The Best Digital Writing Platforms To Build An Audience In 2025

Did you know that x has over 500 million users and gets more than 6 billion website visits per month? LinkedIn has over 900 million users and gets over 1.6 billion visits per month. Medium has over 100 million users and gets over 200 million visits per month. And Quora has over 400 million users and gets over 800 million visits per month. So where should you start writing online? Probably your blog. Yeah, I think starting a blog makes sense. Somewhere with no readers, no one will know it exists except your mom and your dog. But you can pick the domain and you can design it. So that's pretty cool. Whenever writers ask me where they should start writing online, I always tell them to write on social platforms first for the following reasons. And if you don't know who I am, my name's Nicholas Cole. I'm one of the most read writers on the Internet. I've been writing online since the mid 2000s, back boy before anyone even knew what a blog was. And since then, I've accumulated over a billion views on my writing, built an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers and email subscribers, and sold over $15 million worth of writing related digital products, ghostwriting services, and books. And there are three big reasons why I'm such a big believer in writing on social platforms. First, and at the end of this video, I'm going to give you a proven content strategy I've used for years to help you start writing online as quickly as possible. Right. Reason number one, social platforms are incentivized to find you the right readers. Most people don't know how social platforms work, so let me give you a little crash course. Okay? How do social platforms make money? By allowing businesses to run targeted ads. What do you need in order to run targeted ads? Well, you need data. You need to know what types of content people like. How does a social platform learn what types of content people like? Attention. They need to keep those people on their platform for as long as possible, engaging with as much content as possible. And so how do you keep people on a social platform for as long as possible? By showing them things they will like over and over and over again. So what does this have to do with you and your writing? When you hit publish on a social platform, what is the social platform going to do? It's going to try to show your writing to as many of the right people as possible all around the world. Because the more of the right people it shows your piece to, the more they will resonate with it. The more attention they'll give it the more data the social platform will gather, the more money the social platform will make from their advertising business. Okay, it's a flywheel. And you want to take advantage of this flywheel and realize these social platforms, with hundreds of millions of users, are actually incentivized to show your writing to the right people. All you have to do is keep hitting publish, and the platform takes care of the rest. Reason number two, social platforms allow you to reach people you otherwise would never have access to. Think of x as one giant conference or LinkedIn as one giant mastermind. Which means when you write on these platforms, your writing has the ability to reach anyone else in those rooms. Industry leaders, Silicon Valley founders, renowned investors, celebrities, professional athletes. I mean, the list goes on and on. I remember, like a year ago, I wrote something on X that went viral, and Chris Pronger, one of the greatest NHL players ever and someone I idolized growing up, DM'd me, saying he'd read my piece, really enjoyed it, and then followed me. Okay, that doesn't happen when you have a blog. It can't, because a blog has no community, it has no distribution. Flywheel, it's just a blank page on the Internet that nobody knows about except your mom and your dog. And the only way to get people to your blog, unless you want to play the SEO game. But that has nothing to do with high quality writing, is to post on social platforms. So you might as well skip that step and just publish directly on X, LinkedIn, Medium, or Quora. Reason number three, social platforms force you to build niche libraries of reusable content. A lot of people think about writing linearly. So I write something today, then I write something tomorrow, then I write something again the day after that and the day after that. But really, your writing trajectory shouldn't move in a straight line. It should move in a circle. It should be a flywheel like this. You write 10 things, you look for the top two performing topics, you repeat the winners, you cut the losers, you write 10 more things, you look for the top two performing topics, repeat the winners cut, the losers, repeat over and over again. The goal is actually to get to a point where you've written so much about a particular topic that you don't actually have to write about that topic anymore. You've built a library, and you can reuse that library over and over and over again anytime you want, any. And anytime a new social platform comes out. I have been doing this for almost a decade, and most people have no idea. But for example, back in 22, I decided I wanted to start writing on LinkedIn. So what did I do? Did I start writing on LinkedIn? No. All I did was take my entire library of short form content from X and start reposting it on LinkedIn. In fact, that's all I've done for the past two years. I haven't created a single new piece of content on LinkedIn and have built an audience there of over 70,000 followers. And guess what? Not a single person has ever commented and said, hey, that's not fair. You already wrote this on another platform. In fact, it's almost always the opposite. People are happy to see the same ideas and frameworks and stories shared over and over again. So don't think of your writing trajectory as linear. Think of it as a flywheel where the goal is to create these niche libraries of content that you can reuse over and over again in the future. Now the big question is, how do you get started? Let me walk you through my proven content strategy to accelerate your trajectory of on the best text based social platform. So that's X, LinkedIn, Medium, and Quora. And if you're finding this explanation helpful and want more resources for how you can start writing online, hit subscribe. Okay. I've been writing on the Internet for over a decade. I'm super passionate about it. I firmly believe there's never been a better time in history to be a writer, to start writing and to monetize your writing. And I really do enjoy paying it forward. So hit subscribe. And on that note, here's my proven content strategy for writing on any text based social platform using my three verticals. Okay, Vertical one Niche topic I talk about digital writing. I talk about ghostwriting. I talk about self publishing. These are niche topics. Vertical 2 universal topic personal development. I talk about how to use writing as a vehicle to work on yourself. And then Vertical three Personal Topic Gaming I talk about how I think about writing online as a video game because I used to be a pro gamer as a teenager. So see how these three verticals all sort of work together? That's the ultimate goal. So if you're sitting there and you're going, Cole, I have no idea what my niche is. I don't know what personal topics I want to write about. That's fine. These aren't things that you're going to know in the beginning, right? You don't know these things first and then start writing? No, you start writing and then you clarify these things over time. First pick a topic, any topic, and then use what I like to call the 10 magical ways let's say you want to write About Real Estate 10 Magical Ways to write about real estate Tips for buying your first piece of real estate Stats for buying profitable real estate in 2024 Steps to buy your first rental property Lessons I learned buying my first short term rental Benefits of of buying real estate in your 20s reasons everyone should own at least one rental property for passive income Mistakes people make when buying their first rental property Examples of real estate investors who made millions Questions Most first time homeowners don't know to ask the seller personal stories from building my local real estate empire and owning 100 doors. Boom. One topic 10 magical ways and now you have 10 things to write about for the next week. And if you're sitting there thinking, no way it's that easy, right? No way can you keep writing about the same topic over and over again. Readers would hate that. Okay, what does Ryan Holiday do? He writes about stoicism every single day. What does Seth Godin do? He writes about marketing every single day. Every prolific writer and creator on the Internet becomes known for a niche they own. And how they become known for that niche is by writing about that topic over and over again. And they find ways to tie that niche topic to universal topics, and they find ways to sprinkle in their personality and share personal stories inside that niche topic. But really, all of these things are anchored to that niche. And I'm telling you, you won't find your niche by sitting at your des, smoking a corn cob pipe, staring out the window, pretending to be Kafka reincarnated. You create your niche by writing online, gathering data, and seeing what works. And the easiest place to start is to just pick a topic, run through the 10 magical ways, write about it for a week, and see how you feel. See if you enjoyed it, see if readers enjoyed it, then do it again. And do it again. And do it again. When I was first starting out, this is exactly the same process I had to go through. So I'm not telling you anything I haven't done myself. And now I mentor thousands of writers on how to do the same in our digital writing program, ship 30 for 30. So if you want to do this on your own, by all means. That's why I made this video and I put together an entire free walkthrough you can use@startwritingonline.com or if you'd like some help, head over to ship 30 for 30.com and hop aboard.