DON'T START A BLOG! (Why digital writers should start a Social Blog instead...)

What's up, everyone? My name is Nicholas Cole, but you can call me Cole. And if you love writing but aren't sure how to make a career out of it, how to make money from it, people have told you writers have to stay broke their entire lives. This is the channel for you. I've got so, so much I want to share. So in this video, I want to talk about the first of all, what is blogging? What is social blogging? And where should you be writing on the Internet? So this was the inspiration for this idea, was the inspiration for my last book, trying to see if I have it on my desk here, called the Art and Business of Online Writing. And the point of view that I open with in the book was basically, you shouldn't start a blog. Starting a blog is the biggest mistake that you can make as a writer on the Internet. And I've been sharing this perspective for years. Uh, this was not the first time that I've written about it. I've written about this on the Internet countless times before, and I've always gotten a lot of criticism for it. Uh, a lot of the opposing perspective has been. Blogs allow you to do a couple things. One, you know, you should have your own site. You should have your own blog. You should have some sort of part of yourself on the Internet that you own. There's a lot of opinion around you needing to own the platform. And I don't necessarily disagree with that. We'll just get into why. I don't think that that's why that matters as much as people say it does. The second thing is this kind of obsession around customizing the site, you know, oh, I want to be able to design it. I want to be able to choose what it looks like. You know, I've got my site pulled up here. I've been playing on the Internet for a long time. So I built this myself. I mean, I use Squarespace, but I am not super even. I know I'm not super proficient in building things like this. And so I can throw something together, but I'm aware of how difficult it is, you know, and I consider myself being pretty digitally savvy. And there are a lot of people in the world who don't have even, like, that level of skill or proficiency with some of these platforms or their ability to just figure it out, you know, and so what's their alternative? What do you do if you don't know how to get a site up and running? Well, what a lot of people do that have achieved some sort of success in their life already. They have a business, you know, they're entrepreneur, they've already made some money, they've, you know, had a great career for themselves is they go hire someone to build out a site. The reason they do that is again, it comes back to, oh, I want to be able to design it, I want to customize it, I want it to be my own. And again, I want to get into why I think that's a mistake and why that ends up being a lot of wasted money. And then the third is this idea of people wanting a place where they can write about whatever they want to write about. And it's when you hear people talk about, I want to launch my own site, I want to launch my own blog. The approach that they come at it from usually has to do with, I want this for myself. It's a very eye focused thing. You know, I want to write what I want to write about. And beneath that phrase, you can almost hear this little bit of, and I don't want any criticism, I don't want to hear anybody's opinion on it. I just want to do the thing that I want to do. And to that I say, if that's what you want to do, go do that. But there's an interesting irony that happens, and this isn't just true for people that want to start a blog, but I find this is true for a lot of people who want to write or just be a writer in general, is they say, I want to do this for me. And they say, I don't care what readers or what other people think of my writing. That's part A. And then immediately after, you know, after they write their first blog post and nobody reads it, they voice their frustration and they're frustrated and they go, hey, this is stupid. Everyone should pay attention to me. You know, why, why didn't this get more views? I'm smart, my writing's great. Why isn't this getting more views? And so the reason I point all of this out and I'm presenting this in a, in a certain way because you'll see how it all kind of lines up logically is you can't on one side of the spectrum say, I don't care. And so make, and then you make decisions around, well, these are the things that I want. And I don't really care whether people like it or don't like it, or they pay attention to it or don't pay attention to it. And then simultaneously also then voice your frustration and say, why aren't I Winning the game, right? Why aren't I getting readers? Why aren't people paying attention? And over the years, I've been writing online for a long time. I started writing online when I was a teenager. I had a gaming blog. When I was in high school, I kind of stopped writing online. I had a blog in college, and same thing I'm sharing here. I didn't get any viewership on it. When I was writing on the Internet, I had a blog, a gaming blog, in high school. But it actually wasn't really a blog. It was more of a social blog. It existed in a social environment, and so there were already readers there. It was very easy for me to get 5,10,000 readers on my gaming blog a day because I was tapping into this social environment, which is what we're going to talk about. And then I go and I started a conventional blog in college, because that's what I thought you were supposed to do. You know, conventional wisdom is, hey, if you want to be a writer, this was 10 years ago still, but. But if you want to be a writer and you want to write on the Internet, will you go start a blog? And of course, nobody read my blog because nobody knew it existed. And so I didn't stick with it. I had a blog for a couple months, and then I gave up. And then after I graduated college, I started writing on Quora again. I went back to the social environment, and immediately I started to gain traction. Couple months went by, I had my first Quora answer go viral, my second Quora answer go viral. Within a year, I had millions of views on my work, and that changed the whole trajectory of my writing career. And so the thing that I have an issue with is a couple, well, two big things. One is people say they don't care, but they do, you know, so they make decisions where they say, I just want to do this for me. But then really, they do care about the outcome, and they complain about it or they're frustrated by it, and then they usually give up as a result. So if you're giving up quickly, something's wrong, right? So I consider that not a very viable strategy. And the second is, once you start writing online, you start to realize that you don't know. First of all, you don't know what you don't know. And then second is the more you write, the more you start to learn that you don't really know what people want, want until you put it out there. And so the issue that I have with this strategy of I'm going to Invest in building a really beautiful, designed website. I'm going to invest in someone building out a blog for me. Money, right? I'm going to invest time in me figuring out how to build my own website or blog. I'm going to invest in getting a logo made. I'm going to invest in making my first blog post all beautiful and perfect and really well designed. There's all these things that people invest very heavily in at the beginning, and then they hit publish. And then they realize, wait a second, that actually wasn't really what readers were interested in. And now you have a problem, right? Because you just invested all this time or money or energy or whatever it is into a direction and then you started down that direction and then you realized, wait, this actually isn't the best direction for me now. I need to steer, I need to pivot, I need to go in a different direction. So with all that in mind, my perspective was, why not start from the opposite direction, right? Why not reverse engineer it? Why not say at the very beginning, I know nothing. I don't know yet what's going to resonate with readers. I don't know what my strengths and weaknesses are as a writer. I think I do. I have assumptions. You know, I assume this is what people want to hear about from me. I assume this is what I'm good at. But I don't objectively know. And I don't have data that tells me that I know or don't know, right? I'm just making assumptions. And so instead of starting from there, why not start and go, I don't know, I'm going to publish a bunch of stuff, I'm going to find out. And then as I learn, I'm going to listen to the data. And so that's what I started to do. And that's how I treated Quora after I graduated from school, from college. You know, I basically had a. Not basically. I did have a degree in creative writing. And not just creative writing, but fiction writing, if you can believe that, you can even get a degree in that. And all I did was start writing on Quora and listen to the data. And when I say data, I mean I was just paying attention to what did I write that got the most likes, what did I write that got the most comments, sparked the most conversation? What did I write that got the most impressions or views? I was just noticing what was happening. And of course, patterns emerged. So I had these patterns that told me, hey, when you write about life advice stuff, you get 10x more views than everything. Else I didn't know that at the beginning. I thought because I was really into bodybuilding at the time, I was really into health and fitness and nutrition. I would write these health and wellness answers on Quora, and I was like, everyone should want to know this. Like, I have the answer. This is what is going to perform well. And over and over and over again, the data kept telling me, yeah, it's doing okay, but this thing over here is what people really want to hear about from you. They don't really care, like, what you eat for breakfast. They care about the mindset, you know, they care about how you're thinking about it, how you're approaching it. And I had this point, you know, on the journey where I'm like, at a crossroads and I'm like, okay, do I keep hammering away at the thing that I think I like more or I think that people should like more, but the data's telling me isn't right? Or do I just listen to the data and I started listening to the data and the rest is history? I mean, the moment I started doing that, I was. I got to a point where I was averaging somewhere between 1 and 3 million views a month on my work, just on Quora. And then I started expanding it to medium. And I mean, I was doing millions and millions of impressions every single month from people reading my work. And the secret was it wasn't anything major. I just started listening to the data. Okay, so with all of that in mind, why would you go start a blog? This is my whole argument. Why would you go start a blog when in order to start a blog, that means you have to base all of your decisions off of what you currently know. And if you are brand new to, to writing online, or even if you've been doing it for a couple years, but you don't have that much conclusive data, why would you go start a blog or an invest in your own site when it's all based on assumption? And this is the whole thing that I try and share with people and just pass along this perspective. The benefit of writing in social environments, the benefit of starting a social blog is that it allows you to learn faster, it allows you to gather data faster, it allows you to confirm your assumptions faster, allows you to prove your assumptions wrong faster. It allows you to build relationships with readers faster, allows you to get feedback faster. Okay, so all of these things, it's like a flywheel, right? And so as a writer, remove yourself from a blog for a second. The blog doesn't matter. What matters Is the relationship that you have between your writing and readers. Doesn't matter what the medium is. It could be on your own site, it could be off your own site, it could be in text messages, it could be in physical mail that you mail people. It doesn't matter. What matters is, is what you're saying valuable to the reader to the degree where they are willing to keep showing up and listening? And in the beginning, most people think they know the answer to that and they don't. They are making an assumption. Which means your job is to validate your assumptions as quickly as possible. And how do you validate your assumptions as quickly as possible? You write in environments where there are tons and tons of readers because more readers means more potential data points. Okay, so this is the whole point of view. I'm not saying that having a blog or your own website doesn't matter. I have my own website. I don't write here. It's a very basic five page, here's about me, here's what I do. Here are my companies, contact me here. And that's fine. You can work toward having your own email list. Absolutely. That's great. But all of these things usually don't happen in the first six to 12, 18, 24, 36 months of you writing online. They just don't. And if you choose to do those things, like people that go day one, I want to start my own site, I want to launch my own blog, and I want to build my own newsletter. These are things that only really work once you validated what it is that you're writing about. You got to go test it. You got to go bring it in front of people. You got to see if readers even care about it. So before you go putting your writing behind a wall, right, subscribe to my newsletter to read, or subscribe to my paid newsletter to read. You should probably know whether the thing you're writing is even worth subscribing to in the first place or is even worth paying for. It's the same. I share the same logic for writing a book, right? Why would the first thing that you do be I'm going to go write a book, when you have absolutely no idea if any of the content within that book is even what readers care about. And so again, so much of the publishing world thinks in this linear forward fashion, and I've always seen it in the opposite direction. Start with the reader, learn from them, gather feedback from them, gather data, test what works, see what doesn't. And then if you keep doing that, the site writes Itself. The newsletter writes itself, the book writes itself. Right, because you already have all the answers. You already validated, hey, this is the content that's resonating and this is the content that's not. So I just want to pass that along because I think that is a. It's something that I find a lot of people don't think very much about. This decision for me is what changed my whole career. I mean, if I had just kept hammering away blog posts forever, I would not be where I am today. I mean, I've made use of these platforms with millions and millions of users. So just to prove the point, I just want to show you kind of real quick how this works, not to overcomplicate it. Alright? So a social blog, could it really. When I say social blog, all that means is you are writing in an environment where there are already users. Ideally there are millions of users, tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions of users. Okay, so Twitter in a sense is basically a social blog, right? I can go here and I can search for, you know, say I search for marketing. Okay, great, there's marketing Twitter. There's tons of people writing about and reading about marketing here, right? So if I go into the marketing Twitter sphere and I start writing about this, I. I am going to get my work in front of, or, you know, to start small groups of people. And the more that I write things that are valuable, the more Twitter is going to push that content in front of other readers that it thinks will also enjoy or find value in my content. Okay, so this is how you could have literally zero followers on Twitter. Zero. And as you start publishing content, right, Twitter's gonna send your content to a very small group of users and it's going to say, hey, based on those 5, 10, 20, 50 users, how they engage with your content, if they like it, we're going to push it to more people. We're going to push it to more people. This is how someone with 300 followers can end up writing something that goes crazy viral and gets 3 million impressions. So this idea where people are like, yeah, it only works if you have followers. Okay, well, first of all, it's not like your blog's any better now. No one knows your site exists, period. And the only way they're gonna know it exists is if you go on one of these social platforms and try and direct people from here over to your site. Okay? So no. Second is these algorithms are literally built to move your content from you to more people, and the more people that engage with it, the more the algorithm learns and goes, people are finding this valuable. Let's keep serving it to more and more people. So your number of followers isn't really what matters. What matters is how. How well the content's performing. Do people find it valuable or not? That's the only thing that matters. That's why I tell people so all the time, don't worry about how many followers you have. It really doesn't matter. Here's another great example, right? Medium. Medium is, you know, they have, I think, last time I checked, they don't publish this very publicly, but I think they have somewhere around 30 million users. This, in a sense, is similar to a social blog. I mean, the Medium flywheel is very slow. That's why, you know, especially in chip 30 for 30, we encourage writers to use Twitter because Twitter's flywheel is a lot faster. You're going to gather a lot more data points. Medium is a bit slower, but it's the same thing, right? I mean, I can go into Medium and I can just go search by topic or keyword or, you know, whatever. Okay, cool. Cryptocurrency. Let's see what people are writing about there, right? This is a discoverability flywheel. So when you write things, you have the ability to get in front of users. I mean, look, okay, in this topic, 74,000 writers, 380,000 stories, other related topics, right? So this is what a blog doesn't have. A blog doesn't have a discoverability flywheel. No one knows your blog exists unless you go post on another platform and say, hey, everyone, please come over to my blog now. Side note, here's the thing that most people don't know is that more and more of these platforms are like walled gardens, right? Twitter wants you to stay on Twitter. Medium wants you to stay on Medium. Quora wants you to stay on Quora. Facebook wants you to stay on Facebook. So what that means is if you were to start a blog and you go to Twitter and you share a link to your blog post on your site, well, what is that link? Think about it for a second. That link is literally an invitation for people to leave Twitter and to come over to your site. Now, eight years ago, I would understand the logic where people say, yeah, that's what you want to do. You want to siphon readers from this social environment over to your website. The problem is these social platforms have caught on, right? They don't want you siphoning readers. So links often get very little distribution, right? A native post on Twitter, on Facebook, on Quora is always going to get more viewership and more engagement than just you publishing a link. Because Twitter knows it's a link and they go, hey, you're trying to steal users. So what do they do? The algorithm goes, don't show that to as many people. Right? So it's not a great strategy to go. I'm just going to take. I'm going to write on my site. I'm going to take this link, and I'm going to put it over here. Okay? That's why with Typeshare. I'll show you in a second. We encourage writers to share an image, right? Because an image is native content, text is native content. You should always be thinking about, how do I write on the platform itself? And you can do that in a bunch of different ways. You could take the same content and put it across a bunch of different social platforms, but you don't want to go, I have my site. Here's a link. Now everyone leave and come read it. That's not how you're going to get in front of a lot of readers. Same thing with Quora. Quora, we got 2 million people following marketing strategy. We got another 2.5 million following digital marketing. We got hundreds of thousands following digital Strategy. We got 26.5 million people following marketing in general. Okay? So think about the potential, right? What's the pro con pro of you starting your own site is you can say to yourself, I own it. Congrats, you own it. But the con is you're not able to tap into hundreds of millions of readers that are literally all sitting here, flagging, raising their hand, saying, I am interested in reading about this category of thing. So that's the pro con, right? And so, as a mentor of mine used to tell me, it's like, would you rather own 100% of a grape or 10% of a watermelon? You know, and a lot of people who start their own website and blogs, especially in their first year of writing online, they'd rather own 100% of a grape. I wouldn't. I will take 10% of a watermelon any day. And that's what I did. And that's why I've accumulated hundreds of millions of views on my work, because I've never written on my own site again. And every time I share this perspective, there's always someone who comes, you know, comes back and goes, yeah, well, you know, look at all these. I. I've gotten, you know, 3 million views on. On my blog. Clearly, it's going fine. And I'm like, yeah, you've been at it for eight years and you've been hammering away and you've also written and built a huge audience on Twitter and you're driving your Twitter audience over to your site. Yeah, you're eight years into the game. That's totally fine. You know, that was a big investment. And also that's amazing. Your 3 million impressions and views on your blog is amazing. I've done probably 300 million. You know there's a difference, right? That's not a 10x difference, it's a hundredx difference. So that's the pro con is like there's so much reach potential by tapping into social environments that why would you go invest all this energy into starting your own site and starting your own blog, especially day one. Why would you do that? You're basing your whole strategy off of assumption, when here are hundreds of millions of data points waiting to confirm for you whether you're moving in the right direction. So start there. So, for example, my story was I still don't write on my own site, but my story was I wrote in public on various these platforms, mainly Quora. Then I moved over and did a bunch of writing on Medium and now I'm way more active on Twitter. But I've been doing this for, let's see, I graduated in 2013 and it's 2021. So what is that? Seven, eight years? You know, I mean, and I still am like, hey, I'm still learning, I'm still gathering more data points, I'm still refining, you know, and I've written books and I've launched a paid newsletter called Category Pirates. And I've launched this cohort based writing program with Dickie called ship 30 for 30. And all of that's amazing, but I still view all of this as practice. I still view it as continuous learning. And so you can eventually go, yeah, I want my own site or I want to start building my own newsletter and all that. That's great. But that should come like year at least after year one, at least after year one, year, two, three, four. But spend the first year writing in public and really learning that's that. It seems like the longer road, but it's the shortcut. It really is the shortcut. Because once you have the data around what it is that people are interested in hearing about from you, the whole game changes. Now you know what people want to read about. You know, that's, that's a dramatically different place than just launching a site and going, I hope people like what I have to say. So now the big question is, all right, well, that's great, but say I want a little bit of both. You know, I want an online home. I want somewhere to have my master library of content. I understand the value of these social platforms, but I also want the fun of having my own blog. You know, I want to do some customization and I want it to feel like my own. And so I get that, I really do. But. So within ship 30 for 30, we've been building this software tool called typeshare. And basically typeshare is, if it's not already, it is in the process of becoming a social blog platform. And, you know, it's me, Dickie and Sam that are working on it. And really the idea here is you don't know how to set up your own site. So it's already. Your social blog is already set up for you. You want some level of customization. Okay, cool. You know, we'll make it customizable. That's great. And you want it to be able to plug into all of the other rapidly spinning social flywheels. Right. You don't just want to publish on your site, you want to publish everywhere. So that's what you can do on typeshare. So when you go and you hit publish on an atomic essay or a thread. Right, right. It doesn't just go onto your social blog on Typeshare. It can also be distributed to Twitter. And then soon we'll make it so it can be distributed to Medium as well. And then you can take the image, you can distribute it to Pinterest. You know, like there's all these other flywheels that you should be able to connect your site into. You can't do this on a squarespace site. You can't do this on a WIX site. You can't do this on a, on a WordPress site. So this is something. I mean, I've been writing online for a really long time and this is basically what I've always wanted. I've always wanted a mechanism where you can have your online home and you can have a place where you have your master library of content. Like, I get asked all the time. People are like, you've written so much, thousands of articles. Where do I start? Where do I find your library? And I've never had a great answer, right? Because normally I would say my blog, but I've written all this stuff. So where do you have an online home? Where do you have these piles where people can dig into? I want to read all your stuff about this topic or all your stuff about this topic, or I want to read your favorite 10 things that you've written. You want to be able to organize your master library. You want to be able to customize it a little bit, but most importantly, you want people to read your work. That's the big one. And starting a site and starting a blog where you just publish something and then you wait and no one shows up, that's a problem. It's demoralizing, it's depressing. It's the reason why so many people stop writing. And I want to solve that problem. We all want to solve that problem. So that's what Typeshare is and is going to continue to be. So I'm starting to treat Typeshare as my primary destination for writing. When I write, it starts inside Typeshare and then I hit publish. It goes to my social blog on Typeshare and. And it goes to as many platforms as I can connect to it. And that's how you turn one asset into 3, 5, 10 assets, you know, and all of a sudden you can 3, 5, 10x your reach just because you're publishing it in more places. So again, why publish somewhere when you can publish everywhere? That's really the whole mentality. So all of these things, I just wanted to make a video and share. You know, I. I know I'm throwing a lot at you, but this is how I think about the game. And I've been doing this for, I mean, basically a decade at this point. And I continue to run into, like, the majority of people that talk about digital writing or think about online writing, they have a problem with this perspective and they don't agree with it. And the legacy publishing world can't even wrap their head around it. But for me, like, this is how I've achieved everything that I've achieved. This is how I've racked up hundreds of millions of views. This is how I've. My last book, I wrote in four months because all of the content in there, I already knew what was. I already knew what readers wanted because I had already written it on the Internet. I had already tested it, I had already proven it. The book wrote itself, you know, and now it's continuing to sell, do great numbers on Amazon. Like, the. The book was successful because I had already tested all of these things. So this whole mentality, I just want to pass it along so that you can apply it as well. And it's really, really powerful, you know, if you just take a step back and Rethink how you're thinking about the whole game. It's really not difficult to get a million views on your writing, but you just have to reorient how you're approaching it. So. So I wanted to just make this video and share that with you. I hope you find it helpful again. I remember when I graduated from school and basically the advice that I was given was to go the legacy publishing world and everyone said, have fun being broke for the rest of your life and you're gonna. It's impossible to make a living as a writer. I have found the complete opposite to be true. I think it is the greatest time on earth to be a writer. I think it has never been easier to make a full time income as a writer. I think it's never been easier to make a ton of money as a writer. But you just have to rethink the whole game and you have to rethink how you're approaching it and what your goal really is. And whether you're making decisions based on you want approval from the legacy publishing world or you're willing to kind of go your own way and forge your own path. And if you are, and if you're open to new and different ways of thinking about it, then this channel is for you. I want to share. I'm making that commitment to myself. I've. I've been very fortunate to have achieved all my hopes and dreams as a writer and then some up until this point. I have many, many, many more. But I really want to pass along everything that I've learned because it's allowed me to have really incredible experiences and thrive for my writing. And I know how special that is and I know how important that is and I want to pass that along to you. So if you've enjoyed this and if you get a lot out of it, let me know in the comments. Ask me questions. Let me know what else I can be helpful with whenever I see questions. That inspires the next video. And we'll see you next time. Don't forget to subscribe. All right. See everyone.