to slow down and really understand what goal are you working toward if you are. So the vast majority of writers, they sit down and they go, I want to write something. Okay, so you just want to write and then you want to reach certain people. Okay, great. What is SEO? SEO is the complete opposite of that. SEO is there's a search term and I want to own that search term. And I don't even care how the writing turns out. I just want to own that search term. Two completely different goals. So again, it's a fallacy where people go, if I just write on my blog, I'm going to rank on Google. You don't even know what that means. You're not going to rank. What are you going to rank for? Right, so it's like, that's part of, I feel like I'm on this quest, you know, and I have to like walk, I have to run around with the flag and be like, I try and educate every writer. Be like, what you were told is wrong. And let me explain to you why it's wrong. And let me show you a different way. Because so many writers, it's not that they're not talented, it's just they either were taught to think about it the wrong way or in my case, you're told you you can't make a living as a writer. There's never been a better time in history to make a living as a writer. You just have to understand how to make money as a writer.

Okay, so website is a no go website.

Should you have a website at all? So you can have a website and I think it's fine to treat it as a, like, this is where my best work lives, you know. But again, don't be confused. It's going to be way easier for you to get millions of views on your writing if you're publishing on Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Medium, anywhere that there's a social garden where lots of people are hanging out. The way that I like to explain it is think of it like you go to a party downtown in the city. We're in London, there's a pub. And the pub, there's people spilling out of the pub. And it's an amazing time. And you walk up there and you're whispering into every person's ear and you're like, hey, I throw really great parties too. You should come back to my flat. Trust me, it's amazing. Every time you show up with a blog post that's what you're doing. You're like, hey, I throw really great parties too. And everyone's like, no, I want to stay at the pub. It's amazing here. Everyone wants to stay in Twitter. Everyone wants to stay in LinkedIn. So you should be writing in the environment. And then, sure, your site is where your best work can live, but that's not what's going to drive the result.

Okay, so write on Twitter. Write on LinkedIn. Am I just. Okay, so let's say I'm writing on LinkedIn and I'm like, okay, so firstly, how do I decide? Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Quora vs. Medium. I know this kind of changes over time, but right now, what's the snapshot?

They go through different peaks and valleys, but both either are great. Twitter and LinkedIn I think have the best distribution right now. But to me, it doesn't really matter either. Or I love when people go, I don't think my niche exists here. It's like, there's hundreds of millions of people on these platforms. It exists. It's just you haven't figured out yet how to reach people, which leads to the second question, fallacy, which then the person goes, yeah, but I can't reach them unless I have an audience.

Okay?

Social platforms have changed. People don't understand how a social platform works. It doesn't matter if you have 100,000 followers or you have 10 followers. What happens every time you write something is a social platform feeds it to a small number of people. So it goes, we're going to show this to 25 people. And based on the ratio, based on the number of people in that small group that interact, if it is above the majority, we're going to show it to more people. And if it's below, we're not going to show it to as many people. So that's how you have someone who, you know, you, me, anyone who has a larger following. It doesn't matter if you have 100k followers, 100k people aren't seeing your content. The only way that it's getting distributed is if the thing that you wrote keeps crossing the next threshold where the platform goes, this is worth being shown to more people, which means everyone's on a level playing field. You don't need a huge audience. It's just about the quality of what you're creating.

How do you figure out what to create? Someone listening to this is like, oh, okay, so I guess I should write on Twitter. What the hell am I going to write on Twitter or LinkedIn?

So there's a really great, like beginner framework that we share with people right in the first week of Ship 30, which we call for who so that. So every time you sit down to write, who are you creating for so that they can do what? Okay, so before you write a single word at the top of your page, you should write for who so that. Okay, so for who? So this is writing advice for beginners so that they can outcome, outcome, outcome, so that they can build an audience, accumulate tens of millions of views, make their first dollar online. And if you just start from the for who so that over and over again, you're in great territory. And the thing that is important to remind people is it's not that you make that decision once and then that's the only thing you can do. This is not a marriage decision. Seven years ago I was writing about bodybuilding on the Internet. Nobody cares. Now that's fine, you can change over time. But if you start every single thing that you create with the for who so that framework, then you can test different audiences, you can test different outcomes, and then you take that data driven, lean writing approach and you go, well, every time I write for who so that here it performs well. And every time I write for who so that over here it doesn't perform well. Well, what should you do? I'll double down on my winner, cut my loser.

Right.

And all of a sudden it removes all this pressure of you have to sit down and be the genius in the room and go, what's your niche? Just let the data tell you.

Right?

The data told Ryan Holiday, stoicism is where the opportunity is. The data told Mark Manson, hey, life advice and the subtle art of not giving a fuck is where the opportunity is. Just follow the data.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess at that point people like.

A question that I often get is that, but what if I don't like what the data tells me?

What if, like, what if I don't.

Want to pander to the audience kind of thing? And like, what if I actually do want to do all this other, these other things that I'm more interested in?

You can do that?

Yeah.

You know, again, you have the freedom. And an important thing to remember is just because something performs well doesn't mean you have to do that. So I've written things that have gone viral that then the next day I was like, that's cool, but that's not really what I want to write about. Okay, great, push it to the side. Create some new data points, see what happens.

Right.

That's again, it's not a marriage decision. You can keep experimenting, you can keep evolving.

Yeah, I have a friend who is doing this kind of method with her YouTube channel and she's kind of thrown some spaghetti at the wall, seen what sticks, double down on the stuff that sticks while still kind of doing a little bit more spaghetti frying. And she had a video go viral on a topic that she didn't really. She was like, ugh.

I mean the video's gone viral, but.

Like, I actually don't think I want to make videos on that particular topic. But the concern is I have now gained an audience of like 10,000 people. An extra like 25% of my subscriber count has now come from that video. So therefore, like, am I kind of shooting myself in the foot by ignoring that, that segment of the market? And I guess I kind of had this quick problem when I like a year into my YouTube channel, I made a video about how I take notes on my iPad Pro. And all of a sudden half my subscribers were from that, from that one video. And I was like, damn, I used to be a how to get into med school channel and now I'm a freaking tech. Tech youtuber. What the hell is going on there? And often found this struggle between like trying to imagine the mass of the audience and be like, oh, but like some of them are like kind of 13 year old girls doing their school exams and wanting to learn how to study a bit harder and be motivated. And the Others are the 38 year old tech bros wanting to learn about the latest iPad. What the hell is going on? How would you approach that kind of thing?

Yeah, that's why so much of this is being exposed to different ways of thinking, because these are all just decisions. One of the things that Quora taught me, and I love this framework, is the size of the question dictates the size of the audience. So for example, how big is the audience of person who wants to get into med school? That is way smaller than the size of audience that goes, how can I improve my note taking ability?

Right.

So the size of the question dictates the size of the audience. So when you see a data point, it's worth keeping in mind. Well, so like what's the category difference? Like, of course personal development is always probably going to outperform something like how to get into med school or something that's more niche. And so that's why part of the data. And again, this is a big thing that we teach people in ship 30 is part of the Data is not. More views equals better. You have other data points, like, what are the quality of comments? I know every time I write personal development, I'm going to get more views and the comments are going to be like, nice. Good one. This was really helpful. You know, whereas every time I write about ghostwriting or how to start a business by writing on the Internet, I'm gonna get less views, but I'm gonna get way higher quality comments and people asking me questions. And again, you can do both. And so it's. You have to, like, learn how to read the data and go, okay, well, this one's getting more and more attention, but this one's getting me more engagement. You can have both. Yeah, but which one is connected to your business? Which one is driving the outcome that you want?

Yeah.

And I guess almost a third data point is, how did you feel writing about those things?

Totally.

I don't care about talking about medical school admissions anymore, but I used to, seven years ago, when I made money off the back of that, and now it's just like, oh, whatever. I guess you don't really care to write about bodybuilding anymore.

Exactly.

Even if it maybe started to do well, you'd be like, hey, actually, I've got. This is my interest.

Yeah.

And you want to do the thing. You're always going to be more successful when you do the thing that you actually want to do. So that's why, again, you kind of have to divorce yourself from the. Well, just because it's getting more views doesn't mean that it's better. You know, what's. I like thinking of it as. Which is connected to your business.

Right.

If your business is like YouTube, although it changes with CPM and stuff, but like, with YouTube, it's more views equals more money.

Right.

So I would understand someone going, I want to optimize for views. Mr. Beast makes very strategic decisions to optimize for views.

Right.

But if your business is, you know, I want to teach you how to start writing online, or I want to teach you how to become a ghostwriter.

Right.

You actually don't care about views. Views is a pointless metric. I care whether people are engaging, commenting. What questions do they have? Am I answering the right questions? Am I moving those people into some sort of education that's going to help them? So you have to understand which metric and which lever is tied to the actual business that you're in.

Yeah. And I guess when you're. What do you do when you're starting out where you don't yet have that.

Business, you just test data points, right? Because what I always like paying attention to is so views and likes is kind of which way is the wind blowing? Is there interest in this direction or this direction? But comments are where you really start seeing what people need help with. So one of the big things I like pointing out to people is if one person comments on your video with a question, the average person or the average creator just goes, oh, someone commented. And then they like walk away and do whatever. But that one question is your first potential customer. DM them, talk to them, ask them what do you need help with. And if you just start interacting with those people, they're literally going to tell you the business to build. Because they're literally saying, if you just solve this problem, I will give you money.

I'm just throwing random questions at you here because this is great. What do you think are okay? So if someone has a field of.

Expertise.

At this point, you've been writing for 10 plus years and so it's easy enough for you to give advice on writing. What if someone listening to this is maybe, I don't know, early 20s, just graduated university, started their first job and feels like, I don't really have any skills, I don't really have any passions. I guess I, I go home and like watch tv. But like as everyone else does, like what, like how do, how do I figure out what. But, but they want to build this business on, on the Internet. And there's this sort of gap between like where they're at and seeing people who are experts allegedly sharing opinions on stuff where they feel like they don't have any expertise to share opinions on stuff.

So in ship 30, we call this the two year test, although it can also be the two day test or two hour test. When you were in fourth grade, you didn't want to learn from people who were in college. People who were in college seemed like adults to you. They seemed like your parents. Who you wanted to learn from was the fifth grader because you were like, hey, what's fifth grade? Like you wanted to learn from the person who's just a little bit ahead of you. And so when you're thinking about things to share, you want to use this, we call it the two year test. Where it's what? What are all the things that you've learned over the past two years? What are all the experiences you've had? What are all the pivotal moments? What are the lessons, the mistakes, the tips you would give? And all you're doing is you are creating for the version of yourself. Two years ago, you are the fifth grader telling the fourth grader, here's what you can expect. And if you just do that, that is the cure for imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is you trying to do the two year test forward. You're like, I'm going to pretend I'm two years in the future. You're not there yet. Your ideal reader or viewer or listener is two years behind you or two hours behind you. What did you just learn how to do? Great. Turn around and pass it to the person who doesn't know how to do that thing yet. That's the easiest solution.

Yeah, it's great how a lot of this stuff really converges on the YouTube advice as well.

Same thing.

The thing I tell people is if you're struggling with your niche, figure out, what have you learned in the last three years or five years or 10 years, depending on how old you are that you could potentially teach to someone who's in that position. And so even now, even though with me, I get emails from people in their 30s and 40s and 50s and stuff being like people coming up to the street of all ages saying that your videos are helpful, I find it very hard to imagine what I could possibly say that would be useful to a 45 year old with kids. Because it's like, what the hell do I know about productivity for people with kids? And I just still just imagine myself speaking to someone who's like 25. But there's that thing, I think in 12 immutable laws of marketing that the target is not the market. You can speak to one person, but actually your market could be a lot bigger than that.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great sales copywriting adage, which is if you write something for everyone, you write something for no one. Your goal is to write or create something that is so specific, it's universal to all the people that are like that person. So whenever you're thinking of I want to build an audience, you shouldn't think of a mass of people. You should think of one person. What is their name, where do they live, what problems do they have, what are they interested in? And if you're clear about that, you're going to attract all the other people who are like that person. But if you just think, I want to build an audience, you're in the mindset of, how do I get everyone? First of all, the more you try and get everyone, the more you get no one. Second of all, you don't need everyone. So what you were saying you don't need Ed Sheeran level of success.

Right.

You just need a thousand people. It's the famous essay a thousand true fans, or Legion, I think was the one who wrote 100 True Fans.

Right.

You just, you don't need as many people as you think.

Yeah.

It's like I often when. When people ask about this niche thing, there's a story that Tim Ferriss told where he was like, he really struggled with writing the four Hour Workweek, and then he decided to write it in a Gmail compose window to two of his friends.

Exactly.

That just made it so easier. So much easier. Because it feels like you're writing to a single person rather than trying to imagine a.

Well, analytics tell me my audience is.

Like 15 to 54, living in the UK, the US, Australia, India, China. How do you even begin to imagine that?

That is exactly what Quora taught me, is Quora was literally one person saying, I have this question and what did Quora do? It scaled my answer to that one person's question to everyone else who had that question. So you would have Quora answers get millions and millions of views. But it started by answering one person's question and then the platform scaled it to everyone else. And Twitter's the same, LinkedIn's the same, Medium's the same, every platform. YouTube's the same. You start with the one person's question and then the platform's responsible for distributing it, which is what your blog doesn't do.

Yeah.

Importance of having your own email list.

So, again, depends on what your goal is. Like, you can have a successful freelance writing or ghostwriting business without an email list. You can have a successful YouTube channel without an email list. But as soon as you start getting into productizing yourself, a paid newsletter is inherently a list. Or like writing and selling a book, you want to have some sort of list because you want to be able to reach those people directly. I think the biggest mistake authors make is they go, I'm going to set out to write a book, and they have no attention engine, they have no social following, they have no email list. You need some way of interacting with readers because the book otherwise is just going to sit on the bookshelf with millions and millions and millions of other titles. No one's just going to pluck your book off the shelf.

Yeah, nice. So would it be a case of, again, let's say someone is a total beginner to this. Would you recommend they start off like, email list from day one and funnel people from their Twitter bio into the email list or try it out for a few years. At what point would you start to think about the email list?

The email list is an inflection point and it's a decision after you've clarified your writing in social environments. So you've written consistently, you've generated a bunch of data points, you've learned what works, you have a clear understanding of who you're trying to reach and help, what questions they have. And then the newsletter is just the more of that. So social is the I do it in X amount of words. I go into a certain level of depth. The newsletter is I'm going to do that for the same type of person, just way more. And again, then you have the barbell decision, am I saving you time or am I giving you expert level insight? The reality is, most people, especially when they're getting interested in something, you don't have the expert level insight. So go the other route, curate, save people time, be the one who's researching. You are now getting compensated to learn and build your skills. And over time, if you want to, you can translate over to now I am an expert.

Nice. To what extent can people quote? Like, expect a growth on things. Like if we take Twitter for example. You know, the thing I tell people for YouTube is do this one video every week for two years and I guarantee that'll change your life. But I can't put any numbers on it. I can't tell you whether you'll get 10k, 100k, a million followers or even.

If you'll get monetized at all.

But I can just tell you it'll change your life. And that kind of more like long term thinking without really being wedded to a particular outcome is at least how I approach the YouTube stuff. How do you think about that for I guess, Twitter, LinkedIn?

Yeah, I mean, so if we really want to talk about it as a like hedge on your time, energy and effort, the best, the best measure for success in writing online is just thinking about building your library. So every time someone comes to you with a question, every time someone goes, hey, what do you think about X? Notice how often you repeat yourself. So when you go have a coffee meeting, how many times do you say the same tidbits about yourself? How many times do you explain, well, this is my thought process on making videos. This is how I think about solving these problems.

Right.

Every time you're saying that you are manually doing the work, writing online or making videos or having a podcast, is your ability to scale that in the sense where now every time someone asks you that question, you don't have to repeat yourself, you go, I already wrote about it over here. So remove the audience, remove the. How many followers? Remove the email list, remove the money. Even still, just creating things on the Internet allows you to scale yourself digitally. So then the question just goes, do you think that there's benefit in scaling yourself on the Internet? Everyone's going to go, well, yeah, of course there is, because now you have a library that you can point to over and over and over again. That's like the greatest hedge on it all. It's not wasted time or effort.

What sort of success stories have you.

Seen from people that you know who have done the writing online thing?

Oh, huge. I mean, we have tons coming out of ship 30 now, where it's like they take the frameworks. We have so many people who have built audiences bigger than me on Twitter. That's best case scenario. I love seeing that because then that proves, hey, these things that we're teaching, they work. You just have to put them into place. And we've had people get tens of millions of views, insanely viral Twitter threads, build audiences of 100k, 200k, 300k, launch their own products, start making money on the Internet, made their first five grand, ten grand, twenty grand, fifty grand. Like it all, it is all possible. But for me, the reason why, like, someone can build a bigger audience faster than me almost always has to do with the category they're playing in, right? So for me, if my business is writing education, I don't care If I have 50k followers or 100k or 200k. I care about what is the conversion rate of the number of people who come in, they learn about these frameworks, and then they come over and decide to participate in the business. If someone else goes, I want to write about personal finance or I want to write about personal development. You can easily build an audience 10 times bigger than me, and that's fine. But I hope that you connect it to a business that's related to that audience.

Right?

So it all depends on what game you want to play and how are you measuring that success. But it's. All of this stuff is when I was in school, my teachers, which I always found weird and ironic, but they always said, not everyone can become a writer. And I kind of sat in class and I was like, well, then why are we all here? And 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 and it's possible. You just need to invest the time to learn some of these skills and put them into practice.

Fantastic. Cole, thank you so much. I think this is a good place to end this. There's still so much to talk about. Category design your next snow leopards and all that kind of stuff which I read recently, which is sick. Oh, cool. Yeah. Where can people learn more about you? Where can people find you?

Twitter is probably the easiest point now. NicholasCole77 See, I don't even point people to my website.

There you go.

And if anyone wants to start writing online, take the next cohort of ship 30 for 30.

Good stuff. And we'll put links to all of those in the video description and perhaps you could even hook us up with a discount code or something for ship 30. Nice. We'll put all of that in the video description and the show notes wherever you're watching or listening to this. So we'll definitely do a round two next time we're in the same geographical location again. I'm planning to visit the US Sometime in the new year, so we'll hook up.

Let me know. We'll get Dicky together. We'll do in Miami.

That'll be so good. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

Thanks, man.

Cheers.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description.

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