In this solo instructional video, Nicolas Cole outlines a step‑by‑step framework for writers to generate income online. He begins by recommending that writers publish free content on platforms such as LinkedIn, X, and Substack to build an audience and demonstrate consistency and value. Once a free audience is established, the next stage is to launch a paid newsletter, which serves as a subscription revenue stream and a pool of highly engaged readers willing to pay for deeper solutions. Cole then advises creators to monetize that audience further with high‑ticket digital products (e.g., $350 courses or toolkits) that solve more complex problems. He suggests repurposing the best newsletter material into self‑published books, turning the newsletter into an engine that funds annual book releases without needing advances. Finally, he mentions offering premium services for ultra‑high‑ticket clients. Throughout, he stresses the importance of congruence across all offerings—each product should stem from the same core topic and audience. He warns against mismatched content streams (e.g., nutrition writing paired with copywriting newsletters) as a common mistake. When choosing a starting model, Cole recommends either a paid newsletter or a digital product, but emphasizes that the best choice is the one the creator is most likely to persist with. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action to a free masterclass (StartWritingOnline.com) that provides hooks, platform recommendations, and growth‑hacking tips for beginners.
Chapters
This is the ideal scenario. The ideal scenario is you write online, you write about a topic, you give it away for free. LinkedIn, X, Substack, you're, you're writing things for free. The things that you write about for free, you write about more of in your free newsletter. Over time, as you prove to yourself and to the people that you're trying to help that you can in fact be consistent and helpful— those are the two very important pieces, what do you do? You go from free to paid newsletter. This is amazing because this is subscription revenue. What's the paid newsletter? It's just more of the free thing. But just because you have a paid newsletter doesn't mean that that's the only way to monetize. Everyone that's on your paid newsletter list is basically raising their hand saying, I would love to give you more money if you help me solve more complicated problems. So what do you do? You help them solve more complicated problems with digital products. Awesome. There's no reason why you shouldn't have a $350 digital product or new digital products that you are marketing to your paid newsletter list and even to your free newsletter list. But you're taking the time to write all those newsletters, right? You're building your library over time. Why wouldn't you also self-publish the winners as a book, even if it was once a year? Oh, now your newsletter just became an engine where you're getting paid to write a book every year. That's pretty cool. You don't need an advance. You don't need anyone else's permission. You are literally getting paid to write a book every year. And then you could use that book to incentivize all the other flywheels in your business. And then you go, oh, and by the way, I educate you in all these ways, right? More, more, more, more, more. Or You can also hire me, and for the ultra-premium, I'll just do it for you. Services. You actually can monetize in all of these ways. The key is for there to be congruence between all of them. Does that make sense? Where this doesn't work is if you're like, I write online about nutrition, but my newsletter is about copywriting, and my paid newsletter is copy— copywriting for people who want to retire early, and then my digital products is money management, and then I self-publish books about life advice, and then my services are AI automations. And this might sound silly, but this is literally what everyone does. This is the mistake. And so you want, you want the opposite of this. You want the content to lead to the free newsletter, to lead to the paid newsletter, to be congruent with the digital products. It's all the same thing, just different levels of more. I don't think it's very helpful to actually use what Dicky and I have built as an example, because this is not how we started. You know, yes, you can have lots of different things as time goes on, but how you start is with one thing, right? Simple scales. And then over time, you can start to add on top of it. So, yeah. So, David, this is the magic question. If I, if I picked one model at the start, which would be the best? And why. So the prescriptive answer is I would go either the paid newsletter or the digital product because those are the two easiest to execute. The real answer is whichever one you are most likely to take action on. That's the real answer, because I could tell you, hey, you should do the digital product model, but if you're not actually interested in that, you're gonna do it for 24 hours and then give up. So is that the right answer? No, it's not the right answer for you. The right answer is whichever one you are most likely to stick with. That is the one you will make the most money with.
Real quick, if you want to write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out StartWritingOnline.com. This is a free masterclass I put together sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners, like proven hooks to capture your target reader's attention, where to write online to get the most distribution on your work, and little growth hacking tips to build your social audience and email list faster. Over 100,000 writers have gone through this free masterclass, and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online.
