How To Monetize Your Online Writing (In 3 Simple Steps):

One of the biggest mistakes that writers make is what they do is they go, "Oh, Cole, I'm just writing about this thing because I enjoy it." And then I go, "Okay, that's fine." And then 2 seconds later they turn around and they go, "Yeah, but why isn't it making me money?" You just picked 2 different things. Yes, pick something that you enjoy, but like, be honest with yourself about the fact that you want to monetize it. And if If you truly do not want to monetize, that is closer to journaling. Okay, if you're, if you're like, I just want to write something that I'm passionate about, fine. But like, that's borderline a journal. Okay, if you at all want to monetize, period, then you have to understand that you need to take specific actions and you need to do certain things in order to make money from that thing. Just because you pick a business model does not mean you make money. Just because you turn your newsletter paid does not mean that people pay you. Just because you build a digital product does not mean that you automatically start generating revenue. It is— it creates the option to make money, but it doesn't mean that it happens instantly and automatically. And so the funny thing about monetizing is that If you skip the first step, which is just proving that you can write really valuable things to people for free, if you skip that step and you try to rush into monetizing, you actually, like, don't understand why you're not making money. But if you take the time to go, I am clearly helping people. You have to remember that the more that you do that, the more you increase the likelihood that you can make money later. And I think almost everyone here, I assume you watched this happen or you saw this or you heard about this. You know what is one of the best examples of the past few years of this? Hormozy's $100 million book launch. I have nothing to sell you. I have nothing to sell you. I have nothing to sell you. Free content. Free content. Free content. Free content. $100 million in 3 days, right? And so this, this is an important concept of if you want to monetize, you have to realize that the bottleneck to monetizing actually doesn't have to do with the business model. That comes second. The true first bottleneck is, are you able to write things for free that people find valuable? And if you can for free, then monetizing is actually very simple. But it's that first step that is required. Yeah. Everyone here, I think the easiest thing to do is just audit your own purchasing decisions. You know, how much free stuff do you consume before you buy? And that kind of tells you your answer. Now, does that mean that you can't turn on a business model day one? No, you absolutely can. Actually, what we did, Dickie, with Ship 30 is a really good example. I had been writing on the internet for quite a while before then, but like, the primary traffic engine for Ship 30 was, at the time, Twitter, and both Dickie, you and I were new to Twitter. That was a new platform for me, and that was a new platform for you, so we kinda were starting from zero. And we wrote lots of free things, but we also had Ship 30 for sale, kinda like, very soon after that, right? Yeah. And so for everyone here, I'm, I'm not saying you need to go write for free every day for 7 years before you start charging. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is it's a very simple concept, but it's very hard to, to understand, which is if you can't get someone to read the free thing, they're not going to buy the paid thing. So you have to kind of come back to first principles and go, okay, let me make— let me just practice. Like, there's a skill bottleneck, right? Like, let me just practice and get better. But that doesn't mean that you can't turn on a business model. And so I think it's important to understand, like, if you want to monetize your writing, what does monetize your writing actually mean? What, what is a business that is quote unquote built on writing? It's actually very simple. There are only 3 steps to the entire business, and it doesn't matter what business model you pick. It is the same 3 steps over and over and over again. You drive traffic, aka write online. You collect traffic, aka capture emails, and then you monetize traffic. You sell something. What was Ship 30's model? We wrote on Twitter, we drove people to startwritingonline.com and captured their email. We sold them Ship 30. Those were the only 3 steps that we did for years and drove millions of dollars in revenue. Okay, if you want to sell books, what do you do? You drive traffic, you get people's emails, you sell books. If you want to sell digital products, what do you do? You drive traffic, you collect emails, you sell digital products. If you want to monetize a paid newsletter, what do you do? You drive traffic, you write online, you collect emails, they join your newsletter, you monetize, you get them to upgrade to the paid newsletter. So I think oftentimes people make monetization so much more complicated than it actually is. It's 3 steps, it's 3 things. And that's why, that's why, like, anytime you find yourself overthinking, you realize, or anytime you like obsess over one of these steps, you're lost in the forest. You have to pull back and see the forest from the trees and go, "Whoa, wait, it's not actually one of these individual pieces. It's this loop." And so the way that you monetize is by repeating this loop as often as possible for as long as possible. I think, Dickie, internally we looked at the data recently and we're like, What was the year that Ship 30 was most profitable? It was the year that we went viral the most on Twitter. So the most traffic, we collected the most high-intent emails via Twitter, and we ran the most Ship 30 cohorts. We ran a cohort every 6 weeks for a year straight. This is actually a really— this is another great way of thinking about it. So Sean, you put in the chat The most valuable thing I've gotten from this sprint is the realization that so much of what we want is a product of providing an outsized amount of free value consistently. Yeah, right. Like, where to take the counterpoint— where do people go wrong with monetization? What they do is they go, I'm not helping you, but I have this thing for, for sale. And then they sit there and they're confused as to why no one buys it. Right? The right way to monetize is, "Hey, you have this problem. Here's how to solve it. Here's another way to solve it. Here's another way to solve it. Here's the reason why you have it. Here's some mistakes that you're probably making that are keeping you from solving it. By the way, here's a template I built to help you solve it. Oh, and by the way, after I give you all of that, I also have a more advanced version that is even more helpful if you would like it." Like, it actually is such a radically simple concept, but it's one of those things that takes a really long time to truly understand, which is the free content is really like the big forcing function for you to build skill. That is the whole purpose of creating content. And as you get better, as you understand the person that you're trying to help, as you get better at articulating their problems, as you get better at articulating the outcomes they care about, as you get better at articulating the mistakes that they're making, as you get better building templates that help them, cheat sheets that help them, prompts that help them, assets that help them, the more that you build that skill, the monetization is very easy because the monetization is a reflection of that skill, right? So does everyone understand here, like, Business 101, those 3 steps? And I'll tell you, the number one mistake that people make is they simply don't do it long enough. They, they, they start this and then they stick with it for 6 days and then they're confused as to why they're not generating the same outcome as someone who has replicated that loop for 6 years. It's very basic. By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading The Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing.