5 Ways To Make $1 Million As A Writer - Nicolas Cole

you are not the main character of your story the reader is the main character the moment you realize that you realize that you are in the business of serving the reader people don't buy the asset right no one buys a book what the person's buying is an answer to a question hello and welcome back to Deep dive the weekly podcast where every week it's my immense privilege to sit down with authors academics entrepreneurs and creators and other inspiring people and we talk about how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love what you're about to hear is an interview between me and Nicholas Cole and the main theme of what we're going to talk about is how you can make money on the internet through online writing you can make money as a writer it's just you need to differentiate between are you saying I want to write this and then you go out into the world and go who's willing to buy it or are you starting in the opposite direction and go what do you need what question do you have and can I provide it he's done basically everything as it relates to making a full-time income from the internet through writing and so in the video we break down how to get started with this how anyone can make money writing on the internet how to build an audience through writing on the internet and lots of like super tactical stuff further in the episodes anyone can become a writer all of these skills are easy to learn and it's possible you just need to invest the time to learn some of these skills and put them into practice thank you so much for coming on the Pod where this is it off this is gonna be so fun like we've we've known each other on the internet for the past like one year plus I think and now you're here in London on Thanksgiving break and here we are on Thanksgiving recording this I'm so I'm so happy we made it yeah thank you so much for coming down yeah um I was thinking like you are the kind of I guess a professional at making money through online writing I guess like how how do you introduce yourself to people these days if someone asks like what do you do what what do you what do you say to that I like to say I use language to change how people think okay so I used I used to get paid I I frame it this way I used to get paid as a Ghostwriter and as a ghost writer or earlier on as a Content writer you get paid to write words so someone's like I'm gonna pay you to write 800 words I'm gonna pay you to write 1200 words 1500 words and it took me a long time that took a long time to realize that great writers don't get paid to write lots of words they get paid to write two or three words that then dictate the direction of the 800 words the 1500 words the 3000 words so now I focus on using language to change how people think writing two or three words that changes the direction of which way the wind is blowing oh okay definitely want to dig more into that um I was thinking we would talk about kind of a handful of different ways to essentially become a millionaire through online writing or through writing of some sort and given that you've done this in various kind of uh fields I feel like you'd be the perfect kind of expert expert on the topic um but before we go there you you have a fantastic book um the art and business of online writing which I've actually ordered a physical copy on Amazon which is arriving tomorrow because we're showing it off in a video like on Friday oh cool that'll be cool um thanks for supporting the artists no it's all good I've been I've been recommending that book to so many people when they ask questions like should I start a blog and hey I want to make money on this on internet thing but I don't really want to show my face on YouTube I want to become a writer um and I just send that book to a lot of people but in that book you talk about your origin story which is like a World of Warcraft Pro Gamer or something yeah I had a World of Warcraft phase during wrath and cataclysm as well really and but like I I know I always like loved the idea of being in a raiding Guild but I could never make it work with like my mum calling me down for dinner as a freaking 16 year old and then having to leave the raid and all of this kind of stuff so what was your background in World of Warcraft how did the origin we had the same story first of all hoarder Alliance oh I was bored okay good yeah that's the the right answer um yeah I was I you know same thing I was a really hardcore gamer as a teenager and I didn't know that I had celiac disease till I was 18. so I was really sick growing up and I also wanted I had dreams of playing in the NHL and fractured my spine when I was 14 and then tried to come back to the sport fractured it again when I was 17. so those two things you don't have a lot of other time or options so I just sat in front of my computer and I got really really good at world Warcraft right and uh yeah by the time I finished high school I was you know competing at a pro level and a lot of the guys that are at the top of the space now are guys that I remember playing against 10 years ago I was just a little too early you know in 20 let's see I was 17 2007 so that was the very very beginning of the Esports Trend oh okay so I missed that boat by like 18 months yeah that was like end of boating Crusade wasn't it because wrath came out 2010. yeah yeah so you would see what were you like on the rating side or on the PVP side all the PVP really yeah same thing I never had time my parents you know they were always like you have to sit and have dinner with us you can't raid on school nights so I would just PVP and I would just compete against all the best players in the world so where did the interest in writing come in because like journalism fiction like you must have had some sort of background in writing yeah I've just always had it I think my earliest memory is my mom signed me up for a Poetry Club when I was in fourth grade and I don't know that I wrote anything fantastic but there was something really cool about that and I don't know why like words just always stuck I was not good in math was not good in science I really struggled in school but writing always made a ton of sense okay so you're you're at University you're doing the you're side hustling as a music producer you're a side hustling a side hustling as a barista while do while doing your degree what happened next in the story I sat in my last class uh of college and the very last class I was taking um from this professor it was kind of a he was locally famous in Chicago he was an author and he had written this book called hairstyles of the Damned his name is Joe Mino and I loved him as a teacher he was great and in the city everyone was kind of like oh my dream is to write a book like him and he kind of embodied the the goal of being a locally famous writer at least to me and we're sitting in the very last class and he's like okay everyone you're about to graduate I'm going to tell you how to become a successful writer so we all pull out our notepads and our notebooks you know I'm sitting there and I'm like this is what it was all about I put in my time you're going to give me the answer and he's like okay here's what you do you spend a year minimum on your story and then when you're done you go down to the bookstore and you pull these magazines off the shelf and you look for agents at these uh because at the backs of magazines they'll say you know who are the Publishers and usually who are the agents he's like you find the addresses of the agents that you want to reach then you go down to UPS you get yourself a manila envelope and you put your story in the manila envelope and then you put it in the mail and you ship it to them and then you wait and you just wait and you just keep waiting and then in six to 12 months they're going to mail you back a rejection letter and you're gonna put it on top of your desk and that's where you're going to stack all your rejection letters and then you're going to do that for 30 years and that's how you become a successful writer and he was serious he was like in order to be a writer you need to get comfortable with rejection and half the class was just like it was like a doomsday parade you know it's just here's everything that's wrong with publishing and here's why it's so hard to make a living as a writer and and I was sitting there and I got my iPhone in my pocket and I'm like I have more technology in this phone than the Space Shuttle that we originally landed on the moon with like how how is it that the most effective way to make a make money as a writer is for me to go print off my story and then just go wait for a rejection letter and I was Furious and so I left school basically being like okay thanks for teaching me things about writing thanks for teaching me how to read my work out loud that was a really big thing that I learned and I loved that but there was no preparation on how to actually monetize your craft and so when I graduated I was like I'm gonna have to go figure this out on my own and I was talking to a friend at the time and the question that I posed to him he was a YouTuber as well I was a gaming YouTuber and I was like if models and Foodies and other archetypes have Instagram and Gamers and you know Educators and filmmakers have YouTube where do writers write like what is the writing equivalent and he said oh you should check out this platform called quora and coro's question answer site I had never heard of it was 2013 and immediately fascinated like I spent hours reading on quora and what I noticed is every question was the way I saw it every question was basically a writing prompt so it wasn't really a question answer site it was a social question answer site and every question was this this jump off point and all the highest performing quora answers were stories so someone would be like what is it like to be an entrepreneur and the answer wouldn't be here's a formal definition of Entrepreneurship right the first sentence would be like when I was 22 I was worth eight million dollars and six months later I was worth nothing sleeping on my parents couch again and you're like obviously I'm gonna read the story right and so I had this aha where I I noticed that I didn't have to wait for permission anymore well my teacher was trying to tell me and us and all these students is there's a way that the game is played and you have to wait for permission or you have to you have to have someone else give you permission and they have to validate you and you have to wait and you have to wait and you have to wait and your success is based on someone else deciding when you're successful and the internet made me realize well no I don't have to wait for anyone I can just start writing and if the quality of my writing reaches people then we're good to go in that position a lot of in that position a lot of people might be thinking well how am I going to make money from this like it's all well I'm good answering free questions on the internet I was writing on forums back in the day but like there's no there's no obvious path to monetization there whereas in the at least old school traditional Industries like publishing it's like hey you know JK Rowling got 57 rejections or whatever it was and then the 58th one became made her a billionaire that kind of that kind of model so I guess I guess how were you thinking about the monetization were you thinking about the monetization that that fear of okay cool I'm writing on the internet but like what what then totally um the whole time I mean I could say you know I've been at it for 10 years now and the monetization question is really hard to answer that's part of why I'm so passionate about talking about it because 10 years ago there weren't a lot of resources explaining how to make money the first so in college I started writing my first book The the book about being a gamer and my goal was I want to finish this book and I kind of had the the pipe dream that I think every writer has where you think my first book is going to be my magnum opus it's immediately going to be this incredible bestseller the world is going to notice my talent and and you just kind of think magically you're gonna make a ton of money from it and I spent hours researching about should I do self-publishing should I try and get a publishing deal all of this stuff because I wanted to be educated on the business side I didn't want to just you know accept whatever happened and that first book did not make me a lot of money I had a very real moment with myself where I spent four years writing this book and you hit publish and then you're like cool I made a thousand bucks you know and then you start to realize that the way that you're taught to think about monetizing your writing is only that model you know it's I hope the world recognizes my genius you know I don't even know what a publishing contract is but I hope I sell enough copies so that I just magically you know have enough to live on and then you start doing the napkin math and you're like this is not going to work out the way that I think it's going to work out so yeah I spent a lot of time reading forums and studying other digital marketers and trying to understand like what is a funnel you know what are ads what's a landing page what's an what's a free email course you know and just year after year I just kind of kept piecing all these things together learning how to monetize so the time you were writing on cora but it sounds like you weren't thinking or were you thinking that okay if I can do well in quora sudden then then yeah how are you thinking about the monetization I mean in the in the very very beginning it was uh I have no idea I'm just gonna try stuff okay uh my my assumption was if I get enough people reading my work on quora something will happen so what I did is you know because that's the only place you can start from right and so what I did is I challenged myself to go okay I'm gonna commit to this new thing I was extremely disciplined in my 20s I still am but I was way disciplined in my 20s and I was uh really into bodybuilding you know I was lifting every day I was eating six meals a day every day I know I don't look good anymore and uh it was to me it was really important that if I started something that I baked it into my daily schedule and I did it every single day because I knew that that was the only way that you would really see is it working or is it just I'm not putting in the effort right I wanted to run a clean experiment so I was like I'm going to write every single day on quora one answer a day for a year straight worst case scenario I do the thing I love which is right best case scenario something happens and I had this moment where you know it's how it always goes where you start a new habit and then you get like a month in and you start getting in your head about it and you're like I don't know if I really want to do this and uh and one day I was like I really don't want to write today I I'm just tired from my job I don't want to hit publish forced myself to stay an extra 15-20 minutes at my job because I didn't have internet in my apartment I didn't allow myself to have internet for four years until I finished writing my book because I knew I would waste it on YouTube so I removed that option and I did all my writing at if I need to use the internet I would just use it as coffee shop or at work or something I wrote this quora answer I hit publish got on the train and by the time I got home it was on the front page of Reddit it was over a million views very quickly and it was basically my story of going from really sick as a teenager not knowing I had celiac disease to this bodybuilder and I had this before and after photo uh at the top it was a really short answer and immediately I had I got all these emails from people a lot of guys that looked like me on the left hand side which was you know skinny scrawny insecure and I got the same two questions over and over again what's your workout routine and what are you eating and so I saw that and I had this connection moment where I was like oh a huge part of monetizing your writing is you need to write things that people want answers to right like you are trading information for money at least through the non-fiction lens and so I spent all weekend writing these two ebooks and on Monday I put them up for sale I connected the website and where I was where I was selling them to that Viral answer that was still going crazy on quora and I remember sitting in my Monday morning meeting and my phone's just going nuts with stripe notifications and that's how I made my first like five grand something like that and I had this aha moment where I was like oh you can make money as a writer it's just you need to differentiate between are you saying I want to write this and then you go out into the world and go who's willing to buy it or are you starting in the opposite direction and go what do you need what what answer are you looking for what question do you have and can I provide it and that was the as soon as I realized that everything changed and I went from the fallacy of I'm going to sit down and write what I want to write about now I have to go hustle it right with starting in the inverse who's who's the reader what do they want I was doing a session for our YouTuber academy yesterday where you know we were doing like a little q a and people were people always struggle with this question of what's my Niche and one way of approaching it is what do I want to make videos about but the more successful way of approaching it is what do other people want and how can I serve them yes and just kind of thinking like an entrepreneur rather than thinking like a hobbyist is like hey I I have all these I have for these hundred different interests I want to make videos about productivity and Entrepreneurship and personal development like okay as do five million other people like right come on where's their Market where's where is there something that we can serve someone yeah I mean the the hardest thing I think to wrap your head around is your Niche is not about you your Niche is about your reader or your viewer or your listener so where I notice a lot of writers go wrong is they spend their whole lives just going well I want to write what I want to write about and you should that's great but also you are in service of the reader and I think a really important thing to differentiate between is if you want to write whatever you want to write about go for it like that's the beauty of the internet that's the beauty of self-publishing that's you have that freedom but don't two seconds later then complain when the external result isn't what you want right so someone goes I want to write what I want to write about and then they go and why aren't I going viral or where's all the money or why don't I have a gazillion followers right and that's because you're not being clear about whether you're doing this for yourself or you're doing it for an external outcome and I think you need to be honest and go I want a right to make money great make decisions that unlock that outcome you know whereas there's a lot of things that I want to write in my lifetime that I want to write and I'm not confused about the fact that those things are probably maybe they might be a home run but probably not going to make as much money as if I start with the end in mind and go well what does that person need and how can I use writing to serve that need you know what I mean there's this a famous artist um I don't know if you're families like um I think uh Aziz Ansari was at a party and he asked this really big musician who releases stuff like every like 10 years or something like that and I'm blacking on the name but but essentially he asked him like hey man how like it seems like you just kind of do whatever you want you just release music when you want it seems like you're not caught up in the trappings of the industry like how do you do it and the guy was like it's easy I just make a lot less money and it's like you know the the way we teach this on a YouTuber Academy is I always say to people that there is a spectrum between I'm doing this as a hobby and I'm doing this as a business yes where are you on that Spectrum from like zero to ten and everyone says ten ten ten ten otherwise they wouldn't be in the course whereas when we do our free workshops everyone's like two three four is like the average but then the same people that are like I want to do this 10 out of 10 as a business are still also kind of still struggling with this thing around like oh but I have all these 10 different passions and I want to make videos about all of them whereas you wouldn't make a a grocery store well a shop trying to uh a shop trying to sell absolutely everything because you've been competing with Amazon you'd be finding a niche where you know there's there is a market for the thing and just focusing on that even if you have these other 10 interests yeah I mean the example I love we use this in uh in our course ship 30 which is we asked the question what's Ryan holiday's niche and immediately the whole chat all blows up with the same one word right everyone says stoicism and then I go okay great how do you know that right like why did you type that and we don't realize that we associate niches with people because they educate us to do that right it doesn't just happen like the reason we associate stoicism with Ryan holiday is because he writes book after book after book and he makes YouTube video after YouTube video that says stoicism right we would not do that if every single thing he wrote or every video he created was a different topic so I think that's point a point B is realizing that you can do both I I it's a fallacy to think you're a one-dimensional person you're not we all have many interests you can do more than one thing most people don't know that I have like I don't even know three poetry books published no I didn't know that yeah right most people don't know that and that's fine because I'm not confused about which thing I do because I want to do it and which thing I do that is my money maker that's the whole question is you want to make the niche if if your goal is how do I make money right you want to make the niche your money maker but that doesn't mean you can't do other things you can just don't expect those things to have the same external outcome as your money maker right and I think remembering that gives you so much freedom and it allows you to do all the things that you want to do and you aren't confused about what to optimize to make sure that you can still put food on the table right all right we're just going to take 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my my thing for YouTube which was I'm gonna make a video every week for the next two years and fingers crossed something will happen but even if not like I'll learn stuff I'm sure it'll be interesting in some kind of ways maybe I'll get a few sales for my medical admissions course or something like that having now taught like you know a couple thousand people for YouTuber Academy and I'm sure you've you've you know you've done the same thing for for ship 30 the writing course that's a pretty unusual kind of mindset to have like most people I know don't have that attitude of all right I've decided to do a thing I'm just gonna do it every day for a year like what what was it about you that made you more inclined to go down that route and anything that you would any advice you would get for people who are struggling with this idea of just committing to a thing and doing it consistently well first of all it's curiosity I think I'm just a very curious person and I think anyone who makes that decision is inherently curious but really just stop and think about it right no one paid you to go to middle school but we all have a lot of memories and a lot of lessons learned from being in middle school no one paid us to go to high school but same thing no one paid us to have Hobbies growing up but yet we all look back and are like oh I learned so much playing a musical instrument or I've learned so much playing a sport right we inherently do it it's just for whatever reason there's this fear of choosing to do it yourself whereas when you're younger someone else tells you you have to do it and there's something comforting about saying oh well someone else told me that I had to do this and so thus it must be the right thing right and once you get comfortable making those decisions yourself you realize that there really isn't any wasted time no one paid me to get into bodybuilding for six years but the lessons I learned from that have shifted my life massively you know no one paid me to learn classical piano growing up but I learned a lot doing that and so all it is is just realizing that the outcome is positive and even if you did it every day for a year like extend the time Horizon your life is long a year is not that much time right and I think the fear that everyone has is I'm going to waste time but then meanwhile they're just they go right back and they're scrolling on Twitter or Instagram it's like you're already wasting time right so there's something about just committing to the process and enjoying the journey and trusting that whatever skill you gain that skill is probably going to be Universal it goes back to what we were talking about you said there's a theme of Gamers musicians right getting into right well what is that that's just acquiring other skills it's not really the skill of being a gamer it's not really the skill of being a musician it's all the underlying stuff work ethic commitment creativity right yeah I see I see this a lot with um with medical students in particular where like Medics are and I guess like any kind of traditional career which attracts a kind of risk-averse kind of person who has done well in school the attitude is always um how like essentially how many CV points am I going to get for doing this thing and increasingly and and it's it's easy enough in medicine because it's like okay cool when I if I publish these two papers then four years down the line when I apply for residency I'll have an extra two points on my thing and that will give me an extra five percent boost over the other people that maybe only have one publication it's a very kind of points-based like I'm doing this thing because it will look good on my CV further down the line type of attitude whereas if I think of I guess kind of the entrepreneurs and stuff that I know they almost never had the attitude of like this will look good on my CV it was almost always an attitude of let me try this out and see what happens and I'm sure something something interesting will happen further down the line I can't I can't tell you what it's going to be but we'll we'll kind of see what happens yeah it's I think it's a very rare human trait to Focus to want to focus on the skill more than wanting to focus on the outcome I really don't care about a lot of outcomes I like them it it'll be fun when I get there but I am way more obsessed and interested in mastering a skill or knowing that if I'm in the same room with other people that are mastering skills I want to know that I am able to play at that level or that I'm able to surpass that level for me it's all about skill it's not about some title because titles are worth you know they matter for a moment you know and then two days later everyone's like oh that title doesn't matter anymore right so it's not the title that you care about the second thing is when you're first starting out this is why one of the big goals that we set for people in chip 30 and especially after chip 30 we have kind of a follow-on um area called the captain stable and we go the goal is to make your first dollar on the Internet it's not to make a million dollars it's just you need to make one dollar because if you start there the moment you feel that there's a different direction that's possible that's when you become excited about it right but all if your risk averse chances are it's just because you haven't felt that there's another option but the moment that you feel oh there is another way that I can go then it just becomes a well are you curious enough to keep going or not and the decision keep going or not is a lot easier than start something totally new or don't hmm yeah I've been I've been doing a bunch of bunch of writing around this for the book that I'm working on kind of this uh the law of inertia like Newton's first law of motion that you know something something at rest continues to stay at rest but something in motion continues to be in motion unless acted on by an external imbalanced force and I often think of that when it comes to you know struggling with procrastination or struggling with anything that is just like it's way harder to get started than it is to just keep going and so when it comes to like procrastination hacks if I'm struggling with it I'll literally set a two minute timer on my phone I'm just gonna do it for two minutes and then I trick my brain into just doing it for two minutes but then that extends into hours whereas the thought of doing something for hours then starts to feel like a real like ah and just taking that next step um yeah I I really like the thing of make make your first dollar I think it like the the thinking about it now like a lot of the conversations I've had on this podcast with other with other entrepreneurs it's like the moment that they made their first dollar on the Internet is the moment that changed their life everything changed and that was for me that was like when I was 13 and I was doing freelance web design I was like [ __ ] I can make money on the internet like my PayPal account that I've lied about my age which later got like banned 10 years later because I had to give him my driving license and they said you learned about your age 10 years ago when you were 13. that was like God damn it um I'm surprised you if you experienced that so early then that you decide to go to med school like what made you then leave that yeah so um I decided to go to med school I did I didn't say this in my interview at the time but I reasoned that everyone says university is the best time of your life and med school is six years rather than three so that's cool and it was between medicine and computer science because I was into the cold coding e type thing but I just thought it would be more interesting to be a doctor who knows how to code than to be a dude who knows how to code um and so my plan was always like hey let me get really good at medicine and then I'm sure with the coding background something interesting will happen in the intersection of like medicine and Technology um and it was only as I got kind of further through it where I realized that I cared a lot less about medicine and a lot more about teaching medical students so there's something about teaching that really made my heart sing that like practicing medicine never did and that's what kind of took me down this Avenue rather than that that's really interesting I feel like you kind of made that decision then of if I have this not status symbol but it's almost like an intuition on your niche right there's a difference between being a coder and being a doctor and being a coder doctor right and it's often at unlikely intersections that opportunity hides that's why I love looking back on my years as a gamer because pair almost anything with gaming and you have an unconventional Niche you know and most things actually are like that is if you take two things that shouldn't be in the same room and you put them together all of a sudden you've created a new thing the problem is we all say we want to stand out we all say we want to be different but deep down we all just want to fit in we all just want to be the same right and so what's hard about creating at unlikely intersections is it requires you to be the first one right and I'm sure even as you were going through your journey or especially when you were thinking about leaving medicine you know there probably weren't a lot of models to look to right which is what makes the decision so uncomfortable is you're like I've never seen the thing that I'm about to do before but that's also where all the opportunity is yeah yeah that's good that's a good way of putting it because I think yeah yeah at the time my my intuition was very much that like because like every everyone I knew was a doctor and everyone I knew who was a doctor complained about being a doctor and I was like okay you know this this is this is an interesting data point um and I didn't even know that other queries existed outside of medicine really because you know my mom was a doctor all of our friends were doctors just like so so standard like amongst the kind of people I hung out with to be it to be a medic I was like yeah I don't want to quit just be a doctor I want to stand out and I was like cool let's let's like given that medicine is like the only thing I can really imagine let's combine other things with that um I think if I if I think of like if I think to YouTube channels that have have like really succeeded as well it's because they've combined an a niche interest in one thing with an interest in another thing like the other channel called tier Zoo which is combining gaming with like uh ecology and evolutionary biology to sort of gaming esque videos around like why are snakes overpowered and why are lions like but why should Lions be nerfed and just using that kind of terminology it's like three million subscribers like this stupidly profitable business there's no another one Wendover Productions where the guy's obsessed with airplanes and like Aviation and he does explainer videos about how airplanes and Aviation and like the logistics of Formula One and how what flight they're taking as they move the and people just love that [ __ ] it's just like this guy's like super obsessed with Aviation but has combined it with an ability to write and an ability to animate and suddenly no one in the world is able to do that yeah and he's carved out this Niche for himself that's gotten like four million subscribers on YouTube and makes a business and it's so hard I think like to if yeah if I just think of the YouTube example and I I guess maybe similar for writing to just try and dominate a single word category like it's really hard to be a productivity YouTuber it's a lot easier to be a productivity combined with gaming combined with health YouTuber for example yeah yeah I mean here's another way of framing it is which game do you want to play do you want to play the competition work ethic game or do you want to play the creativity have fun expression game and if you are trying to compete in an existing category or usually a single word category all you're doing is going I'm better than all the other people here you know if you want to be a doctor the whole game you're playing is I'm a better doctor than all the other people who say they're doctors right and that game is predicated on work ethic long hours I'm better than you incremental Improvement or you can go I'm a coder doctor or I'm an educator doctor right and you combine it with a different category you create a new subcategory and now you're not playing a competition game because everyone goes well all the doctors are over there and you're a coder doctor so I can't put you guys in the same room right and when you do that that allows you to then play a creativity game and now you can go create all the opportunities that you want and so it's so simple that it's complicated you know and it we can make it sound simple but I understand why people have the hesitations they do and the fears but a lot of those fears to me are more underlying it's uh I want to be different but deep down I really just want to be the same you know I want to stand out but deep down I really just want to fit in and you have to overcome that feeling in order to play The Creation game you know and that's really hard for a lot of people yeah yeah it really is like I think I was speaking to someone earlier just again on the on the YouTube example because I'm just in the middle of this course now who's like um a lawyer like super successful lawyer and it started a YouTube channel which has started to get some traction and she's like really worried like what if people at work are going to see this and it's like she kind of knows that like to unlock this dream life where she can do what she wants she needs to stand out but at the same time it's that tension between like oh but like I don't I don't want my colleagues to think of me as a loser who started a YouTube channel you know when I had this illustrious law career even though that's actually what I want to do yeah how do you how do you like I guess kind of the writers that you coach have this kind of issue as well how do you how do you approach dealing with it yeah it's the same thing we talk about in ship 30 and to me the easiest solution is you just start by being surrounded by other people that are doing the same thing right there's benefit to being I had a mentor in Chicago who used to call it hanging around the hoop you know you're just going to get better if you hang around the hoop with other people who are getting better versus if you just try and go do it by yourself and again we all want to fit in so if the underlying feeling is I want to fit in and then you try and go do it on your own that is a very viscerally uncomfortable feeling right but if deep down we all want to fit in and then you are part of a community where everyone is doing that thing all of a sudden you're going to try to fit into that Community which is going to make it a lot easier to do the thing that you want to do so there's something really helpful about just being surrounded by other people just like I'm sure you've realized how many inflection points as being a YouTuber came from you just being friends with other YouTubers yeah right there's this compounding effect that happens and so for me whenever I'm starting to get into something the first thing I do is I look for where's the hoop like where are the people because if I just go spend time around the hoop I'm going to get better 10 x faster than if I just try and go do it on my own yeah I like that so we yeah we we talked about kind of focusing focusing on on the skill focusing on mastering the skill rather than focusing on the outcome another thing that you said when when you were talking about um there's I guess consistency discipline stuff was also focusing on enjoying the journey um this is like my whole Spiel as well it's just like with with anything yeah so okay set a goal but like the goal is kind of meaningless what matters is just enjoying the journey along the way um do you have any kind of practical tips on how one can uh nudge themselves more towards enjoying the journey along the way hmm so that's a great question um reminding yourself of it daily you know because I think the the crazy part is no matter what you achieve the day after you achieve it you're gonna look at it and go well that was nothing so what's next you know I still go through that they're like I wake up every day being like Oh I still haven't made it as a writer I've done everything I wanted to do and I still feel like oh I haven't made it as a writer you know and so recognizing that that feeling never goes away and taking little moments consistently like I try to every day remind myself dude 10 years ago you were in a really not nice studio apartment with like a heater from the 1960s sleep on an air mattress with no furniture you know I mean remembering all the things you had to do constantly is a really helpful way to just stay connected to wow I'm having I'm having the time of my life this is amazing yeah the only thing I have I'll I'll show you after this just on my computer monitor is a little Post-It note saying remember to enjoy the journey smiley face and it's weird but like just a little reminder like that when I see it in my profile Vision oh yeah it's just like a little a little reminder that encourages me to actually try and enjoy the present moment and not just be so fixated on on the goal at the other end yeah and it and just always remembering that again it doesn't matter what you achieve it's never going to be enough you think it will it it won't and the goal post keeps moving over and over and over again so get comfortable with it nice okay so we're back to this weekend you've been you've written your ebooks overnight around a bodybuilding routine and like nutrition routine and like the next day you just made 5K over the weekend how did how did that feel at the time and like what happened next it was game over after that that was the beginning of the end I started tracking all my income before that I hadn't done that you know you just show up to work and you're like I get my paycheck I started tracking my income outside of work so I was like what's my side hustle making me and it took me a while you know I think from the time I started tracking my income it probably took me about a year maybe a year and a half to build that trust with myself you know because that's really where the fear is you go well that's great I just made a thousand bucks or a couple thousand bucks but can I do that consistently that's the real question before you can quit your job and go do something else so I kind of pieced together a couple side hustles and I wanted to gather data to go okay for six months can I prove that I can consistently generate a certain amount of income outside of my job and once I got around 50 of my monthly paycheck I was like I bet if I had eight more hours in the day because I was only doing this you know at night a couple hours if I had eight more hours in the day could I fill in the other 50 that was that was the bet I was making and I was like yeah I think I can and so in 2016 same day I published my first book actually so book goes live and it was my last day of work which is really cool I didn't mean for that to happen just happened and uh and I left my job and two weeks later I freaked out because I you know you don't have a paycheck hit your bank account and you're like oh I need to I need to start making some money here or I'm not going to pay my bills and my burn rate was super low I was living in a really you know run-down apartment in Chicago and you know it's not like I was living lavishly at all um and that's how I fell into ghost riding it was my first my very first like real paid writing opportunity after I quit my job was a ghostwriting okay that brings us very nicely to our five different ways to make a million dollars as a writer um what were your like what side hustle income was getting you to this 50 point while you were still working the big one was uh in end of 2015 I want to say maybe early 2016 uh so I a little backstory in 2015 2016 Cora had a really cool partnership with all of the major Publications so they partnered with like ink Forbes Fortune time CNBC all of these and what they were doing is they had a team that would crawl really great quora answers and then they would pitch the quora answers to the major Publications and I figured this out and I spent I don't know 20 30 hours going through quora and just researching what are all the things most likely to get republished like what's the the signal for CNBC is going to take a core answer you know and I I mean I basically came up with uh well here's what they're looking for here's the type of topic here's the structure a lot of them just wanted listicles you know and I started deliberately writing my quora answers in that style so I was like that's the goal you know and again to what end I didn't know I was just curious and I was like I bet if I get a bunch of core answers republished something will happen you know so I started writing in that style and I I'm pretty sure I set the record in 2015 2016 for like the most core Answers republished by other major Publications in a year I had dozens and dozens and dozens and I got them in every major Pub and there was a point where Inc magazine was republishing one of my core answers every week for like months and so I ended up getting a column with them and how their columns worked they changed it but back then how their columns worked is you'd get paid per page view so they'd pay you like a penny per page view and to me this was the mechanism that never existed right for writers there is no YouTube and AdSense so I was like okay that's fair you're gonna pay me per page view if I can bring you traffic I'm gonna get paid and I had already figured out how to write viral core answers so I was like okay game on like let's play and they gave me this column and they were like hey can you do like two to four columns per month and I literally came back and I was like can I do One A Day like I will write 30 columns for you a month because I want to generate enough page views so that I can make enough money to quit my job and they were like you're nuts but sure and I did it and literally every single day for a year and a half I wrote an ink magazine column like insane level of output and I was still writing on quora and I suppose while you still have the job while I still had the job so I was this was like approaching Peak it got even crazier in ghost riding after but like this was approaching the peak of what I could handle in a day or a week in terms of writing and I ended up bringing in like millions and millions and millions of page views for them and it amounted to roughly I mean it's funny to look back on now but I forget how the math worked out in terms of page views but I probably was making three to five grand a month writing for ink and you know I wasn't making that much as a entry-level copywriter so that was like 50 of my paycheck and so once I had that I was like okay if I had eight more hours in the day my thinking was could I write two columns a day you know what I mean like I was like could I just double the input and double the output um so that was how I was making half my salary that's really cool that's there were easier ways to do it looking back but it was uh it was an interesting mechanism at the time to what extent were is it a bit of random question but to what extent were these were these like Evergreen content or like was this literally a trade of time for money or was it actually a trade of because I feel like the moment you decorate your income from your time input that's another inflection point that changed the game for a lot of people yes that didn't come until way later um it there so I thought that there would be a compounding effect I thought as my library grows there will be some Evergreen effect and then my average monthly page views will go up and it did my average did go up a little bit but it was not there was no inflection point and so in order for me to keep earning three four five grand a month I needed to be churning out 20 30 40 columns a month so there was a while like it was until I got into ghost writing which was still trading time for money it's just it was a premium on my time right but that inflection point didn't come till later oh okay all right so you're you see your day job which I don't think we mentioned it you were doing copywriting for an ad agency yeah what is copywriting I only recently real like I was so confused like like a copyright with a W versus copyright with the rht yeah just like yeah copywriting with the w is and there's different uh definitions for it my job at the time was I was doing like all the work that nobody wanted to do you know I was writing social media copy for Brands I was proofreading proposals to try and land new clients like anything with writing in this agency is what I was responsible for doing as a small agency the real definition of copywriting is normally in the context of sales copy so you're specifically writing things with the goal of selling a product or selling a service yep so you're writing landing pages or you're writing emails or whatever it is and there's a very specific I don't even know if you call it style but there's like rules to copywriting and sales copywriting and things that you need to do you know biggest thing is benefits not features you know even that most people don't know don't talk about what you do talk about what you're going to unlock for the reader for the customer whoever so my job quote unquote as a copywriter was very basic it was just sales copy proofread or um social media copy proofreading stuff like that ah okay and how much were you earning at the date of oh man like maybe 45k a year salary I mean it was not a lot yeah and so when you started earning the sort of three to five k month from Inc magazine that was yeah I guess like 50 of your yeah your thing and I didn't spend any of it I didn't upgrade my life I didn't go buy new clothes I didn't I just saved it because I wanted that as Runway you know I wanted to when I quit my job know that worst case scenario I was good for like three months four months you know so each of these were like very deliberate decisions along the way but none of it was rash it's not like I was jumping out the window going oh I just magically hope this all works out like it was always the next logical step and and I tried to minimize the risk as much as possible we're going to take a very quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor 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tutorials back when I was at University of Cambridge where you would learn a little thing and then you'd be paired with a world-class expert in the thing and they'd be asking you questions and you'd be kind of figuring it out together rather than being spoon fed information like we're normally taught in school each lesson on brilliant is broken up into 15 minute bite-sized chunks and so wherever you are in your day you can find a little bit of time you can go on the app and you can level up your brain rather than scrolling social media or whatever the other default activity might be and it's pretty cool as well because they're constantly updating the library of courses for example they've recently released a course introduction to algebra and this is like a visual representation of algebraic thinking now I thought I understood algebra because I did maths in school but actually the way that brilliant explains it with kind of the stories and the puzzles and the interactive exercises you 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ton of nuance obviously but the simplest way to explain it is recognize that anyone with a business or anyone with a fund or anyone with a profitable product wants to share who they are on the internet because if they build an audience they are going to attract more opportunity right or they're going to sell more of their product or service so first of all recognizing that potential ghost writing quote unquote clients are everywhere they exist everywhere anyone with a big YouTube channel probably needs to go try it anyone with a big podcast probably needs a Ghostwriter anyone with a company probably needs a Ghostwriter you know and it's becoming less and less stigmatized like the same way that you go I want to make videos I'm going to hire a video editor well writing's the same way you're like I want to write tweets LinkedIn posts articles newsletters whatever you're like I need a writer you know so that stigma doesn't really exist anymore or less and less the what it actually looks like is you just get on the phone with the person or get on Zoom or whatever and you just go okay let's forget the Whole 30 000 foot strategy like this one thing what do you want to say like just one it's a tweet it's a thread it's an article I always tried to remind people like we're not gonna figure out your entire life mission here right that will reveal itself yep you know a mentor had a great quote which is um you can't steer a stationary ship right if you're just sitting at your desk and you're just looking out into the world you can anticipate it all you want but the moment that ship leaves the harbor if it starts raining your your plan is out the window right so I would say that to these people over and over again and be like the the end will reveal itself for now let's just focus on what is the one thing you want to write and all you're doing is just hurting their thinking you know you're just kind of whittling it down um getting clear on what it is that they want to say in this one piece and the process that I did is I would take the phone call I would record it and I would use this website called rev which allows you to transcribe things I would get the transcript and I liked to think of ghost riding myself as I'm not writing I'm I'm deleting so you have a you have a transcript and they're giving you all the information and your job isn't really to sit down and recreate it your job is to remove all the tangents and all the fluff and all the things that don't have to do with the one thing that they're trying to say and then you're just using their words and reorganizing it that's the way I liked thinking of ghost writing and it's a skill but if you can get good at it I mean you can make a killing yeah like it's only it's only recently this that there's been so like I work with a Ghostwriter for like LinkedIn posts and stuff because it's like I want to convert my videos where I've already said this stuff into tweet threads and Linkedin posts but I sure as hell don't want to do that myself so like cape who wants to who wants to help out with this and now that I've kind of seen what that process of working with a Ghostwriter is like I'm just kind of thinking like one of the one of the ultimate side hustles these days is to be is to be a video editor because now having tried hiring video editors it's just an absolute Nightmare and most people are well suck at it and if someone just took my skillshare class over a weekend they could become like really good at video editing I was like what why don't more people do this if anytime people email me and be like hey I'm a student and I want to make money on the side was like video editing is like a good starting point teach yourself the skill find find YouTubers who need editing because they all do especially like podcasts everything except like content stuff but increasingly I'm starting to say to people it's like hey you've got two options video editing or writing like actually if you can if you are good at writing like if you're a student and you've written essays and you can appreciate what like blog post writing is compared to essay writing there's like zillions of like the local orthodontists the local lawyer the local accountant they all need ghostwriters way more so than video editors actually and it's just it seems like an incredible opportunity it's yeah it is incredible and to be honest it's even I even think it's even easier now than even five six seven years ago when I was getting into it which is just think about how many creators there are and how the whole game if you are a profitable Creator if you have some sort of business or product or service connected to the to your creation attention engine right you need to scale yourself on the internet with words fifty percent of it could either be video audio and the other 50 is actual words and language and so the lowest barrier to entry is a writer going to Someone Like You and going I'm going to take your entire Archive of YouTube videos you've already done the work and I'm going to extract all of the written content that you haven't created yet right and so as a Ghostwriter it's almost like humbling yourself and realizing you aren't getting paid to sit down and like be brilliant and quote unquote ghost write or ghost think right you already did the thinking The Ghost Writer just needs to go through your library and go I'm going to scale you with words and you can make six figures doing that from your you know bedroom and your sweatpants I mean that is not a hard job to get and the way I like to frame it to people is the easiest and fastest way to do it is to do it for free first go find a Creator go find an entrepreneur go find someone that you think should be scaling themselves with words on the internet and go I'll do your first week of content for free I'll write 10 threads for you for free I'll write five blog posts for you for free if you can do it well that person will throw money at you yeah absolutely right I'm thinking if someone emailed me and was like I I see you've got these 13 skillshare classes your how to study should be an ebook I've written the first five chapters for you I'd be like oh my God like join my team full time I will do whatever it takes to hire the hell out of you and like no one has ever done that yes exactly it's so easy and so funny story I went back to uh I went back to my college maybe like five years ago at this point right out it was six to 12 months after I quit my job and I went back to my school and I was meeting up with a professor and I saw another professor down the street and he happened or down the the hall and he happened to be teaching a class at the time and he was one of my professors and it was a small class 15 students and he was like Hey as long as you're here why don't you come talk to the class share some of your Lessons Learned because he had kind of seen some of my internet writing and was like oh wow there's starting to be some traction here and I go in front of the class and he's like all right Cole why don't you tell the aspiring writers here how they can start making money from their writing and I literally said don't start by trying to make money from your writing do it for free and everyone in the class looked at me like I was crazy and my teacher jumped in and he was like well no no I think what Cole's trying to say is you know uh charge your worth you know charge like an hourly rate or something and I was like no that is not what I'm saying I'm saying start for free prove you can do it and then the opportunities will just waterfall all over you and the problem with the reason people don't do that is because they're so afraid that they're going to get taken advantage of they're so afraid that um like they're doing something wrong when really if you offer to do something for free what you're doing is you're removing all the friction if someone DMS you and goes I want to write for you but this is how much it costs you now have to allocate time and mind share to think about whether or not that's a good idea right which you don't have the time to do any successful person doesn't have time to do that at least on command right but you can easily remove all that friction by just going hey I already see what you're doing I've already consumed 30 hours of your content I've already extracted these five threads and these five blog posts for it I want you to read it here you go if you don't have time to read it pass along to your team and if you want more of it let me know made this would be like literally my dream come true if anyone wants to DME with that exact message and this is this is what people don't understand is that the free work the ROI like I'm cheering up at the thought of like how incredible it would be if someone actually did that and and the amount of emails I get from people being like bro what's the best business idea I'm like God damn it exactly and what what people don't realize is I still do this yeah like I still when I meet the right person I still go you know what don't don't pay me for that even though I know that they've got the money and I know that I'm worth the money and they know I'm worth the money I still in the right circumstance go you know what don't pay me for it I'll do it for free six months ago I met a guy really successful entrepreneur and investor and he wanted help writing uh his speech he was giving a commencement speech and I was like I could either charge money for this now or I can do this for free and I can call in a favor later and I chose free because I knew oh okay you know what I see all these other outcomes that I could get later and I bet if I do this for you for free you are going to constantly think about ways to pay me back right because that's how that type of person thinks and I the reason I still make that decision is because people don't realize that the ROI on free work is exponential whereas the ROI on paid work is not exponential it's just fixed it's like hey I'll pay you five grand right but I've done so much free work for people over the years that that's why my network is the way that it is because people go well I remember when you helped me write my commencement speech so what do you need trying to raise money here's 10 people you know you try and do this here's the right person to talk to you're trying to you have a question about that you should go talk to that person me it's game changing advice like the ROI on free work I was thinking like I was I was saying this to a friend a friend the other day like I've I've worked with like of the various coaches I've worked with two two come to mind one and like they're both people I knew like through the network who were who were getting into coaching and one offer to do it for me for free and the other one charged me for it and the one who offered to do it for free I have sent so much [ __ ] his way so much traffic plug this course whenever he's doing a course plugged all of his stuff because I feel this profound sense of like like even though I could have I could have easily afforded it and I knew he was worth it like we we knew what was going on there but like the fact that he offered to do it for free may make me makes me feel so indebted to him whereas the friend of mine who charged me for coaching when he asked me to plug his stuff and be like kind of it's just it's just I mean even even though he's a friend it's a bit it feels a bit more totally yeah weird and a bit more transactional and I'm like well I mean wait I could charge 20K for a sponsored video like etc etc and here's here's the exactly and here's the thing is it often translates into paid work right if you start for free it doesn't take very long for the person to go this is amazing yep now I I want to pay you right they will throw money at you and that's the point is like if you can prove that you can do it the money is easy but if you can't do it and they're not happy with the free work then you shouldn't be charging for it in the first place right so it's it's a uncomfortable forcing function for you to learn am I creating something for the for this person that's worth being paid for and if it's not you have more work to go do more free work to get your skill up right and if it is they throw money at you yeah that's it's like it's it seems like it's the longer road but it is the shortcut because it's the forcing function for your skill and the skill is the hard part yeah no absolutely like I'm just the sort of so many dots are connecting like in my mind like um one thing that I've kind of been saying to uh kind of team members of mine who are now getting into like YouTube Consulting and stuff on the side it's almost just like hop in a free call and give as much value as you possibly can on that free call and I guarantee at the end of it they're gonna say how can I how can I hire you for this thing and a lot of them are like oh but like should I charge I was like no no free call just give as much value as you possibly can similarly uh my old housemate um used to kind of help me out with like businessy type stuff and she then met a few kind of massive YouTubers and helped them be like oh you know let's draw an org chart let's like see how you're going to run the business and they were like [ __ ] like this this person's incredible I want to hire you for like whatever what whatever amount of money you want and it's just it's just amazing how much people who are profitable and successful with from will throw money at people who are good because it's so hard to find people who are good at a thing and can demonstrate that they're actually good at the thing yes um that's why so we talked about you make a million dollars as a Ghostwriter and I with uh when I had my agency I mean we scaled that up to several million in revenue and that was um we did it the hard way like we made so many mistakes and the pricing should have been so much better and like there if I could go back that business could have been so much more profitable than it was but it was my first company and I made every mistake in the book but the second one that now we're talking about is um productizing yourself so so turning your knowledge in whatever domain and using writing as the ability to scale yourself and productize yourself so we did this with ship 30 for 30 which is our course right so it's all the things that I and my business partner Dickie talk about in terms of writing and then we scale it through an education course that's writing based you know you can also do that with ebooks and you can do that with other assets but the goal is instead of providing whatever you're doing as a service so being like I'm going to be a Ghostwriter for you or I'm going to be a consultant for you or a editor for you right it's all one to one it's you're you're using time as your measure now you're just packaging it digitally and that allows you to scale it the the beauty of productizing your service is that you like we were talking about earlier you're removing the constraint of uh being paid for time that's the whole that's like the biggest challenge is as long as you're being paid for your time and not the outcome it's really hard to have some sort of exponential jump in income you need to divorce the two yeah but I guess like you know it's it's very useful to start up being paid for your time because I think another mistake people make is jumping to let me create a course and it's like uh No One's Gonna buy it like and that's that's why one of the things that I often encourage is start by providing a service so it's like start for free prove you can do it when you can do it people will pay you trust that that will happen and they'll pay you well for it and then use the paid work to learn what questions do people have what problems are they facing what are your unique Frameworks for solving those problems right once you get paid to learn all of those things then when you go to productize yourself you are you're not sitting in a room going well how do I magically come up with all these answers right you already got paid to do it so now you're just transforming your service into a digital product and the whole model for this yes going back to free work is give away 99 of what you know for free right what the mistake everyone makes is they go I'm going to productize myself and before I tell you anything you have to pay for it well it's the same mistake as providing a service right you don't walk up to someone and go hey before you know what I can do here's how much it costs they're like get out of here but if you start by going here's everything here's here's here's how to think about it here's how to solve the problems here's the interesting Frameworks the frames the frame the solutions here's everything you need to know the person then goes well if all the free stuff was so great then what's in the paid stuff right and what most people don't realize is most courses most books most uh like paid membership communities all that you aren't really buying information what you're buying is implementation you're buying accountability you're buying access to the person that you want to learn from so you can use all the information in your course as your free content it's just when someone pays they're not buying just the information right it's that you packaged it you're saving them time you're giving them access to you you're answering their questions that's what someone's paying for um yeah I think one of the one of the things that people seem to struggle with in this is like thinking thinking like I don't phrase it's like almost like thinking like a consumer rather than thinking like a business totally kind of thing where I where I see this where like just that thing we were talking about earlier about how someone like me will literally throw money at anyone who is good who's demonstrated the ability to do the thing that's like unfathomable for people that don't have a business because it's like well of course I'm going to kind of try before I I like I mean like it's just a very kind of individual way of valuing money which which tends to be very very price sensitive and not appreciating what the ROI is for someone someone with a business totally and similarly when we sell our YouTuber course people tell us it's like it's it's too cheap because a business or a brand for whom that's like Pocket Change Is Almost gonna think it's like the scammy because it's so cheap even though we charge several thousand dollars for it and so just the way an individual values money versus the way business values money or someone who is already making money just is just completely Worlds Apart this is this is on my later list you know a book I want to write at some point yeah is the different ways that people think about money and how quote unquote successful people think about money and and I want to help educate other people on the different ways that people who make money think about money in the sense that when you go to start a business or you pitch your services as a freelancer you need to understand that the person you're talking to thinks about money totally differently than you do right like now that I have made some money the way I look at money is totally different you know and I make decisions not on oh how much does it cost I make decisions around well how much time is that going to save me you know or a really great one is you know when I was broke I would look at like a five thousand dollar a month Service as oh that's so expensive you know but then as soon as you have a business a business that's doing a million two million three million four million right you start looking at the 5K a month as a negligible expense and you don't realize that when you're starting out yeah right because to when when you're living in the rundown apartment you're like 5K a month is a lot who would spend that right and same thing with now restaurants it's like I noticed that my default if I'm in a new city and I'm looking for a restaurant what's the first thing that I do I pull up Google and I sort by most expensive right because there's a there's like a a bias of well if it's more expensive it's probably better right so if you're pitching your services and you're pitching them at a discount the person that you're trying to sell to is like I don't want the Honda Accord I want the Ferrari right so it's it's all these very interesting ways of thinking about money that I it takes a while to see it from the other side yeah yeah I think one of the one of the ways that I often think is like these days is just in terms of uh sort of very back of the envelope Roi calculations like I I booked a flight last night um I'm going to Pakistan in the new year for a cousin's wedding and the economy class flight was 200 pounds and the business class flight was 3 000 pounds but doing the business class flight would allow me to leave a kind of team annual planning thing an extra two hours later and I was like 100 valuable because me being there with a team of 13 people or for to give two hours more input on vision and direction of the business is worth way more than 2 800 pounds hell yes that's a great example that's something I just would not would not be even able to Fathom had I not were I not running a business because it's like why the hell would anyone spend 3K on a flight well you could spend 200 for exactly the same thing totally that's like you know the value of money is just completely completely changes yeah where are you staying do you have access to Internet or not does that allow you to work yes or no you know can you make use of your time by meeting someone else there there's so many other things that have to do with the decision than just the price tag the price tags often like the easiest part that's not what people get caught up on it's how much every every single go trading client that I had it wasn't the price they would ask me how much time is this gonna consume of mine yeah so if I pay you three grand a month four grand five grand a month do you need an hour of my time or do you need 20 hours of my time that is the decision it's not the amount of money and again that takes that's really hard to wrap your head around when you're especially when you're first starting out yeah and you're trying to charge for things like you you can't understand that decision yeah like uh so I'm I'm kind of seeing this from the other side now that very like various people on our team are doing this side hustling stuff and they all like say to me that oh my God like kind of just speaking speaking to people with businesses just makes me realize just how differently they think about money and how differently I think about money and now what they do you know one of our one of our ghost writers is like he the the way he negotiated a pay rise was basically being like this thing does not require any input from you beyond like 10 minutes a week you never need to check the things no one ever complains that this was not written by you like this is saving you a lot of time and I was like sure let's 3x your thingy which was what he was asking for because it was still totally worth it yeah so yeah amazing segue so we talked about ghost writing yeah we talked about uh productizing yourself so third being sales copywriting so the beauty and how you can make a lot of money as a sales copywriter is you want to div again you want to divorce being paid for the effort versus the outcome yeah so there's a lot of copywriters sales copywriters that get paid like per asset you know so they go hey I want to charge you know five grand to rewrite your landing page or I want to charge you you know 10 grand to redo your email course or whatever and you can easily make six figures doing that how you break into upper six figures seven figure plus territory is you have to not be compensated for the effort but for the outcome that you drive how does that work so for example the way that a lot of uh really successful sales copywriters structure their deals is they go okay let's take a product or let's take an existing funnel here's the average amount of Revenue that you're doing right now if I can write things that lift the revenue 25 50 I get a piece of that so now you're being compensated on the outcome you drive not on the I spent 20 hours rewriting the landing page right because if I know how there's I mean what's the grade is it the Picasso story where he sees the woman in the park and she's like yeah draw something for me and you draw something on the napkin and then she goes how much should I pay you for that and he goes 10 grand she goes what it took you two minutes you know and he goes yeah but it took me a lifetime to learn how to draw like this right so if I'm being paid to drive an outcome it shouldn't matter whether it takes me 20 hours or two hours I want to be compensated on the outcome that I drove not on the effort and so that's how a lot of especially really legendary sales copywriters Gary Halbert um Eugene Schwartz like all these guys how they made their fortunes was they would take a piece of The Upside that they unlocked for the business or the product yeah and it's not worth it for the business like if someone again like like at the moment when we do landing pages and stuff we do it per like effort kind of unit but if someone were to be like hey look I will measure your conversion rate and or whatever and I'm gonna aim to double that and I want like 10 of The Upside I'd be like hell yes like exactly of course that's a trade I'm making any day of the week because it's the exact same thing as a salesperson yeah right you go hey based on how much new Revenue you bring in we're gonna give you a commission yeah so you as a writer are basically being paid as a quote-unquote infinitely scalable salesperson and if you can write things that prompt people to purchase or take an action you should be rewarded for the fact that you unlocked that outcome how does how does one get good at becoming a sales copywriter I mean like anything you do it a lot but um study the greats you know I mean there's a lot of really amazing sales copywriters over the years my personal favorites Gary Halbert I like I like saying Gary is what Hemingway would have been if Hemingway had gotten into advertising okay him and Hemingway have very similar terse minimalist Styles right but Hemingway went the novel route and Gary Halbert went the I'm gonna sell products route um and also try and sell something yourself like the fastest way you're going to learn is when you start writing things that prompt people to buy and when you notice oh when I wrote this no one bought and when I wrote this some people bought right that your subconscious is going to soak up all of those lessons and you're gonna start to piece together your own framework on well how do I get people to buy okay sales copywriting um so you said that kind of your first year as a ghost over your first few months as a ghost writer you were up to like 250k a year but then you said like that kind of changed and like what what happened at that point so now I like to I I call it the valley of death for uh Freelancers who want to build agencies so what happened was I got up to maybe like 20 or 30k a month uh as a Ghostwriter and I I mean I was working four hours a day talking to really smart people making way more than I was making as a full-time employee and having a blast like it was best case scenario and I was talking to a close friend of mine and I told him what was going on and he was like we should turn this into a business you know think about what you're doing we can break it apart so we'll have editors who talk to the clients and we'll have writers who do the writing he said I will train the editors and I'll do the phone calls he was in sales and you know that was a great skill for him yeah and he's like you'll do the writing and you'll train the writers and in about 18 months we scaled that from me and him on his apartment couch to more than 20 full-time employees couple million in revenue and like 80 plus concurrent clients and we had I mean just CEOs of publicly traded companies grammy-winning musicians New York time best-selling authors like all over the board and in every industry and the problem was ghostwriting is such a subjective skill you know you're not selling plastic widgets you're you're writing something that the person on the other side goes I want to put my name on that yeah that reflects me and the misunderstanding that people have is ghost riding is often not ghost thinking yeah right so these people aren't saying think for me they're saying I have my ideas I just need you to clean it up and scale it right and that was a very challenging business because we first of all everyone is full-time everyone was on salary there was no contractors so we had a ton of overhead um and even though we have we had no problem attracting and getting clients it was the the business was unstable in the sense that clients would churn but the overhead was fixed yeah so you constantly needed to be filling up the bucket faster than the water was coming out and and it was no problem when it was a small agency and it was five people but the more that we tried to scale right your sales machine needs to get more and more powerful in order to do that and so the reason I call it the value of death is there's this there's this Gap where a freelancer Ghostwriter or a very small agency so from I'll call it like a quarter million to maybe a million in Revenue right perfect yeah right perfect like just enough clients just enough demand for you uh just enough take home income to be worth your effort but then between a million and like I'd say the real number is like 8 million yeah that is the value of death and your margins go down your profitability is down right you're you're taking out less and less cash of the business the sales machine is needs to get more and more powerful and basically the net of it is if you can't get to 10 million plus your agency is gonna just make you gray and unhappy and I saw it everywhere every agency owner I talked to it was like they were you know just their whole life was a mess and gray hair and disheveled and stressed they were all in the valley of death and I ultimately came to the same realization we got a two and a half three years in and I was stressed out in my mind and there was a point where I ended up in the hospital with shingles because I was so stressed and I was on painkillers and on antibiotics in my bed interviewing like the next two full-time people in the next full two full-time people and I was just I'd had enough and I had this talk with my co-founder and we were like let's be done let's just fire everybody go back to just you and me we had been paying ourselves half of what I was making before you know we were in the Valley of Death yeah and I was like I'm done and so uh very weirdly six months before the pandemic we let everyone go we scaled the business back to just us too and then the pandemic hit you know five six months later and if we hadn't made that decision the business would have been dead for sure have you have you come across a guy called Daniel Priestley he's written a book called oversubscribed and key person of influence and like stuff the name rings a bell but that's familiar so we had all the Pod um a few months ago and he's actually in London as well and and he's become a friend a friend and Mentor he has a a model that's almost identical to yours just coming at it a different way the way he phrases it is that kind of zero to three people is like okay whatever three to twelve people that's where you're you're either a struggling Boutique or you're a lifestyle Boutique and the difference there is if you have 100K per Revenue a 100K Revenue per employee you're a lifestyle business you're like living the dream fun Freedom flexibility so from like 300K to 1.2 million if you have three to twelve people and then for him 12 to 40 people is the desert where companies go to die yeah where you're too big to be small and too small to be big and Beyond 40 people it's like okay now you're in performance business territory where you've already got all the systems and processes and blah blah blah blah but if you're optimizing for fun free Freedom flexibility cap your team size at 12. and what we have found is that when we had like 18 to 20 full-time employees it was a nightmare now that we have 12 full-timers and everyone else is a contractor it's such a breath of fresh air I feel like I have zero stress I spend all my time just writing writing or filming or doing podcasts which is what I love and zero percent of my time in meetings but there was something magical about something like magically bad about having kind of 18 to 20 full-time employees where everything just felt like it was going to [ __ ] yes and that seems to mirror your experience as well it's the same thing and you know it's kind of a a whole separate nuanced conversation but oftentimes so I'll say I'll speak for myself the mistake that I made was I equated success with head count so to me it was like my ego I was proud of myself when I said oh we have 15 full-time employees we have 20 full-time we have 23 full-time you know and you start to realize that hey that's a horrible measure of success because you're literally bragging about the fact that your overhead is going up and your profitability is going down yeah so that's I don't know what I was thinking but the more important thing is when you're focused on head count or you think about hiring in terms of roles most people start from the perspective of okay I need a project manager I need a social media manager I need a whatever right so they think of the role the more effective way of thinking about it is what is the task what is the lever that you need and is that directly correlated to growth in the business so are you a revenue critical employee or no and the mistake that I found we were making was we were adding all these employees that even though they yes they like had things to do they weren't Revenue critical you know and that's that's where things start to fall apart is you you start looking for roles or you assume that each role is a full-time thing yeah it's not most most of those levers and those tasks are not full-time they're part-time and can easily be contracted out so and to your point right is if you can keep that below the 12 people-ish Mark it's a really nice forcing function to go I'm not going to think about hiring as the measure of success I'm going to think about the levers that have to do with profitability as the measures of success and actually less head count is more successful than more yeah yeah I think I kind of fell into the same trap like a year 18 months ago where you know initially I was doing the YouTube thing myself for two years and then I read the email 3 visited and had a mentor who encouraged me to hire and we got an editor and we got a writer and it's like oh my God incredible like so good having like two three four people on the team and then we were like Hey we're making all this money through courses what if we got like someone to help produce the course it's cool five six seven people on the team and then our cohort based course really took off and suddenly we had more money than I knew what to do with it's like well all this millions are selling in the business account doing absolutely Jackal so let's hire some people and that was a mistake the mistake was thinking that there is a linear correlation between uh a new employee doing a thing that theoretically should contribute to revenue and the real world of that thing the communication and managerial overheads associated with having an extra person on the team even if their thing is contributing to revenue is it just the whole system ended up slowing down and I was in my mind trying to figure out like Roi calculations for every employee and all this kind of stuff and it just turned into an absolute nightmare yeah but most people most people are not Revenue critical and that that was one of the harder lessons for me in that first business so if you were to do it again would you only hire full-timers who are Revenue critical and then contract the rest or like how would you be thinking about that I would either do it as I would keep it very very small like we hadn't we had such an amazing business when it was just five people yeah like and looking back on that I was like I wish I knew how good I had it at that moment um because me and my co-founder were essentially out of the business we had Justin we had just enough people to run it yeah and we could just oversee and focus on bringing in new clients and we didn't need a ton of clients because it was a small team you know it was like it was perfect and so I would either do that again and keep them full time and just and almost operate at a deficit intentionally like I'd rather have a wait list for clients than constantly be like we need 10 new clients a month you know so I would either do that or I would go the contractor route um but same thing I would probably keep it small and the thing that I try and educate talented writers on is you will probably make more so that value of death you will probably make more money just doing what you do individually and scaling your your pricing in a niche and being the best person in that niche just working for yourself you will probably make more money you don't need an agency and whenever someone thinks about scaling themselves with an agency I always try and stop them and I'm like you do not need this like you're actually probably going to make the same or less money because now you have other people to take care of so if you're a really talented writer you might as well just work for yourself yeah it seems like the agency game is becoming like uh I feel like a few years ago if you looked at the category of make money online on YouTube Drop Shipping affiliate marketing was all the rage these days it's all about social media marketing agencies yeah and there's like a few kind of big YouTubers one of them we have in the Pod a few months ago who I have courses teaching people how to set up agencies and stuff and um young broad young and broke people who watch these sorts of videos how to make money on the internet are thinking that an smma social media marketing agency is like the the key to riches and wealth um but I think that that thing of like the genuinely is like a value of death between like one one and 10 million where things things start to break and there's there's a Nuance here which is you can be a one-person agency right A lot of times the the agency education is really just about productizing your service and organizing it and and you know you can have the service and then you can scale it with some digital products like and you can do all of that as a one-person shop that's fine the myth though is oh if I hire more people my income just goes up to the right that's not how it works and your headaches go up and it Demands a totally different skill set and you go from being a writer or practitioner into being a manager right your whole life is different and so if that's what you want go ahead and do it but if you're a writer you're really great at a specialty skill set you're better off just scaling and increasing your earnings and charging more and working with higher and higher quality people than you are going well let me scale horizontally yeah you know I mean yeah one of the one of the ways I think about this which kind of really actually helped shape a lot of decisions in the business is that if I won the lottery or if I took money out of the equation how would I want to be spending my time and I found that like when we had 20 people on the payroll the ways I was spending my time were radically different to how I wanted to be spending my time whereas now that we have basically the same people but like half of them are contractors and the other half are employees now I'm spending all my time doing the things I actually want to be doing um and I I find that this is a good similarly I know I know people who just really enjoy writing who I actually want to do writing they don't want to manage an agency of writers they want to do the writing because it's fun right yeah I was that person then it took me yeah it was a hard lesson to learn like I don't want to manage 20 writers you know I'm really good at what I do I just want to be paid a premium to do what I do nice okay so so far we talked about kind of five different ways to make seven figures of the writer we talked about um writing as a service like ghost writing and how essentially by just starting for free doing it for someone really well they're going to throw money at you and also throw referrals at you because you know it's just a thing in the world of business that people who are successful know other people who have made made lots of money and who need the same thing so that's just like easy and easy enough in inverted commas we've talked about productizing your service and turning it into more of like well agency slash digital products we talk about sales copywriting we're like paid paid newsletters what's the deal with that paid newsletters are they're both in an older category and now it's being reinvented uh by sub stack so all a paid newsletter is is you just being paid for your ability to scale a certain type of idea framework um news whatever the benefit is to the reader and so when someone goes I'm going to start a paid newsletter they think oh just because it's a paid thing I'm going to make money from it no that's not the case that's like saying just because I wrote a book people are going to buy it people don't buy the asset right no one buys a book no one buys a paid newsletter what the person's buying is an answer to a question they're buying a certain type of outcome and the paid newsletter is just a way of delivering that or scaling that so to me there's really only two types of paid newsletters that work you either have timely newsletters where the the benefit is you're saving me time so you as the newsletter Creator go out there and you're gonna dig through all the information you're gonna do the research you're going to round up all the statistics and the facts and you know and you're I'm paying you to go do all of that time and you're going to compress it down for me and because you're saving me so much time I'm going to pay you for that like Trends exactly yeah so that's that's one side of the barbell and then the other side of the barbell is the complete Ops set you go I want access to quote unquote Insider information I want expert level insights so this person is a domain expert they're going really deep and you are it's almost like you're paying to get the I want coffee with you at scale right so someone's like I'm an expert in this thing you pay me 10 bucks a month 20 bucks a month whatever it is and you're getting access to my Frameworks my insights my and I'm going to take you down the rabbit hole yeah and that's the barbell you're either in super timely or super Timeless and shallow or deep and any newsletter that sits in the middle like the biggest mistake is people go subscribe to my newsletter nobody cares about your newsletter right they care is this a trade for time I'm paying you to save me time or is this a trade for expertise I'm paying you to shorten my growth currency yes so like Ben Thompson the strategories world are like the depth in-depth analysis on a topic that this guy's been in for the last 20 years totally and then the trends of the world are like we've got a team of researchers who are going to research the best Trends and we're going to save you time as an investor as a business person to be able to see what the market wants and that's the barbell yes there are outliers but 99 of the time successful paid newsletters fall into one of those two categories and again you have to start from the thinking place of you are not writing what you want to write about and then charging for it you have to start from the place of I am starting a business called a paid newsletter business and what am I in the business of doing saving people time or giving people expertise those are the two businesses and you need to be clear on which business you want to start yeah and I guess a mistake that that people make with this is almost thinking of a paid newsletter as sort of a patreon equivalent of like hey you like my newsletter every week where I share my my what's what I'm getting up to in my life you know as with some some percentage feel free to support me kind of vibe huge mistake yeah because nobody I mean look it's not just creators who make this mistake go go to any multi-billion dollar company's website on the sidebar they go subscribe to our newsletter you're like why even free newsletters can't get people to read it right because the Val the value to the reader isn't you have a newsletter the value is which one is it you're saving me time or you're saving me years and shortening my growth curve and so you going you know subscribe to Ollie's newsletter right like yeah some people might but that is not the lever that makes the paid newsletter go yeah yeah and I guess you know even in the creative Zone if we think of like Tim ferriss's five bullet Friday the way he pitches it is that every Friday it's just five things that I've curated because I I come across interesting things and I will save you time because yeah which one is it and you can try you can try these things out and that's not even a paid newsletter it's just it's just a free one um and you can go the free route and monetize with ads which is what he did which is you know the hustle morning Brew all like ads work but subscription revenues King right and if it doesn't take very much for you to go okay if I can get a thousand people on my paid newsletter like I'm living yeah now you're making six figures that's that's amazing like you the math is it's it's not that hard to make six figures as a writer on the internet if if you can unhook your thinking from I'm writing what I want to write about and people are going to pay me right you're starting a business the business is you're in the business of serving readers with your writing and so the only way like I think you can get to six figures just fumbling around but the only way that you're gonna get to Seven is by being really clear which side of the barbell are you on yeah this is like a I feel like I've only I've only recently developed this appreciation of like almost like the the difference between six seven six figures and seven figures because having like I've now been in that zone for the last like many years but I have zero like at like zero experience at the eight figure range and so when I speak to like you know interviewed Alex formosi and it was like oh well you know six figures or single Channel single Target single Avatar single product easy seven figures blah blah blah easy I suppose you get to five million 15 million is a lot harder because I'm just like okay this is now a level of knowledge that I just cannot even appreciate because I'm kind of stuck in the seven figure category myself and similarly a lot of viewers or or listeners are stuck in the five figure category where they've got a job and they they aspire to get to six figures where I was like oh my God if I could make six figures doing what I love are you writing for four hours a day hell yeah sign me up yeah and then you get to that point and it's like and you almost kind of realize that yeah this thing of six figures it isn't that hard but seven figures is it's like my current model but someone like well MOSI might think seven figures not that hard eight figures maybe is and it's just like different levels of experience get you to different kind of number of zeros on the end of your on the end of your balance sheet totally yeah it's there's different uh models and mental models for each one and also it just depends on which business you're in and are you are you okay with the business that you choose you know like for example I love writing books you can make millions of dollars writing books but it's a lot easier to make millions of dollars providing a service or you know like being a Ghostwriter as a service or productizing yourself or building a course or an education product so it's possible to do all of these things it's just is it the thing that you actually want to spend time doing and that to me is the more important question you know like are you playing the game that you want to play yeah yeah I was I was speaking to another um entrepreneur friend the other day and um I won a dilemma that I put to her was that like yeah I feel like you know now that we're you know this YouTube channel is at least somewhat successful there's all these like different ways of making money and I just like don't really know which like which ones we should be going for and the analogy that she used was like she was like oh you know the way I think of this is that there's all these different like money clouds in the air and you can make any of them rain but the point is you just want to figure out which ones align with what you actually want to do and your own values and then you just ignore all the other 99 of them and just actively decide these are the ones I'm focusing on yeah yeah it's sick cool so writing books how does one make money through writing books so the big the big question with this is self-publishing versus traditional publishing so just for a little context so most people don't know that a conventional publishing deal goes like this they give you an advance that Advance is predicated on your existing audience right it's often not the quality of the book it's your existing audience and how the deal structure works is they'll probably give you a we'll call it eight percent on the really low end 15 on the high end royalty so the real way to think about it is the advance they're giving you they're buying 85 of your book so imagine your book is a business an investor comes along and goes I want to buy into your business I'm going to take 85 percent and I'm going to give you this advance the advance for most people I mean I'll say probably the average is somewhere between 10 20K all the way to maybe 100 maybe to 250 okay anything above that you have a giant audience or you're a celebrity yep like period and anything below that the reason they're giving you that is because your audience is growing and they believe that you will be bigger tomorrow than you are today yeah so it's worth asking the question if a publisher is willing to give you that why are they willing to give you that and if they're going to give you 100K that means they think they can make a million so keep that in mind when you're you know thinking about your deal the other side of it is self-publishing most people don't know how easy self-publishing is you can do print on demand on Amazon you upload your book anyone can do that every time a book gets sold you get your share and if it's a print book all Amazon does is they extract their printing cost so say the printing cost is three dollars so they're selling the book for 10 they extract the three because that's what it costs them to print they ship it to the person and then you get your split something like 65 percent you know or whatever it is um and that's how self-publishing works and so there's a bit of an irony in the sense that you are only going to get a publishing deal if you have an audience but if you have an audience you could and should just self-publish because you're going to make more money and it's important to do the napkin math on how many copies do you need to sell if you're only getting 15 of every sale or if you're getting 65 70 of every sale on Amazon or a hundred percent on your own site and after you do the math you realize you need to sell like close to 10 times more books with a traditional deal than if you just self-publish so oftentimes you will make a lot more money just self-publishing and the only time in my opinion the only time you should take a traditional publishing deal is there's three criteria there's it's either a personal development book it's a personal finance book and you are swinging for I want to write a New York Times bestseller Wall Street Journal bestseller and by the way the only way that you're going to hit that list is probably if you're writing a personal development book or a personal finance book because that's the vast majority right and even further if you want a chance at hitting that that list be prepared to spend a lot of your own money as well so to me that's the only time you should be playing that game is like I've got everything in place I want to swing for the fences I want to do this thing right if not if you just want to make money self-publish a lot of this stuff like I mean I guess maybe not ghost writing sales copywriting prototyping your service but certainly paid newsletter and writing books and certainly selling a course and stuff all seem to be predicated on building an audience uh I know this is a huge ass question but like how does one build an audience with online writing what's the Playbook the the starting point is if you want to build an audience don't focus on building an audience I mean the the fallacy that people have is if a gazillion people are following me then I can do something and that's really not how it works how it works is you are consistently delivering something that's valuable to people and then they follow you as a result right and so and and the other point is just because you have a big number of followers doesn't mean that they're the right kind of followers right it doesn't mean that they're the people most likely to then go buy a product or service right so if you start by going I just want to build an audience well if you build an audience around one thing and then you go and launch a product or service or business that is unrelated to that those people aren't going to convert right so if you're just out here making memes getting half a million followers then you're like and here I'm starting a ghostwriting company like there's going to be a mismatch and so the whole key is you want to take a this is like the biggest thing that we share with people in ship 30 which is you want to take a data-driven approach the whole idea behind digital writing is that you've accelerated your feedback loop so Legacy world of writing Hemingway sits down he spends four years writing a novel sells it to a publisher he has to wait another 18 months for it to get published and he has to wait another 12 months for the magazine reviews to come out and then he has to go to a pub down the street and then he overhears some person being like Hemingway's novel was terrible right that's the feedback loop whereas today the feedback loop is I have an idea I write a tweet a thread an atomic essay a LinkedIn post I publish it and I get feedback three minutes later and if you do that and you constantly take a data-driven approach every time you write something you should be learning who is this resonating with is this something I want to keep writing about every time you see a breakout data point you go oh maybe I should double down on that right and you just keep accelerating your Niche over and over and over again I'm sure as you've been making videos over the years you started to recognize oh when I make this type of video the chart goes up and to the right and when I make this type of video it flatlines or it goes down and intuitively you and every other Creator goes I'm going to keep doing the thing that's working right and so what we try and educate people on is just make that decision conscious right from the very beginning notice what's working and you can accelerate your feedback loop and your growth curve by just doubling down on the winners and cutting the losers yeah we got this problem a lot in our YouTube of course where people get so hung up on what's my Niche and I always try and like the way the way I describe it it's like you know uh uh the architect approach versus the archaeologist approach or it's like an architect has the plans for the whole house before they lay a single brick whereas or as an archaeologist like kind of goes to one site they do a bit of digging then they go to another one go to another side and then like oh [ __ ] I've struck some gold they'd keep on Excavating they they dig some more and unless you are for example a uh sort of in in the world of YouTube a kind of mattyavela where you've been making documentaries about documentaries on Netflix for 10 years and you already know how to make a Bang video even then he did a lot of archaeologisting to get to his Niche or a Peter McKinnon where it's like I've been a photographer videographer for 10 years and now I'm going to teach the thing at that point maybe it makes sense to sort of come in with like actively thinking like I'm gonna stand out in the space of Photography tutorials but for most other people especially while you're learning the craft and figuring things out like you just gotta throw loads of spaghetti at the wall dig in loads of sights and the ones that seem to stick you double down on those and kind of keep your mind open it's the way we we call this lean writing so just you acknowledging that you are not the genius at the table right just create data points and double down on the winners it always looks cleaner from the outside but what most people don't know okay so Ryan holiday is a great example Ryan holiday was a marketer right and his first book was about marketing and his second or third book same thing was about growth hacker marketing then he goes and writes this blog post for Tim Ferriss called stoicism 101. and the blog post goes crazy and he gets all these emails and he gets all this feedback and data saying there's something interesting about this so he goes I'm going to double down on it and he writes a book called the obstacles the way he even tells the story he goes I didn't get a very big advance for the obstacles the way right because it was new and it was an unproven data point the publisher goes well we're valuing you as a marketing writer and you want to write about this new thing and now he's the best selling most well-known stoicism writer in the world right so it looks really clean from the outside they're like oh you constructed this from the beginning that's not true he literally just created a data point saw that it won and doubled down on it most people don't know the same thing about Mark Manson yeah right Mark Manson didn't sit down and go I'm going to write this insanely amazing best-selling book you know solar of not giving a [ __ ] right but what happened is the publisher goes to him and goes well you have a big blog you have a big audience uh you should write a book he goes great what should it be about they go we don't know what's your biggest most viral blog post he goes well it's a blog post called the subtle art I'm not giving a [ __ ] right and what did he do he just expanded the blog post into a book there's so many examples of lean writing out in the world and it's just from the outside as consumers we think it's this beautifully orchestrated yeah everything's perfect from the beginning it's not yeah yeah I think I think the the other cool thing there is that even though Ryan holiday and Mark Manson are like Deca millionaires by this point from their various things still most people have not heard of them yeah and it's just like you know I was I was at a dinner the other day and I just casually throw the name Jordan Peterson and like other people like who's that I was like what come on and when I mentioned Ryan holiday like amongst like normal people like almost no one has heard of him yeah and it's just like this guy's like stupidly successful and is like making tons and tons and tons of money doing the thing that he loves and working four hours a day and spending time with his family and his farm Deca millionaire probably had like most people haven't heard of him which is a very like uh a comforting thought that you don't actually need to be like Ed Sheeran levels of famous to to make loads of money and have a really successful career I was gonna say there's there's a positive takeaway from that which is you don't need that many people paid newsletter great example right you don't need that many people to start making six figures as a writer you know if you're self-publishing books you don't need that many people buying your book for it to start being really profitable for you so that's part of what I love again no one educated me on that I had to figure a lot of this out on my own but what I love sharing with other writers is realizing that you don't need to be JK Rowling to live an awesome life you know you don't need to be this insanely best-selling I smash all these records success is a lot easier if you just focus on a small number of people focusing on solving their problems answering their questions and using writing as the vehicle for scaling that information so let's say someone's listening to this and they're like cool I want to get started with writing online um and they might have come across the advice that I was actually peddling a few years ago of like start a blog how do you feel about starting a blog these days my favorite my favorite question um blogging is the digital equivalent of being a legacy writer you know it's you think again what is a Blog it's your website you think you're the important part there's a saying I love repeating to uh writers in chip 30 which is you are not the main character of your story the reader is the main character nice I like that the moment you realize that you realize that you are in the business of serving the reader right that is literally what you are being paid to do and so a Blog it's like well what is that it's the writer going I'm super special here's my fonts here's my website here's my writings here's my color scheme here's my pictures right the reader doesn't care about any of that point a they care about what you can do for them point B is there's no distribution flywheel so how is anyone going to find your writing the only people who know your about your website or your blog or your mom and your dog right so it's you have no mechanism to get in front of readers I mean I guess I guess the kind of the I think people might be thinking if they're in legacy mode is well if I write enough eventually either people will share it and quote it'll go viral through sharing or I'll get traffic through Google yeah so okay so okay I'm feeding you basically yeah yeah it's just like a layup right so what is traffic through Google you know the only way that you're gonna rank who's going to rank for productivity on Google is it going to be you or is it going to be Forbes right or is it going to be skillshare or udemy right when Google is a search mechanism that businesses spend an insane amount of time energy and money to own you are never going to outrank udemy for productivity it's just not going to happen and most writers again this is where it's like you have to slow down and really understand what goal are you working toward if you are so the vast majority of writers they sit down they go I want to write something okay so you just want to write and then you want to reach certain people okay great what is seo seo is the complete opposite of that SEO is there's a search term and I want to own that search term and I don't even care how the writing turns out I just want to own that search term two completely different goals so again it's a fallacy where people go if I just write on my blog I'm going to rank on Google you don't even know what that means you're not going to rent what are you gonna rank for right so it's like that's part of I feel like I'm on this Quest you know and I have to like walk I have to run around with the flag and be like try and educate every writer be like what you were told is wrong and let me explain to you why it's wrong and let me show you a different way because so many writers it's not that they're not talented it's just they either were taught to think about it the wrong way or in my case you're told you can't make a living as a writer there's never been a better time in history to make a living as a writer you just have to understand how to make money as a writer okay so website is a no-go website should you have a website at all like well so you can have a website and it's I think it's fine to treat it as a like this is where my best work lives you know but again don't be confused it's gonna be way easier for you to get millions of views on your writing if you're publishing on Twitter LinkedIn quora medium you know anywhere that there's a social Garden where lots of people are hanging out the way that I like to explain it is think of it like you go to a party downtown in the city that's we're in London there's a there's a pub and the pubs there's people spilling out of the pub you know and it's an amazing time and you walk up there and you're Whispering into every person's ear and you're like hey I throw really great parties too you should come back to my flat uh trust me it's amazing every time you show up with a blog post that's what you're doing you're like hey I throw really great parties too and everyone's like no I want to stay at the pub it's amazing here right everyone wants to stay in Twitter everyone wants to stay in LinkedIn so you should be writing in the environment and then sure your site is where your best work can live but that's not what's going to drive the result okay so right on Twitter right on LinkedIn am I just okay so let's say I'm writing on LinkedIn and I'm like okay so firstly how do I decide Twitter versus LinkedIn versus quora versus medium I know this kind of changes over time but right now they go through different uh Peaks and valleys but both either are great uh Twitter and Linkedin I think have the best distribution right now um but it doesn't to me it doesn't really matter either or I love when people go I don't think my Niche exists here it's like there's hundreds of millions of people on these platforms it exists it's just you haven't figured out yet how to reach people which leads to the second question fallacy which then the person goes yeah but I can't reach them unless I have an audience okay social platforms have changed people don't understand how a social platform works it doesn't matter if you have a hundred thousand followers or you have 10 followers what happens every time you write something is a social platform feeds it to a small number of people so it goes we're going to show this to 25 people and based on the ratio based on the number of people in that small group that interact if it is above the majority we're going to show it to more people and if it's below we're not going to show it to as many people so that's how you have someone who you know you me anyone who has a larger following it doesn't matter if you have 100K followers 100K people aren't seeing your content the only way that it's getting distributed is if the thing that you wrote keeps crossing the next threshold where the platform goes this is worth being shown to more people which means everyone's on a Level Playing Field you don't need a huge audience it's just about the quality of what you're creating how do you figure out what to create like someone listening to this is like oh okay so I guess I should I should write on Twitter what what the hell am I going to write on Twitter or LinkedIn so we have a there's a really great like beginner framework that we uh share with people uh right in the first week of ship 30 which we call for who so that so every time you sit down to write who are you creating for so that they can do what okay so before you write a single word at the top of your page you should write for who so that okay so for who so this is writing advice for beginners so that they can outcome outcome outcome so that they can build an audience accumulate tens of millions of views make their first dollar online right and if you just start from the four who so that over and over again you're in great territory and the thing that I is important to remind people is it's not that you make that decision once and then that's the only thing you can do this is not a marriage decision right seven years ago I was writing about bodybuilding on the internet nobody cares now that's fine you can change over time but if you start every single thing that you create with the four who sew that framework then you can test different audiences you can test different outcomes and then you take that data-driven lean writing approach and you go well every time I write for who so that here it performs well and every time I write four who saw that over here it doesn't perform well well what should you do we'll double down on my winner cut my loser right and all of a sudden it removes all this pressure of you have to sit down and be the genius in the room and go what's your niche just let the data tell you right the data told Ryan holiday stoicism is where the opportunity is the data told Mark Manson hey you know life advice and the subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] is where the opportunity is just follow the data yeah yeah I guess at that point people like I've got a question that I often get is that but what if I don't like what the data tells me what if like what if I don't want to Panda panda to the audience kind of thing and like what if I actually do want to do all this other these other things that I'm more interested in you can do that yeah you know it's like again you have the freedom and an important thing to remember is just because something performs well doesn't mean you have to do that so I've written things that have gone viral that then the next day I was like that's cool but that's not really what I want to write about okay great push it to the side create some new data points see what happens right that's again it's not a marriage decision you can keep experimenting you can keep evolving yeah I have a friend who is doing this kind of method with her YouTube channel and she's been kind of throwing some spaghetti to the walls seeing what sticks double down on the stuff that sticks while still kind of doing a little bit more spaghetti throwing uh and she had a video go viral on a topic that she didn't really she was like uh I mean the video's gone viral but like I actually don't think I want to make videos on that particular topic but the concern is have I I have now gained an audience of like 10 000 extra like 25 of my subscriber count is now has now come from that video so therefore like am I kind of shooting myself in the foot by ignoring that that segment of the market and I guess I I kind of had this quick problem when I like a year into my YouTube channel I made a video about how I take notes on my iPad Pro and all of a sudden half my subscribers were from that from that one video and I was like damn I used to be a how to get into med school Channel and now I'm a freaking tech tech YouTuber what the hell is going on there and often found this struggle between like trying to imagine the mass of the audience and be like Oh but like some of them are like kind of 13 year old girls doing their like School exams and wanting to learn how to study a bit harder and be motivated and the other 38 year old Tech bro is wanting to learn about the latest iPad what the hell is going on like how would you approach that kind of thing yeah there's that's why so much of this is like being exposed to different ways of thinking because these are all just decisions one of the things that quora taught me and I love this framework is the size of the question dictates the size of the audience so for example how big is the audience of person who wants to get into med school that is way smaller than the size of audience that goes how can I improve my note-taking ability right so the size of the question dictates the size of the audience so when you see a data point it's worth keeping in mind well so like what's the category difference like of course personal development is always probably going to outperform something like how to get into med school or something that's more Niche and so that's why part of the data and again this is a big thing that we teach people in ship 30 is part of the data is not more views equals better hmm right it also you have other data points like what are the quality of comments like I know every time I write personal development I'm going to get more views and the comments are going to be like nice hmm good one this was really helpful you know whereas every time I write about ghost writing or how to start a a business by writing on the internet I'm going to get less views but I'm going to get way higher quality comments and people asking me questions and again you can do both and so it's you have to like learn how to read the data and go okay well this one's getting a little more attention but this one's getting me more engagement you can have both yeah but which one is connected to your business which one is driving the outcome that you want yeah and I guess like almost a third data point is how did you feel writing about those things totally like I don't care about talking about medical school admissions anymore but I used to seven years ago when I made money off the back of that right and now it's just like what else yeah I guess like you don't really care to write about bodybuilding anymore exactly even if it maybe started to do well you'd be like hey actually this is interesting yeah and you have to you want to do the thing you're always going to be more successful when you do the thing that you actually want to do so that's why again you kind of have to divorce yourself from the well just because it's getting more views doesn't mean that it's better you know what's I I like thinking of it as which is connected to your business right if if your business is like YouTube although it changes with CPM and stuff but like with YouTube it's more views equals more money right so I would understand someone going I want to optimize for views Mr Beast makes very strategic decisions to optimize four views right but if your business is I you know I want to teach you how to start writing online or I want to teach you how to become a ghost writer right you actually don't care about views views is a pointless metric I care whether people are engaging commenting what questions do they have am I answering the right questions am I moving those people into some sort of Education that's going to help them yeah right so you have to understand which metric and which lever is tied to the actual business that you're in yeah and I guess when you what do you do when you're starting out where you don't yet have that business you just test data points right because what I always like paying attention to is so views and and likes is kind of which way is the wind blowing is there interest in this direction or this direction but comments are where you really start seeing what people need help with so one of the big things I like pointing out to people is if one person comments on your video with a question the average person or the average Creator just goes oh someone commented and then they like walk away and do whatever but that one question is your first potential customer DM them talk to them ask them what do you need help with and if you just start interacting with those people they're literally going to tell you the business to build because they're literally saying if you just solve this problem I will give you money what do you I'm just throwing random questions at you here because this is great um what do you think are like um Okay so if someone has a field of expertise like you I mean at this point you've been writing for 10 plus years and so it's easy enough for you to give advice on writing what if someone listening to this is maybe I don't know early 20s just graduated universities started their first job and feels like I don't really have any skills I don't really have any passions I guess I I go home and like watch TV but like as everyone else does like what like how do I figure out what but but they want to build this business on on the internet and there's this sort of gap between like where they're at and seeing people who are experts allegedly sharing opinions on stuff where they feel like they don't have any expertise to share opinions on stuff hmm so uh in ship 30 we call this the two-year test although it can also be the two-day test or two hour test you know when you were in fourth grade you didn't want to learn from people who were in college people who were in college seemed like adults to you you know they seemed like your parents who you wanted to learn from was the fifth grader because you were like hey what's fifth grade like you wanted to learn from a person who's just a little bit ahead of you and so when you're thinking about things to share you want to use this two we call it the two-year test where it's what are all the things that you've learned over the past two years what are all the experiences you've had what are all the pivotal moments what are the lessons you know the mistakes the tips you would give right and all you're doing is you are creating for the version of yourself two years ago you are the fifth grader telling the fourth grader here's what you can expect right and if you just do that that is the cure for imposter syndrome imposter syndrome is you trying to do the two-year test forward you're like I'm gonna pretend I'm two years in the future you're not there yet right your ideal reader or viewer or listener is two years behind you or two hours behind you what did you just learn how to do great turn around and pass it to the person who doesn't know how to do that thing yet that's the easiest solution yeah it's it's great how a lot of the this stuff really converges on the YouTube advice as well it's the same thing like like the thing I tell people is like if if you're struggling with your Niche figure out what have you learned in the last three years or five years or ten years depending on how old you are um that you could potentially teach to someone who's in that position and so even now even though like with me I I get emails from people in their 30s and 40s and 50s and stuff being like Oh people coming up to the street of all ages um saying that your videos are helpful I find it very hard to imagine what I could possibly say that would be useful to a 45 year old kids because it's like what the hell do I know about productivity from people with kids and I just still just imagine myself speaking to someone who's like 25. um but there's that thing I think in in 12 immutable laws marketing that that the target is not the market like you can speak to one person but actually your Market could be a lot bigger than that yeah I mean it's a it's a great sales copywriting adage which is if you write something for everyone you write something for no one you know you your goal is to write or create something that is so specific it's Universal to all the people that are like that person so whenever you're thinking of I want to build an audience you shouldn't think of a massive people you should think of one person what is their name where do they live what problems do they have what are they interested in and if you're clear about that you're going to attract all the other people who are like that person but if you just think I want to build an audience you're in the mindset of how do I get everyone first of all the more you try and get everyone the more you get no one second of all you don't need everyone so what you were saying you don't need Ed Sheeran level of success right you just need a thousand people it's the famous essay a thousand true fans or Legion I think was the one who wrote a hundred true fans right you just you don't need as many people as you think yeah it's like um I often when when people ask about this Niche thing uh there's a story that Tim Ferriss told where he was like he really struggled with writing the four-hour work week and then he decided to write it in a Gmail compose window to like two of his friends exactly that just made it so easier so much easier because it feels like you're writing to a single person rather than trying to imagine a well analytics tell me my audience is like 15 to 54 living in like the UK the US Australia India China yeah how do you even begin to imagine that is exactly what quora taught me is quora was literally one person saying I have this question and what did Cora do it scaled my answer to that one person's question to everyone else who had that question so you would have quora answers get millions and millions of views but it started by answering one person's question and then the platform scaled it to everyone else and Twitter is the same linkedin's the same medium's the same yep every platform YouTube's the same you start with the one person's question and then the platform's responsible for Distributing it which is what your blog doesn't do yeah um importance of having your own email list question mark so again depends on what your goal is like you can have a successful freelance writing or ghost writing business without an email list you can have a successful YouTube channel without an email list but soon as you start getting into productizing yourself a paid newsletter is inherently a list or like writing and selling a book you want to have some sort of list because you want to be able to reach those people directly I think the biggest mistake authors make is they go I'm going to set out to write a book and they have no attention engine they have no social following they have no email list you need some way of interacting with readers because the book otherwise is just gonna sit on the bookshelf with you know millions and millions and millions of other titles no one's just going to pluck your book off the shelf yeah nice so would it be a case of like like again let's say someone is someone is a total beginner to this would you recommend they start off like email list from day one and funnel people from their Twitter bio into the email list or like try it out for a few years it's like at what point would you start to think about the email list the email list is an inflection point and it's a decision after you've clarified your writing in Social environments so you've written consistently you've generated a bunch of data points you've learned what works you have a clear understanding of who you're trying to reach and help what questions they have and then the newsletter is just the more of that right so social is the I do it in x amount of words I go into like a certain level of depth the newsletter is I'm going to do that for the same type of person just way more and again then you have the barbell decision am I saving you time or am I giving you expert level insight and the reality is most people especially when they're getting interested in something you don't have the expert level Insight so go the other route right curate save people time be the one who's researching you are now getting copied compensated to learn and build your skills and over time if you want to you can translate over to now I am an expert nice to what extent can people quote like expect a growth on thing like if we if we take Twitter for example you know the thing I tell people for YouTube is do the one video every week for two years and I guarantee that'll change your life but I can't put any numbers on it I can't tell you whether you'll get 10K 100K a million followers or even if you'll get monetized at all but I can just tell you it'll change your life and that kind of more like long-term thinking without really being wedded to a particular outcome is at least how I approach the YouTube stuff how do you think about that for I guess Twitter LinkedIn yeah I mean so if we really want to talk about it as a like hedge on your time energy and effort the best the best measure for success in writing online is just thinking about building your library so every time someone comes to you with a question every time someone goes hey what do you think about X notice how often you repeat yourself so when you go have a coffee meeting how many times do you say the same tidbits about yourself how many times do you explain well this is my thought process on making videos this is how I think about solving these problems right every time you're saying that you are manually doing the work writing online or making videos or having a podcast is your ability to scale that in the sense where now every time someone asks you that question you don't have to repeat yourself you go I I already wrote about it over here so remove the audience remove the how many followers remove the email list remove the money even still just creating things on the internet allows you to scale yourself digitally so then the question just goes do you think that there's benefit in scaling yourself on the internet everyone's gonna go well yeah of course there is because now you have a library that you can point to over and over and over again that's like the greatest hedge on it all it's not wasted time or effort what sort of success stories have you seen from people that you know who have done the writing online thing oh huge I mean we have tons coming out of ship 30 now where it's like they take the Frameworks we have so many people who have built audiences bigger than me on Twitter that's best case scenario I love seeing that because then that proves hey these things that were teaching they work you just have to put them into place and you know we've had people get tens of millions of views insanely viral Twitter threads build audiences of 100K 200k 300K launch their own products start making money on the internet made their first five grand 10 grand 20 grand 50 Grand like it all it is all possible but for me the reason why like someone can build a bigger audience faster than me almost always has to do with the category they're playing in right so for me if my business is writing education I don't care if I have 50k followers or 100K or 200k I care about what is the conversion rate of the number of people who come in they learn about these Frameworks and then they come over and decide to participate in the business right if someone else goes I want to write about personal finance or I want to write about personal development you can easily build an audience 10 times bigger than me and that's fine but I hope that you connect it to a business that's related to that audience right so it all depends on what game you want to play and how are you measuring that success but it's all of this stuff is you know when I was in school my teachers which I always found weird and ironic but they always said not everyone can become a writer and I kind of sat in class and I was like well then why are we all here and I think Legacy writing has this elitism to it where it's like not everyone can do it and you have to suffer and you have to stack rejection letters and you know you're you only are rewarded if you're brilliant and like it's there's all this red tape and the world of digital writing now is anyone can become a writer all of these skills are easy to learn and it's possible you just need to invest the time to learn some of these skills and put them into practice fantastic cool thank you so much I think this is a good place to end this there's still so much to talk about category design your uh next time there's no snow leopards and all that kind of stuff which I I read recently which is sick oh cool um yeah where can people learn more about your work and people find you uh Twitter is probably the easiest uh uh point now Nicholas call 77 um my I see I don't even Point people to my website there you go and uh and if anyone wants to start writing online take uh the next cohort of ship 30 for 30. good stuff and we'll put links to all of those in the video description and perhaps you could even hook us up with a discount code or something nice we'll put all of that in the video description and the show notes wherever you're watching or listening to this so we'll definitely do a round two next time we're in the same geographical location again uh I'm planning to visit the us sometime in the new year so we'll we'll hook up let me know we'll get Dicky together we'll do in Miami that'll be so good um thank you so much this has been wonderful thanks man cheers all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 178,484

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali, Abdaal, Ali Abdal, Abdal, Deep Dive With Ali Abdaal, Deep Dive, Ali Abdaal Podcast, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal Podcast

Id: JIfEgvpEufU

Length: 139min 51sec (8391 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023