Why Volume Wins: A proven strategy for becoming a successful writer online.

What's up, everyone? My name is Cole. And if you love writing but aren't sure how to make a career out of it, how to make money from it, you found the right channel. So I just wrote this atomic essay called Volume Wins. Why increasing your output is the best marketing for your writing. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about this strategy so that, you know, if you're, if you've seen this or you've seen me write about this, you understand where it comes from. So really, the way I like thinking about writing and publishing in, in a digital world is if you think about how all these algorithms work. All these algorithms, whether you're writing on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Medium, whether you're creating content on Instagram, TikTok works this way, YouTube works this way. Social algorithms all kind of share the same handful of things in common. And one of those things that they share in common is they all basically operate like wheels of fortune. It's like playing the lottery and you have no idea. You know, you might think, oh, I have this great idea. I know what people want to hear about from me, I know what I want to write about, or I know what I should write about. But the reality is you don't really know how anything that you write is going to be received. And the reason, I mean, I learned this firsthand, because I can't tell you how many times I would sit down to write and I thought I knew what readers wanted. And I would spend all this time on a piece. You know, it could be an atomic essay, it could be a Twitter thread, it could be a long form kind of pillar article. And then I'd put it out into the world and nothing would happen. And I would sit there and go, that's really weird. I spent a lot of time on this. I thought this was really valuable. I don't understand, you know, why didn't this catch fire? And then I've had other things where I literally wrote it in 15 or 20 minutes, thought nothing of it, even sat there, looked at it and was like, eh, this is very average. I don't even really know if I like this. And then for whatever reason, because I've just learned this, I just forced myself to hit publish because you never know. And then I will hit publish and it will become one of my most viral things ever. It'll be one of my most read essays ever. It'll be the thing that I write that sparks more conversation than anything else I've ever written. And I've had this happen now over and over and over again. I have so many stories about, you know, times I wrote something, I put it on Quora, didn't think anything of it. Went front page of Reddit, million views in two days. You know, same thing with Medium. I've written things on Quora that didn't do anything. You know, it didn't really get much traction. I would republish it on a different platform, and it would go crazy viral on Medium, same content, you know, just for whatever reason, it didn't work on Quora, but in a different environment, it works. And I've had this happen so many times where I've really learned that, A, I don't know, you know, I really don't know what's going to work and what doesn't, and B, the more that you write and publish, the more that the algorithms reward your consistency. So it's kind of A, there's two things to keep in mind with this. One is that the more you write, the more chances you have of succeeding. You know, if you only write one thing a year, basically, you only have one lottery ticket. If you write one thing a day, well, now you have 365 lottery tickets. And the more lottery tickets you have, the higher your likelihood of success goes, right? The more likely you are to experience some sort of exponential outcome simply because you're spinning the wheel more times. And so this idea of volume wins is a. It's just the more times you play the game, the more likely you are to win, right? It's like, imagine your friend bets you 50 bucks, and he goes, hey, we're gonna go out to a baseball field. I'm gonna throw one pitch, and if you hit that one pitch, I'll give you 50 bucks, you know? Well, if you only have one try, that's a lot of pressure on one swing, right? But if you go to the field and they go, I'll give you 365 swings, you're like, yeah, no problem. I'm gonna just keep swinging until I get my 50 bucks, you know? And that same mentality is how I've always thought about writing on the Internet is instead of putting too much value on any one thing, acknowledge that. I don't know. Acknowledge that the more times I spin the wheel, the more likely I am to win the game, right? And just don't overthink it. Just trust that process and keep swinging. The other reason that I really believe in this strategy, especially in a digital world, is because the way that these algorithms work and the way that the Internet Works and archives. Information is think of every single thing that you write, not as something in and of itself. You know, it's not just pieces individually, something that I've always done. I've been doing this since 2014, when I started writing on Quora. And I'll show you here, you know, here's my Quora profile. And here, you'll see, you know, I have 34.8 million content views just on this platform, with a hundred thousand this month. I have written very little new material on Quora for probably the past three years. Like, usually I'll go through these little spurts now, like, my library is so big here, but I. I'll go through spurts and I'll maybe write a couple things one month, you know, a couple months goes by, I get inspired again, write another couple things on here. But this isn't really my focus right now. So I stopped really treating Quora as this, like, primary destination a couple years ago. And yet I'm still averaging about 100,000 views a month, just passively. So how does that happen? Well, how that happens is my library here, let me see. 1.3. So that's 1,300 answers, many of which are about 5, 6, 7, 800 plus words. They're full articles just written here on Quora. And so instead of thinking about every single thing that you write in and of itself, right? You're like, oh, I wrote this thing, and then I wrote this thing instead. I encourage you to think of everything that you write as a piece of your much larger library. And your library is a web. And the more content that you have in your library, the bigger the web gets, right? And the bigger the web gets on any platform or, you know, actually on the World Wide Web, right? Like, the bigger that your web is on the web, the more likely you are to attract readers. And so what has happened here is I've written so many answers, a couple key categories. I mean, you can see it down here. Life advice was a huge one for me for a while. So was self improvement, life lessons. You can see, like, this was really my sweet spot for a long time. And then I've got writing, you know, success. I was into fitness for a while, motivation, you know, I even dipped and dabbled in, you know, old hobby of mine, video games, creative writing down here books. So every single piece of content that I've written in all these categories. Like, for example, there was a period of time in the life advice category here on Quora where you couldn't enter the life advice category on Quora without coming across answer after answer after answer from me, you just couldn't because I had so much content circulating around there. And so every person that was interested in life advice or self improvement or personal development, the moment they stepped into that category, they were going to come across something that I had written the same. Now, you know, now my focus is a lot more on writing about writing, specifically online writing, digital writing, writing frameworks, writing businesses, things like that. You can't really step into that category without coming across my work, hearing my name, seeing something that I created, right? Because I'm constantly creating more and more content in that big broad category. And so this idea of volume wins is basically just the strategy of saying, I know that if I produce the most content in this overarching category or a meaningful percentage of it, every reader that even catches wind of that category, right, if they even start inching close to it, if they step into it, they're going to come across my material because my web is so big. And so you can see. I'll show you my dashboard in Quora. You know, here, you know, how do you get to tens of millions of views? Here's a bunch of other stats. Here is, it's just piece after piece after piece. If you notice so many of these, you know, 500 views, 300 views, 400, 400, 300, 700, you know, 1,000, 2,000, 300, 3,000, right? Very few of them have a million plus views by themselves. Some of them do. I can filter by. Let's see, filter by. Oh, they, they just changed the organization of this. So this is a new dashboard. Okay, so here if I organize by views, this one 1.3 million, this one 1.2 million, this one, 900,000, almost 800,000, right? A little over 750. So there's a handful up here that are, that accumulated a lot of views. But this is like 10% or less of my library. 90% of my library is 500 views, 1,000 views, 2,000 views, you know, but, but it all adds up. And so how you then get to, you know, you see, oh, okay, it's still averaging a hundred thousand views a month. It's because you have this giant web where everything's just ticking a little bit, you know, just tick, tick, tick, that's all it is. And the same then happens on medium, right? So I've taken a lot of my content from Quora and I've also put it on medium. Medium views have dropped off a little bit here, but right now I'm averaging about 30,000 views a month on Medium. Not really writing a whole lot here. You know, I'll copy paste content over if I haven't already, you know, so I have one version on Quora. I have one version on Medium. That's about it. But if you go back, this was more. Last year, I was in a really great stride here. I mean, you can see each one of these is a month, right? So I'm averaging about a hundred thousand views a month, 200,000 views a month, 350,000 views a month, 460,000 views a month. You know, I mean, there was a. There was a period of time, there were. Where things in my library were catching again. These were things I had written years ago, and they were catching again. Catching. Someone else found it and shared it with an email list or whatever. You know, like, for whatever reason this happens, it's because the web is so big that when this happens, it's not just the one piece that does well. It's. You have to think people read the piece, and then they go, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what else Cole has written. And then they click over to a second piece, and then, you know, less and less people click over to a third piece and then a fourth piece. So what happens is the average of a big chunk of your library goes up, right? So if you have this happening, not just on one, two, you know, even three platforms, you know, here I'm doing about a million views a month on Twitter, you know, so if you add it all up together, right? I mean, you're. There's periods of time where I'm averaging anywhere from, call it 1 million to, I think, at my height, I was doing about 4 or 5 million a month views a month, and I was writing a lot. But it was also the fact that my historical library kept accumulating views as well. And so I really encourage you to not think of writing as a linear game. It's not. I wrote something. I wrote something. I wrote something, right? It's an exponential game. It's. The more that you write, the bigger that your library gets, the bigger your web gets, the more likely you are to attract new readers. The more times you're buying lottery tickets, you know, you're spinning the wheel of fortune. You're playing the game. The more likely you are that you have an exponential outcome, the more likely the whole average of your library goes up, right? And so you can see how in the beginning, you go, oh, I've written four things and nothing's happened. Right. But if you play it out over a year, two years, three years, all of a sudden this big library that you have is still paying you dividends. Like I said, I'm not even really writing on Quora anymore, and this thing is still driving 100,000 views a month. And I still get emails from people saying, hey, I just read your Quora answer. I just got introduced to you. This library has been up here for seven years. There's still people that are like, hey, I just discovered your writing online. So I just wanted to point that out because a lot of times writers put so much emphasis on any one individual piece, and that's really not what it's about. It's like, see the forest from the trees. You know, don't worry about the performance of any individual piece. Focus on building your library and then bringing your whole library from platform to platform. And that's how you start compounding growth over time. So it might not seem like a lot in the very beginning. I mean, this YouTube channel is a perfect example. You know, it's like, oh, first three videos, you get a couple hundred views. And there's a part of me, right, where I could say, ah, this is never going to work. But I've gone through this enough times where I know, yeah, just don't focus on any one video. Just build the channel right, just build the assets. And then all over the years, right, they all start compounding on themselves. So I just wanted to share that. I think it's a really, really helpful framework. I encourage you to adopt it yourself. You know, don't focus on any one individual piece. And of course, you know, if you're finding these videos helpful, let me know in the comments. Subscribe, ask me questions. I'm always looking for new ideas for things to create, so whatever's helpful, just let me know.