How to Achieve Financial Freedom as a Writer

So the other day I was having coffee with this writer friend of mine. She's in her 30s, she works as a content writer for a big company. And she said to me, you know, I've been working so hard, and technically I'm writing full time because that's a core part of my job. But I still don't feel fulfilled and I don't know if I'll ever achieve financial freedom as a writer. And she said this to me because she's been following my trajectory since 2014. Literally used to read all my Quora answers a decade ago, and now she sees all these writing businesses I've built. She's read my books, she's taken ship 35 for 30. She knows I've made millions of dollars as a digital writer, but this was the first time that she asked me pretty directly whether I'm just an outlier or if it's really possible for her to make a lucrative living as a writer, specifically writing things that she's passionate about, not just blog posts dictated to her by her company. So she asked if I had any advice, and I had tons to share. Because to be honest, this is a question I get asked all the time. A lot of people think I just woke up one day with hundreds of thousands of followers, a giant email list, and the perfect product idea ready to go. But what all these people don't see are all the failed products I've created, the businesses that didn't work, the content that didn't go viral, and all the hours I've put into acquiring the skills and learning the steps to monetize the thing that I'm passionate about. So in today's video, over a cup of coffee, I'm going to tell you exactly what I told her. If you want to earn serious money as a writer, as in a million per year or more in take home income, it all comes down to these seven steps in this specific order. And guess what? Each one requires you to unlearn some faulty belief you picked up somewhere along the way in order to move on to the next stage. So first, let's walk through each step and then at the end, I'm going to show you how they all tie together to create a seven figure one person writing empire. Step one. You have to build a daily writing habit and start writing online. Quite literally, every outcome you desire for yourself is. Is based on the foundation of writing every single day. You want an audience? Start writing online. You want an email list? Start writing online. You want to grow a paid newsletter? Start writing online. You wanna sell digital products, start writing online. You want more coaching or consulting clients, start writing online. The faulty belief here is that people have a bad habit of only thinking in outputs. So they think I want to make more money or I wanna be able to quit my job and do something I'm more passionate about. Okay, but those things are outputs. And outputs don't just magically happen on their own. Outputs are the result of inputs. So instead of asking, how can I make more money, which is an output, a better question to ask is what action do I need to take such that making more money happens naturally as a byproduct? So translation, what's the lowest barrier to entry action you can take that has the potential to lead to the highest leverage outcomes on the Internet? Writing online. Now, whenever I explain this, people always say back, well, what about video? What about audio? Should I start a podcast? Should I make TikToks? The answer is do whatever you want. The medium is irrelevant. Just hit publish. However, I will tell you from personal experience that writing is significantly easier to learn and scale than video or audio. This video, for example, takes me way longer and requires way more resources to produce than writing something. So where should you be writing today? I made a whole video about this. But if you want the tldr, these are the best social platforms for publishing text based content today. X slash, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, or Quora. Which leads to step number two, start ghostwriting on the side. So this is something I encourage every writer to do because ghostwriting was what allowed me to quit my full time job and start making 20 grand a month when I was 26 years old. The faulty belief here is that because of people like Dan Ko, Justin Welsh, and to be honest, even Dicky Bush and me with ship, 30 for 30 people think that the way you earn financial freedom as a writer is by selling digital products. And yes, that's certainly a component of it. But digital products are not your fastest path to 10 grand or 20 grand per month as a writer. Your fastest path to monetizing your talents and getting paid to practice and maybe even quitting your day job so you have more time to write and earn more is ghostwriting because it's significantly easier to to sell one client on a $5,000 service than it is to sell 100 customers on a $50 digital product every single month. Digital products require a lot of traffic, and in the beginning you probably don't have a huge audience and you probably don't have a couple thousand dollars you'd be willing to burn each month testing ads. For what it's worth, we don't even run ads for our digital products, and we do millions of dollars in revenue. But organic takes time. So if time is a scarce resource, then what's the fastest and most lucrative way to monetize? It's to treat ghostwriting as a dividend on your skills. So as you start writing online and as you learn how to write great short form content, guess what? You can collect a dividend on that skill by also ghostwriting short form content for other people, or long form content, or newsletters or email courses. Anything you get good at building for yourself. You need to recognize the opportunity you have to monetize that skill by providing it as a service for someone else. By far, this is your why do so many writers think that's how they should treat their writing? Personally, I blame Hemingway and his chapeau. The whole secret to becoming a prolific creator and being able to monetize your writing in a variety of different ways is to realize that you can't create in a vacuum. You have to create with your readers. You have to listen to them. You have to figure out what problems they're struggling with or what questions they have. And then you have to use writing as the vehicle to solve or answer them. So what should your weekly newsletter be about? It should be about whatever topic has been receiving the most high quality engagement on x, Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever you're writing and is the topic you're most excited to keep writing about. Except more don't overcomplicate it. Cody Sanchez tweets about how to buy boring businesses and in her weekly newsletter she writes about how to buy boring businesses in depth. I tweet about digital writing, ghostwriting and self publishing and and in our weekly newsletter I write about digital writing, ghostwriting and self publishing in depth. Your weekly newsletter is just whatever's already working. Except more Step 4 Create an irresistible Offer I made an entire video on this that went viral, probably because I literally gave away the exact script I've used to sell millions of dollars worth of ghostwriting services and digital products. So if you want the full script and walkthrough of how to use it, just watch the video. But the key here, and how you start to hit a scale escape velocity with your earning potential as a writer is realizing that offer creation is a skill. In order for someone to buy what you're selling, they have to be educated on a problem they didn't know they had, or they have to be reminded of a problem that they have and grounded in the cost of inaction and educating customers or clients. Is that skill Little inside baseball here for you. I'm in all these group chats with all these big creators, people who have way bigger audiences than I do, but who make almost no money. And that's because they spend all day focusing on going viral, which is a great skill to build, but it's not the only skill. And they spend almost zero time learning how to create irresistible offers. This is a mistake I see so many people make, but writers and creators especially, and I get it because it took me a really long time to learn this lesson too. But once you start writing online and building your audience power, leveling your earnings with ghostwriting, building a list of potential customers with a weekly newsletter, a lot of your future earning potential comes down to your ability to craft compelling offers offers. Which leads to step five. You have to write a landing page and sell your first digital product. At this point, you should be starting to build an audience and an email list in a specific niche, and you should be making 10 to 20 grand per month as a ghostwriter, ideally working full time for yourself with plenty of extra time to reinvest in yourself and other products. If you try to launch digital products before this stage, or worse, before you've even started writing online and building an audience, you're making a huge mistake. So please just follow the instructions on the box. Do these steps in order Once you have an audience, a niche, an email list, and some disposable income from ghostwriting. Now it's time to start monetizing with digital products and the big mental reframe here I want to pass along to you is don't think of creating a digital product as this task where you have to go create something new. The first digital product you should create should be anything you've successfully done for yourself just explained to someone else. So, for example, let's say your niche is real estate and you've been writing about how to buy rental properties and you have three ghostwriting clients who are real estate investors. Okay, you can sort of see the niche happening there. Okay, did you set up a system for yourself that allows you to batch write all of your real estate content for the week? That system is a digital product. Have you created any templates for yourself for buying rental properties? Or maybe contract templates or an Excel doc to track repair costs? Maybe email templates for reaching out to tenants? Right. These are all digital products and so you should not be sitting there staring out the window asking yourself, huh? How do I build a seven figure digital product. How do I build the next ship? 30 for 30, which ironically is what a lot of people try and do. That's the wrong question. What you should be asking yourself is what am I already doing for myself? And how could I package this up into a digital product, a template, an asset, a training, and sell to other people just like me. So again, don't overcomplicate it. Take whatever you're doing for yourself, package it up, put it for sale, and then once one person buys, then the iteration process begins. Step 6 One product, one avatar, one channel to a million in revenue. This is a Hormozi framework, but it completely changed the way we thought about building digital products back in 2021. One product for one specific type of person attracted on one platform until you're at a million a year in revenue. This is almost exactly what we did to grow ship 30 for 30. That was our only product, and it was and still is for one very specific type of person. It's for someone who wants to start writing online. Chip 30 isn't for new York Times bestselling authors. It's also not for people who want to self publish their first book. It's for the person who wants to start writing online, but hasn't yet or hasn't consistently. And the channel we use to attract customers, the platform we wrote on was Twitter, which is now known as X. That's it. No ads, no cross posting to LinkedIn, no medium, no Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok. One product, one avatar, one channel. And that first year, we did a little over a million dollars in revenue. Now, the reason this framework works so well is because most of the time people actually do the opposite. They try to launch multiple products that speak to multiple different avatars, and then they try and cross post and drive traffic on multiple different platforms. And then ironically, they end up doing a fraction of the revenue because they're all over the place, which then the problem compounds because they feel like they're working so hard, but revenue isn't increasing. So then they think they need another product and then the cycle just repeats itself. So a mantra I say to myself daily is simplicity is velocity. The simpler the action, the less friction, the faster it can move. Whereas the more complicated the action, the more friction there is, the slower it moves. So weirdly, doing less is actually what allows you to accomplish more. One product, one avatar, one channel, and you should be able to hit a million a year in revenue. I've done it with digital products. I've done it with services and ghostwriting and if not or you feel like you can't, then that leads to step seven. Reflect each year and always be looking for the next vehicle. So a part of the creator digital writer solopreneur journey that I feel like doesn't get talked about enough is the hard decision you're going to have to make to reinvent yourself at various stages. So I've been writing online for well over a decade. I wrote my very first blog post about World of Warcraft way back in 2007 as a teenager in my childhood bedroom. And now, 17 years later, I run a portfolio of writing businesses that do over $5 million in revenue each year. But along the way, I've had to make some really hard decisions based on where I was at and where I wanted to go. So for example, in 2015, while I was still working my full time job as a copywriter, I was the most popular writer on all of quora. Out of 200 million users. I was making like 3 grand a month on the side writing a daily column for Inc. Magazine, and another thousand dollars a month selling my very first digital product, which if you know, was a fitness ebook called Skinny to Shredded. And a lot of my peers and friends at the time would say, wow, man, you've made it as a writer. And I always thought that was so weird because I didn't feel like I'd made it at all. I was still commuting an hour to work each day, spending all morning and all afternoon writing blog posts and social media copy for random clients. Just like this friend of mine I had coffee with the other day that I told you about. At the beginning, my earnings felt capped and the amount of time I had to spend on my own personal writing felt like a second priority. To to be honest, most days it felt like a third priority. Which meant in order for me to get to the next level, I had to make some hard decisions. So after reflecting on it, I decided to quit my job. I had a few months of Runway saved up, maybe like two and a half months. And I figured with eight more hours to write each day, I could probably figure out how to cover the other half of my rent. A month later, I fell into the world of ghostwriting. A few months after that, I was earning 20 grand a month ghostwriting for industry leaders, startup founders and CEOs. Two years after that, we scaled our ghostwriting agency to over 2 million in annual revenue. A few years after that, I started building ship 30 for 30 with my co founder Dickie and the rest is history, literally following the exact seven steps I've laid out for you here in this video. So if you found this helpful hit, subscribe. Because I really believe that now is the greatest time in history to be a writer and to monetize your writing. And this cliche, nobody makes a living as a writer is completely false. I know, because I've monetized my writing in just about every way possible. Ghostwriting, digital products, books, software, group coaching, consulting, even paid newsletters. And I can tell you I'm not an outlier. I've just been at it for a long time. Long time. And I've acquired these different skills, which is what I want to pass along to you. Start writing online. Start ghostwriting. Trust the process.