How I Make 7-Figures Re-Publishing Content

Over the past decade, I have made millions of dollars from my writing. But if you want to know a little secret, a lot of that money has come from finding new and different ways to monetize content that I've already written. So I'm not necessarily writing new things. I'm just finding new ways to monetize things that I already wrote at some point in the past. And I don't know very many writers who do this. I certainly haven't seen a lot of people talk about it, which is why today I want to walk you through my seven figure republishing strategy. This is what I've been using for essentially the past decade to monetize my work. And this is how I squeeze as much juice as possible out of everything I write. So step zero, and everything we talk about today is you have to already be building a library of free content. There's really no sense in talking about how to monetize if you're not writing consistently and you're not creating free things for people to consume. And there's two primary benefits and why that's so important. The first is you want to be creating things that allow you to gather data. So it's very difficult to know how to monetize. It doesn't matter what you're writing about. Nonfiction, fiction, doesn't matter, the industry doesn't matter, the category. It's very hard to know how to monetize and what will be monetizable if you're not already publishing free things where you can gather data from people. And this is not that hard. You know, every time I talk about this, people say, oh, well, that's easy for you to say, Cole. You have this huge audience. Yeah, you can look at the data, but I have zero followers. Well, I hate to break it to you, but there was a point in time when I had zero followers, too. Everyone starts at zero. And when you're starting in the very beginning, what a lot of people and a lot of writers don't understand is that the primary benefit of writing on these social platforms is that the social platform's job is to distribute your writing for you. So it actually doesn't matter how many followers you have. If you have zero followers, the algorithm is still going to show your content to a couple random people based on whatever you're writing about. And then based on whether those people interact with your writing, it's going to decide, should I show this to more and more people. It's also why the counterpoint is true. You know, I have 180,000 followers on X or whatever number it is. And not everything I write gets viewed by 180,000 people. Right. It's a meritocracy. And so it's not about the number of followers. Everyone starts at zero is the first point. The second benefit of creating free content is that it really allows you to learn what's resonating with people and allows you to start building a library that then you can leverage over and over and over again into the future. So all of the things that we talk about and all of the different ways to monetize, well, I can give you the business models, but if you don't have the content, there's nothing to put inside the business model. Right? So you want to first gather data and see what's resonating with people, and then second, based on that data, continue to build out your library so that you create more and more content so that you can then monetize that content later on. Okay, so step zero, you have to be writing for free. My whole thesis, everything that I talk about in my book, the Art and Business of Online Writing, is write on social platforms. Everyone starts at zero. Number of followers doesn't matter. And then ideally, where you go from writing on social platforms is you would start a free newsletter. And the primary benefit of that free newsletter is, is really because a newsletter is sort of a constraint to begin writing long, longer form content. And as you get better and better at writing the short form content into the longer form content, now you have all of these different ways that you can begin to monetize that. Okay, so step zero, you should be building a free library of content. Then as you begin to learn, this is who my target reader is, this is what's resonating with them. I know what problems I can help them solve. I know what they find most interesting. Even things like, I know every time I tell this story, people love hearing that, or people find that really helpful, or people really resonate with that story. As you gather all of those learnings, then you can become, then you can start monetizing it. And the first way that you can monetize, and this was more popular back in 2017, 2018, 2019, but it still exists today, and to be honest, I still do it today, is republishing your work behind Medium's paywall. So if you don't know, Medium is like a blogging website and they have a paywall where it sort of works like Spotify Streams for a musician, where depending on how many people read and Interact with your work, you get paid. Sort of like, think of it like a small royalty, depending on how the content performs. Now I will tell you, I abused this strategy back in 2018. I, when I realized that I could republish essentially the free, the same free things that I was already writing on Quora behind Medium's paywall. I took every single thing that even went halfway viral on Quora and I republished it behind Medium's paywall. And there I think 2018, 2019, I was making five, ten grand a month. Every month I made over a quarter million dollars doing this, republishing my content behind Medium's paywall. And you can still do it. Their paywall is not as lucrative today as it was, you know, five years ago, but it is still a great dividend. And I'd say on average, you know, now, as I just continue to sporadically republish things, I probably make between 500 bucks and 1000 bucks a month just republishing my content behind Mediums paywall. So obviously this is one of those things where, you know, you're not going to make a gazillion dollars doing this tomorrow, but it is a nice little dividend. And if you're going to take the time to create this content, you might as well squeeze juice out of it, right? And Medium is one of those places that I find not very many writers realize that you can republish behind their paywall. So that's the first way. The second way is then you expand a lot of the things that you write about in your free newsletter into a paid newsletter. So the ideal flow here would be I write on social platforms like X, LinkedIn, Quora, I mean any social platform, Instagram, Facebook, it really doesn't matter as long as it's just somewhere that you're gathering traffic and you're learning. You then drive that traffic to a free newsletter. And that free newsletter, the easiest way of thinking about it is it is just more whatever you're writing about on social platforms, the newsletter is the longer form version of that. Okay? Just don't overcomplicate it. And ideally you want this to be centered within some sort of niche or category. That is the long term goal. Right? Ryan Holiday writes about stoicism, I write about digital writing. Okay, so you want to find whatever that niche is and just more, more, more about that niche. But then the ideal next step from there would be taking all the things that you write about on social and all the things you write about in a free newsletter and then actually Expanding them again into a paid newsletter. So think of it as short form, medium form, really long form. And whenever I explain this to people, they go, I don't understand what you mean about expanding something. And I have a great little framework here. I call it my 10 magical ways to Expand Anything. You could take a tweet and you could expand that into a free newsletter. And then you could expand it again into a long form paid newsletter by just running through these 10 magical ways. And all throughout the piece, looking for how could I expand that? And the 10 magical ways are tips, stats, steps, lessons, benefits, reasons, mistakes and examples, questions and personal stories. So if you were to write a piece, for example, let's say you wrote a free newsletter. I'll use something that I wrote recently as an example. Let's say you wrote a free newsletter titled Five Steps to Make youe First Dollar on the Internet. Well, the free newsletter might be. Here are the five steps, right? You're delivering on the promise. Hey, here are the five steps. These, this is the order in which you should go about achieving this goal. The paid newsletter version might be me going through each individual step and then asking the question, how could I expand this with my 10 magical ways? So let's say step one is you should start writing on social platforms to gather data and to figure out what people care about. Well, how could I expand that? I could give the reader tips for starting to write on social platforms. I could maybe give them steps within steps. Like, here's the first thing you should do. You should set up an X account or a LinkedIn account. Here's the second thing you should do. You should optimize your profile. You should rewrite your bio, right? I could maybe give them lessons like, hey, when I was doing this, here are some things that I learned that you're probably going to run into. I could give them mistakes. When I was doing this. These are the mistakes that I made. Here's how I would recommend you not make those mistakes, right? I could give them examples. Here are people that are doing this really well. Check out their profiles, Check out what they're publishing. Here's what I would notice. Here's what they're doing well, right? So expanding work is not hard. You just have to sit there and go, well, what else could I give the reader? And when you approach your writing through this lens, you realize that the whole benefit of writing on a social platform and then eventually having a free newsletter is that you then have the architecture to expand it into other mediums and other business models. And monetize it again. You already did a lot of the thinking. Now just give the reader a little bit more. So the second way is you would basically take your free newsletter that you republished behind Mediums paywall, and then you expand it into a paid newsletter. And you could just do those couple steps over and over and over again. Right? So you're making money behind Medium's paywall, and then you're making subscription revenue off of your paid newsletter. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Okay? This is like we're just getting started. The third way that you can then monetize this content is that as you start building a library of free newsletters. Same with social content, but free newsletters and then eventually paid newsletters. To me, one of the biggest missed opportunities, and I see so many writers online who just, they miss. It's like it's staring them right in their face, and they don't do it. Once you start building this library of free newsletters and paid newsletters, you have, you basically think of it like different piles on your desk and every time you write. So for me, easy example would be every time I write about something digital writing related, I put it in the digital writing pile. Every time I write about ghost writing, I put it in the ghostwriting pile. Every time I write about self publishing, I put it in the self publishing pile. Right? Or change the category. Let's say you write about, like, personal development and habit building. Okay, well, every time you write about building habits, that's one pile. Every time you write about time management, that's a different pile. Every time you write about, like, creating efficiencies and workflows and optimizing your calendar and like, all the nitty gritty stuff, maybe that's a different pile. So what you're doing is you're building these different piles of tangentially related topics, and then as each pile gets bigger and bigger, that pile isn't just a pile of newsletters that you wrote historically, that pile is the beginning of a book. In many ways, the pile is a book. And all you have to do is basically organize the free and or paid newsletter issues that are all related to a topic. So pick an overarching topic, you put them into a pile, and then once you have a good amount of content. So for context, the average nonfiction book is about 6,60,000 words. Okay? So once you have roughly around that amount, it could be 40 or 50,000, it could be 80,000. You then throw it all into a Google Doc or throw it all into a notion doc. And you basically just edit the beginnings and the ends of each quote, unquote chapter. You just make it flow a little bit better. And you just make sure that you're not ever saying something that lacks context. You know, you want to think of it like, okay, this is a separate product. The benefit though is you already wrote all of this content and you already thought through all of it. So all you have to do is basically stitch it together. And once you do that, you can then monetize the content a third way because you can just upload it to Amazon and now you have an ebook and you have a print book for sale. Now, two things. Whenever I explain this, what people will come back with is a, that's gotta be really expensive. No, it's not. First of all, the money that you make from Medium and, or your paid newsletter and ideally your ghostwriting on the side, right? Ghostwriting is your fastest path to 10k a month. So all of that revenue, you can easily bootstrap and get a fairly nice cover designed and maybe have someone help you with formatting for your book. All in, you're talking maybe 1,000 bucks, 2,000 bucks. Like, I have really high grade covers designed by someone who used to work at a big five publishing house. And at most I invest like five grand into my book covers. So this is not a huge amount of money. This is very, very doable. And by the way, I was doing this very early on in my career before I had made a lot of money. This is an investment. Think of your books as little business verticals, okay? And Amazon is print on demand, so you do not have to go buy a bunch of books up front and incur all those costs. Your only costs are basically a cover designer. And if you want someone to do the internal formatting of the book professionally. If you don't, there's a free tool called reedsy.com that allows you to basically just do this on your own. It's very, very easy to use. So you have very few costs. You have almost no upfront cost buying inventory. And every time, for example, every time someone buys the art and business of online writing, Amazon prints it on demand, they extract my printing cost and then they send me the remaining royalty. Okay? So it does not cost you very much money to then take all of this stuff you've already written and then monetize it again. The second question or the second objection that people have when I explain this is they go, well, Cole, I don't understand though, why if someone already read the paid newsletters or the free newsletters, why would they want to read it again in a book? And you have to understand something. There's a framework that I would write about a lot when I was building Category Pirates, which was another paid newsletter. It's a different business I started a couple years ago, became a top five substack paid newsletter within a year. And what we learned, because this is the model we did, we wrote long form paid newsletters and then we republished them as books. And so if you've seen or if you've read some of my other books written with Category Pirates, Snow Leopard, Category Design Toolkit, A marketer's guide to Category Design. Right. All of those are basically just republished versions of paid newsletters that we had written. And why would someone want that? Well, if you really love the work, you don't want to just read it once. You want to read it more than once. And if you really love the work, you don't just want the digital newsletter version. You want a hard, a hard copy that you can put on your desk. So we saw that a lot of our book sales came from our most loyal customers. And this allowed us to essentially monetize the same content again. And I'm telling you because I lived it and I built a business that did it. With Category Pirates, our paid newsletter was doing about a quarter million dollars a year in revenues, around 20, 20 grand a month. And then when we started adopting this publishing model and we started republishing the newsletters as books on Amazon, that unlocked another six figure revenue stream. There were certain months where we were doing ten grand a month selling books and then the average was usually around like somewhere between 3 and 7,000amonth. So you almost like doubled your revenue just by taking the things you already wrote and putting them in a different medium. Okay. So that's the third way. And I find so many people with successful newsletters don't do this. And they always say some sort of faulty belief like it's too expensive or the reader's not going to want that or I don't want to go through all that effort. It's, the reader is going to love it. It's not that expensive, and it is not as hard as you're making it out to be. And you're basically leaving another six figure vertical just on the table by not doing this. But again, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The fourth way you can monetize it is then by taking the, the book that you just created and then doing an Audiobook. And an audiobook is, think of it like a completely different product. People buy it for very different reasons. And something that's really cool, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, is that audiobooks are growing in popularity at record speed, but the amount of audiobooks being created is not keeping up with that level of growth. Meaning there is significantly more demand for audiobooks than there is supply. Because typically creating audiobooks is a little bit harder, right? Not everyone has the funds to create an audiobook. Not everyone has the expertise. And so there are a couple different options here. I just want to give you a little crash course if you're interested in this. But if you want to monetize your content this fourth way and you want to create an audiobook, first of all, Amazon has come out with this AI feature where basically they will have AI read your book and then you do a larger revenue share with Amazon, I don't love it, but if you don't want to incur a lot of upfront costs and you want to get something out quickly, this is an option. The second option is you can hire like a voice actor or a freelancer, and the model there is typically you choose or it depends on who you're working with, but you either, if you want to maintain full ownership over the audiobook, you would pay the voice actor what's called per finished hour. So every time they send you a quote, unquote finished hour of the audiobook, so it's not how much time they were recording, it's I'm giving you a finished hour of the final product, you would pay them some sort of flat rate. So you're incurring the cost upfront, but you're able to then maintain full ownership over the product. So it costs you money in the beginning, but the idea is you would make up significantly more than what you invested into the audiobook over time. That's the goal. Or if you don't want to incur the cost, but you still want to work with a voice actor or freelancer, you can do a rev share with them. And so basically they go, hey, I'm game to upfront the quote, unquote cost. I'm game to put in the time, but then I want whatever the percentage is that you negotiate of the upside. The third option is you buy some equipment and you record it yourself. To be honest, equipment these days is not as expensive as it was five, 10 years ago. You could easily create a home setup for even like a couple hundred bucks. You know, if you were to invest a thousand dollars into your home setup, which, by the way, would allow you to create all of your audiobooks moving forward. So just think about that. That's a completely doable option. The real cost, though, when you do that is time. And that's been my biggest problem. Like, I have the audio set up. It's just you're investing a lot of time in creating these audiobooks, but this is the fourth way that you can monetize the same content again. And it's a very powerful way. Audiobooks are even more profitable than print books in many ways. And it's also a completely different product. And what you have to recognize is that a lot of times the same same person who subscribed to your paid newsletter is the same person who wants the hardcover or the paperback version of your book on their desk and is the same person who also wants the audiobook because they want to consume it in a different way, or they want to consume it on the go, or they want to bounce between the audiobook and the print book. And when I was building category pirates, this idea that we're talking about here is what's called catering to your super consumers. So super consumers are a minority of consumer in your, in your niche, in your target demographic that actually spend 30 to 70% more with you than the average person. So the average person might go, I'll buy your book, but I don't need the audiobook and I don't need your paid newsletter. But your super consumers, which might only be, you know, 10% of your customers or less, your super consumers are going to buy all three, and they're going to do more than buy all three. They're probably going to gift the book to three of their friends, and then they're going to tell three other friends, they're going to use a referral code and tell three other friends about your paid newsletter. So a lot of these business models are actually dependent on you understanding the power of catering to your super consumers, because they're the ones who are going to buy many of the same things, just in different formats, okay? And as someone who's sold millions of dollars worth of writing related products and different business models, I've monetized the same content ten different ways. And I can tell you the super consumer thing is very, very real. And people really, really enjoy having these different formats. And chances are you're a super consumer of something and you don't even realize it. You know, you're a super consumer of some sort of hobby or some. Some consumer Good that you love and you've bought it nine different ways and it doesn't really occur to you that you are so much more valuable of a customer to that company. Well, now just think about that in reverse. You're the entrepreneur, right? How can you cater to your super consumers? So that's the fourth way. Turning your print books into audiobooks. The fifth way is that you can and should see all of this. So free content, free newsletter, paid newsletter, ebook, print book, audiobook, all of this. The primary benefit isn't even the money. The primary benefit of doing all of that is it sets the foundation for the fifth way, which is you can monetize with some sort of education product. So you could and should consider turning your book, which is essentially the foundation. It's you've done all the thinking. You turn your book or your or your paid newsletter into a text and video course, or into a cohort based course, or into an in person training program, or into a group coaching program. You have to realize that the primary benefit books relative to other business models are not that profitable. And even paid newsletters are profitable, but they're significantly harder to scale. And so really, if you're going to take the time to think through all of that content, you have to recognize that the primary value of doing all of that thinking and doing all of that organizing is that you've done all the hard work and you should find other business models to monetize your hard work. And so what you can do is you can take your paid newsletter library, your book library, and then use that as the foundation for a text and video course or for a cohort based course. And the way that you do this is you go back to the 10 magical ways. How can you expand the things in your book into even more in depth modules? Right? And what you have to realize, there's three things that a customer is paying for. When you turn a book that maybe they've already read into some sort of education product. The first thing is that they are paying for slightly higher access to you. So chances are your book doesn't come with videos, right? So just by going from I read your book to I get to listen to you and see you talk through these ideas on video. That is one thing that they're paying for. It's a different medium, it's a different benefit. The second way is the expanded content. So you basically are saying, hey, I know you loved everything in my book. I'm going to give you more of that, I'm going to give you more Tips. I'm going to give you more lessons, I'm going to give you more mistakes. I'm going to give you more personal stories that explain how this works. Right. So they're paying for the expansion. And then the third is they're paying for some sort of other tangible assets that you include. So maybe separate from the book in your text and video course or in your training program or whatever it is you're giving. Also, here's a checklist, here's a blueprint, here's a template, here's a bundle of templates. Here are other tangible things that I can bundle in so that I'm not just giving you the same exact content that's in the book. Right. And if you want a really easy example of how we did this, I wrote the Art and Business of Online Writing about a year before I started Ship 30 with my co founder, Dickie. And when we started Ship 30, you know, the very original, the very first cohort of ship 30 was. It was really just an accountability group. But it started to become popular and we realized, hey, we need to add in a curriculum to this. And when we were thinking of what's the curriculum, I was like, well, I've already thought through the whole curriculum because I just wrote a book about it. And so all ship 30 really is, is the core ideas that are in my book expanded with more tangible assets and higher access to us. You listen to us talk through these ideas on video. And those three benefits. I can't tell you how many people have read both my book and taken ship 30 and then emailed me and said, thank you so much. I love both because they're different products. A lot of it is the same thinking, but they're different products and they communicate similar ideas in different ways. And that's the benefit to the reader. The reader doesn't want to just hear it one time, they want to hear it multiple times. Okay, so those are the five big ways that you can monetize the same content over and over and over again. And I've been doing this for a decade at this point. I have made millions of dollars doing this. I promise you it works. And whatever faulty objection you have going on in your head saying, I can't do that, or I can't believe that the same person would want to buy the same thing twice, it's wrong. And I've seen it and I've lived it. And in many ways, people are appreciative of of it. So nice segue into here are three very common objections I hear whenever I explain this model. So the first is, but if I repeat content, won't people get mad? And I love the Hormozi quote here, which is people need to be reminded more than they need to be told. When someone, when you're trying to learn something and someone tells you how to do it, you don't just hear it once and then go execute it. Very rarely is that what happens. There's a reason why we consume so many different versions of a lot of the same material and it's because we need to hear it in different ways. We need to hear it or see it in different formats and we need to be reminded more than we need to be told. So no, if you repeat quote unquote ideas, people are not going to get mad. If anything, they're going to come back to you and say, thank you so much for repeating that idea to me. I really needed to hear it again. Right. The second objection is why would someone pay more for a text and video course if it's essentially the same content that's in a book or a paid newsletter? And again, I come back to those three differentiators. A, they pay for a heightened level of access to you. So text and video, or if it's cohort based text, video and some sort of live component, they're paying for the expansion of the content. So it's not the same exact content. It's similar ideas but expanded in new and different ways. And then third is they're paying for the additional tangible assets. So for example, something that I didn't even think to do really when I was writing this book was pairing it with templates. Then we built ship 30 and we realized how many people want and need templates. So we thought, okay, well a core benefit of joining Ship 30 is we give you 30 days of templates, right? So by bundling in these tangible digital assets that is also a differentiator between the book or a paid newsletter, for example. And then third is, isn't monetizing my content in all these different ways unethical? And no, it's not. If anything, this is the primary benefit of being entrepreneurial as a writer. And this is why I'm such a big believer in self publishing versus taking a book deal. Because when you take a book deal, for example, the publisher severely limits what you can do with that content. They don't like you giving it away for free. They really don't like you giving snippets away. They don't like it if you take entire chunks and Put it behind Medium's paywall or put it into a different business model. Right. Because they gave you an advance for that product and that ip. Well, when you don't take a book deal and you are the publisher and you do this through a self published vehicle, you can do whatever you want with it. If I wanted to, I could take every single chapter from the art and business of online writing, chop it up into a bunch of pieces and republish it behind Medium's paywall. In many ways, I've probably done that with 40 or 50% of the content. Right. Because people need to be reminded more than they need to be told. If I wanted to take entire chapters from this book and put it into our ship 30 course, I could do that. In many ways I have done that. And so that's the thing to recognize is that when you approach writing through this entrepreneurial lens, you have so much optionality and you can monetize the content in so many different ways. And the nuance that I want to end on and the thing that I find is so hard for people to wrap their heads around is that the primary benefit of creating all of this free content and then creating and leveraging that free content into paid content, and especially those first couple ways we talked about paid newsletters, even compiling them into books, audio books, et cetera. The primary benefit is that you're getting the thinking done, monetizing this content with higher ticket things like either one off text and video courses, or turning them into entire training programs, whatever it is. The bottleneck to being able to do that is that you haven't thought through the concepts. Right. There's a reason why if someone day one goes, I want to build this big successful group coaching program, well, they have a lot of work to do because they haven't thought through any of the frameworks or any of the ideas or any of the stories or any of the things that they want to pass along to the people that they want to help. Right. It is so much easier to start that when you've already created a product or you've created multiple versions of that product. And by the way, when we created our premium ghostwriting academy, this is exactly what we did. We were like, I think we should build a ghostwriting school. I started writing about it more on social. I gathered data, I took that social content, I expanded it into a free newsletter. So we started gathering leads, people who would be interested in ghostwriting. And then I took all of that content and I expanded it into the art and business of Ghostwriting and the art and business of ghostwriting basically became the architecture of pga, our premium ghostwriting academy. So all of these things work together. And I've done this over and over again over the past 10 years. And again, I just don't. I don't see very many writers do this. And even the ones that have the ability to, they choose not to because of some sort of faulty belief. And in my opinion, I'll leave you with this. In my opinion, most mid to high level writers who have achieved some version of success. So I'm going to call that somewhere in the ballpark of making 100 grand a year to 500 grand a year as a writer. It could be with services, it could be with digital products, it really doesn't matter. But if you're in that tier of 100k to 500k a year as a writer, you could easily double whatever amount you're making by just doing what we talked about here. If all you did was just take the same ideas and the same content that you've already proven people find helpful and want to consume, and you just plug them into different business models and monetize them with different types of products, you will double your revenue, period. Full stop. And every time we do this and every time we build something new and I start with one and then I end up doubling down on it and expanding it or putting the same content into another vehicle, we double. And so if you get to that level or if you're there already and you're sitting there going, how do I increase my earnings? The single easiest way to do that is to just plug the same things that you've already been writing into new products and into new business models.