How To Make $1 Million A Year As A Digital Writer

my friends the time is almost here it actually may be here by the time you watch this video but the art of focus box Keepsake Edition is going to be available for pre-order very soon so if you're interested in that it's just this is the only way you're going to get the hard cover copy along with the bonuses that are inside the Box itself it's a pretty big box with a bunch of other things in there and then we're launching the paperback after so if you're not interested in the box that also comes with a hint private invitation to annual events only for Keepsake holders to potentially get it signed if you want to come or just we're probably going to hit the gym we're going to do some cool stuff together in real life in person and finally get to meet so that would be sick but either way I won't shamelessly promote for too long you can check the first link in the bio and let's just get into the video so in this video we are going to start the digital writer series so we've had the one person business series we've had the lifestyle design it's just a playlist on YouTube to be honest where I'm going to start filling it with videos on being a digital writer of course spaced out with other harsh truths and rants about self-improvement and other things like that but I want to start talking about this because it's very helpful and writing has changed my life for the better and if you're interested in the onep person business then you're interested in writing because as we'll see in this video writing is the foundation of everything to get into it I always been a creative at heart I wanted to achieve the dream lifestyle that most people had or that you just saw on TV or the internet where everyone's on the beach working from their laptop or just not working at all and you're like okay how do I do what they do or I would also see artists and graphic designers and web designers and I'm like I could actually see myself doing that as a job or I could see myself doing that as a way to get out of a job because that's what it seemed like the people I was following were doing right that just may be me the people that I was following and I was conditioning myself to eventually do that or want to do that but it seemed like a way out it seemed like a good way of living just being able to do something creative from my laptop from anywhere in the world so naturally I studied things like graphic design film Photoshop illustrator Premiere video editing all of that stuff and I also knew that I had to learn something a skill that was valued by the market but I didn't want to give up my Creative Edge and so this is when I took web development class in my fourth year of college and it's safe to say that I became obsessed I went to the first class I went to the second class I started learning on my own and studying because I didn't really understand the curriculum and then things started to click and I'm like this is really cool I'm actually pretty good at this as a beginner and so after school I would go to the library and I would just self-study all day long I would buy courses I would go on free code Camp I would watch YouTube videos and I would just learn to code and code along with the tutorials day in day out for like 6 hours a day after school the other thing here is that the tech industry or just coding in general had the promise of getting a job without a degree and so this enticed me and the other thing that enticed me is that if I went into front-end web development so what you see on the internet that wouldn't take away my Creative Edge and so I'm like I found it this is the one thing that allows me to both be creative earn a high income and potentially freelance or build a software there was so many different opportunities that were opening to me that it just made sense to learn this skill I have always wanted to do my own thing I don't know what caused it maybe it was just my childhood but i' that's all I've wanted to do I wanted to do my own thing I wanted to be an entrepreneur I wanted to be a Creator I wanted to be what I am now and that's what led to me being it and along with this that meant that getting a job was the bane of my existence it wasn't difficult to observe society and just see that many people weren't happy with where they are they were Mis miserable and when I say miserable I mean their life is so dull it's so flat and predictable and Mindless where they may not be miserable they may be happy in some cases but they aren't experiencing the high highs and low lows that that contrast that actually brings meaning to life that alone is miserable it's a dangerous trap to fall in because you don't think you're miserable you're comfortable but you are so much more miserable than the people that look miserable in the low lows but that is what allows them to have the high highs you can't have a high high without a low low just it's just a universal principle when you pluck a string Bing it goes up and it goes down but if you don't pluck the string if you don't add risk or stress or throw yourself into the unknown that event that traumatic event that causes growth then you're not going to live a meaningful life and it's it's everywhere this principle is everywhere in music the highs the lows the chorus the melody the universe universe one song every everything happening in harmony the lows that are supposed to be there and the subsequent highs or the climaxes of a story it's everywhere games stories everything you see is pointing at meaning and that dull robotic mechanical mediocre existence is not meaningful long story short I was never able to monetize my creative ability and it wasn't because I wasn't skilled enough I had the skill in graphic design coding the creative stuff but I didn't have the skill stack that made that thing monetizable I didn't shift my focus because everyone tells you to focus on one thing oh just focus on coding and you'll do absolutely amazing no if you don't learn Marketing sales writing speaking the Evergreen skills that I talk about then you're not going to see your own success with that thing there are specific Evergreen skills that you have to learn in order to build your own thing and so because of this I had to swallow my pride and get a job at some point I'll go over my full story in a few videos from now like complete breakdown of everything that's happened in my life especially related to business but I fail that so many different we're skipping like five six years here where I'm failing failing failing at multiple different creative Endeavors and it finally not working to the point of me giving up and being like I have to get a job just in order to survive the lesson here is that you don't need to go to school to get a high-paying job but that job can be used as a Launchpad for building your own thing cuz I talk about jobs a lot but I'm I'm not against them I had one I see them for what they are and what they are as a stepping stone because if anything is more robotic and mechanical and Mindless and unmeaningful than a job it's a job that didn't make sense but you get the point you have you're either going to have to break out eventually to live that uncertain and chaotic life that brings meaning or you're going to be stuck in the job and slowly making progress up this corporate ladder that others assign to you so let's get into the topic of the video because I love just running on and ranting and not making any sense but we're here to learn how to make $1 million as a writer per year so I worked at a web design agency that's the job I got for a year and this was a blessing to me because it showed me exactly what was missing in my previous freelancing businesses the agency that I worked for had a marketing department a sales department and operations department and then the creative the the designer so marketing and sales got the customers operations did whatever they do and gave them to me so then I could create something for them so I realized okay for my freelance one person business I have to become all of those things I have to be the media company I have to be the marketing department I have to be the sales department I have to be the operations department but there is technology and software now that has allowed one person to do that well social media is for your marketing and sales to attract clients then there's software like cartra or even clickfunnels or some crms that allow you to manage those project management softwares as well so the whole thing about building your own thing is you need technical knoow and you need the creative skill and match the two together in order to make it work so this led to me learning skills like copywriting Sales Direct response marketing and all the other skills that people tell you to learn but nobody actually learns because they're so focused on learning the creative skills and not doing anything that actually generates customers so you can build your website all day but if you don't know how to send people to that website it doesn't matter and then there's always the objection of oh I don't want to learn those things I just want to do design well think bigger like zoom out and think what do you actually want in your future do you want that because if you want that then you want to do the things that are going to take you there otherwise you're just thinking too small and lying to yourself because then that's when your mind gravitates to the surface level pleasures and distractions that you succumb to and then you get absolutely nowhere which do you not want more so at my job I would spend all of my free time trying to land clients because I knew that was the key that I was missing so I tried everything under the sun like cold email cold calls cold DMS Facebook group networking paid Facebook and Google ads walking into local businesses and talking to the manager and writing down the phone numbers of service businesses from their vehicle graphics so like when a car would pass me and I'd see the vehicle graphic and it's like call this number for pest control or to get your glass replaced I would literally write it down or take a picture then I would email them or call them later and I started Landing a few clients and eventually referral started to kick in and over the coming months I started to see some results and things started to flow a lot smoothly and I started making good money money but it wasn't as much as I wanted and don't get me wrong this allowed me to replace my income and quit my job but I didn't just want to replace my income because at this time I was getting close to the glorified $100,000 a year mark but a few things happened at this point and they could only happen at this point why because I wouldn't understand them without my prior experiences or failures the first thing is I began to understand the power of social media a huge problem in my business is just Why was I doing so much manual work to land clients that was taking me more time than the actual client work why didn't I realize that posting content and building a Following over time and understanding social media allowed me to have unlimited clients at my fingertips think about it like I don't even need the audience if I can write a post that is good and persuasive and plugs my product or service and then through networking or even paid growth I can have someone share that post to Their audience of let's say 100,000 to a million people they see they click through I know how to capture and guide attention and without me even having an audience I can generate leads 10 times faster and easier than just a manual effort but if I could build an audience myself over time that would save me 10 to 20 hours a week just on client acquisition and then if I built my following large enough like past 10,000 past 50,000 people then I knew that I would be able to Pivot out of client work and that would save me even more time people ask like popular videos of mine are the 4-Hour Work Day day and they're like you don't work that little and it's like I do because I noticed what was taking up my time and then used the thing that is called creativity to create a solution to the problem so that it could work less like you call yourself an entrepreneur but you can't spot a problem and solve it in your life the second thing is that I had the experience to grow on X centuries ago there was a social media app called Twitter and I never really cared for it but for some reason I was scrolling one day and I saw a post and it was self-improvement post I've talked about this story so many times before but in short I followed one person likeed their content followed another followed another like content started showing up on my feed I started to like Twitter more and more I saw that this guy was selling Web Design Services and I'm like okay why can't I do the same thing if he's making a full-time income with that as his way of generating clients for his freelance services and his products web design products why can't I do the same thing so I started emulating their content structure and posting the ideas in my head because with my background now in Marketing sales copyrighting all that stuff I could notice the patterns I'm like oh they're using a hook in that piece of content I wasn't reading it like a consumer I was reading it like a researcher where I would see the content and I'd be like that's a hook okay this is leading people down the page this is where it delivers value this is the conclusion or call to action that actually leads to engagement I'm going to take these pieces and put my own thoughts related to my own interest in them and it should work for the content side of things but that's not all there is to content you need to get eyes on your content and we'll talk about that in the next video which is going to be called how to actually grow on social media what they don't tell you so in my first year I gained around 10,000 followers in my second year that jumped to 50,000 in my third year another jump to 100,000 then I use my validated ideas to post to other platforms like Instagram LinkedIn and YouTube I knew they would get engagement because I had so much data from writing on Twitter today 4 years later I have around 2,800,000 followers across all platforms so narcissism aside that is a testament to exponential growth and consistency the third thing I realized is that everything pointed to writing writing on Twitter made me realize one thing is that I wasn't just writing on Twitter I was writing emails newsletters landing pages promotions video scripts direct messages course curriculums product material everything it wasn't too long until I just considered myself a writer people would ask me what do you do and I'd be like oh well I kind of like sell Web Design Services but I'm also on social media and have a good amount of followers it eventually just got too complicated to the point where I'm like I'm just a writer right I couldn't box myself in to Any Given thing because when you actually tap into and understand what a content creator is not as a job but as a way of life of capturing ideas and distributing the valuable ones to people like you and then solving your own problems and selling the solution to the people like you that have the same problems it's just like the most natural business model there is it's much deeper than oh I just want to be a YouTuber and and that's the thing I did every single morning even if I had web designed clients to like fulfill like that took an hour or two maybe more like a day but I was writing every single morning that was the driver of my business that's what allowed my business to survive and so this is how 2hour writer was birthed and that's my course where I teach my entire writing ecosystem because everything you do in business no matter what it is starts with writing and so here's the thing is that most writers that probably clicked on this video if you're a writer then you'll understand this if you're not a writer then we're going to talk about what a writer actually is most writers try to sell their services on social media most writers try to just sell their writing and they can with something like a paid blog or newsletter or community but but that's so limiting writing is both the traffic mechanism and the means to create an information product or to create the education and the marketing around whatever product you want to sell even if it's like a physical product you're still a writer and this is where writers miss out is they think that they have to monetize their writing rather than create a solution to the problems that they're talking about in their writing because any good writer knows that writing starts with a problem and creates steps and value you to get to a solution and so when you have that the topics that you're talking about why don't you sell a product that the people that are interested in those interests are already buying rather than trying to sell your writing when you know how to write market and sell you can earn an income writing about whatever you want and that's just the thing is that writers or creatives in general don't know how to Market and sell the fourth thing that I realize is that my income grew with my readership a few years ago I read a post that said I could make 50 cents to $1 per follower per month and the caveat here is that this is only possible with your own product or service this is not possible with banking on the algorithm or using something like AdSense you need to create an independent source of income you need to take control of your income and not rely on the algorithm or AdSense as your boss like you would a job that you're that's the complete opposite of why you're doing this you don't want another boss just this monolith or megal whatever the the word is of a corporation to determine your income based on your views and how much you cater to them so this 50 cents to a dollar per follower per month held true for me to a point from years one to three I made about $1 per follower per month so 10,000 then 50,000 then 100,000 per month I made $800,000 in my third year and this past year I passed my follower account in income around $3.1 million so far in revenue generated this year with writing so the the last year maybe I've just gotten lazy with how I promote I don't know but I don't think I could see myself with 2.8 million followers across platforms making $2.8 million a month then again that could very well be a limiting belief so there are a lot of technical details here but one thing holds true if you slowly build a decent readership launch a new product and get 80% of the things right I find it hard to believe that you couldn't make a million dollars like it it just doesn't make sense like if you have control of the product and you have control of the traffic and you are consistently growing the traffic that is being sent to the product that bar can go up Forever at a job you aren't in control of this and you aren't in control of this you're in between and you're just being given a set amount the main trap I see is people playing short-term money games blasting Their audience with promotions on a crappy product and never improving what they offer this is a huge trap it's just evolve over time evolve what you write about diversify platforms create new products do what you have to do now we can discuss the principles of monetizing your writing I don't want to give you tactics and hacks this is a a very long-term game this is preferably something that you're doing for life I would argue that every single person is a writer not that you have to label yourself as a writer but whatever you do in business you're going to have to write and you should get good at it you're going to have to write almost every single day if not however you create your schedule but I I I want to give you the principles to focus on these will be the main drivers in monetizing your writing the first is distribution so choosing a platform distribution is how you BRD product and people for writers social media is how you are going to do that you don't need to start on a writing platform but why wouldn't you you don't need to post pictures of your body you can prioritize learning and idea generation you don't need to design Graphics or edit videos it is a peaceful existence unless you want to expand in the future so I recommend X or Twitter as your starting point and then you can develop and grow in the future if you want because things like medium.com or blog sites or even a newsletter those take time to grow Twitter to me is the only real short form writing platform where you don't have to post pictures you don't have to do whatever you can tweet multiple times a day and those serve as those ideas that you post serve as data for any other content that you create on any other platform and in my eyes let's say you want to become a YouTuber it's easier to build an audience on something like X and then move that audience over to YouTube especially when you have validated posts that you can then expand on in YouTube videos and know that they're going to perform well because they already got high engagement so the first lever or principle is distribution so just having traffic the second is an offer something to send the traffic to that's how you monetize an audience and the thing here is is that beginners tend to see something like a YouTuber pulling in big money from AdSense and think that's the only way to monetize now more people are coming out and being transparent about how much they make as a Creator uh with the the products that they sell right that's the thing is that the big people the huge people make a ton of money with AdSense but if you're it really depends I've talked to YouTubers that make like 1,000 a month 5,000 a month 10,000 whatever but if you want to make a million $10,000 a month for a channel that has 250k to 500k subscribers depending on your Niche it's still not enough and if the thing holds true where if 50 cents to a dollar per follower per month then you're wasting a ton of money rather than having $10,000 a month paid out with AdSense you can create a product that sells iterate until it sells and potentially make 250 to 500k per month but if you don't make it that far let's say you create a product that is 50% as good as perfect let's consider the higher end 500k a month perfect let's say you shoot for the stars and land on the moon then you're still making like 50 to 100K a month rather than 10K a month from relying on AdSense so in order to create an offer first just go watch my one person business playlist watch the best business model to start in 2023 that'll go over like offer creation I believe but here's what I would do first thing is start a freelance business you don't have a large following at first so you do more manual work to land writing clients for a higher price than something like a course this allows you to make an income and you can sell social media content copywriting emails Etc just don't offer plain old writing second is to wean off of manual Outreach as your audience grows you can leverage that for landing clients this frees up time to start creating a product the third is turn your freelance service into a product so you can keep freelancing but having a digital product course or physical product allows you to earn without manual labor the fourth is do whatever you want at this point you should have the mental and financial resources to build and monetize whatever you want enjoy the freedom that a proper skill stack and experience provides one last thing is that people create a product and see Zero results most of the time first I I'll just give you what to do one study the people that you already follow and that you know we selling the product or service and that it's actually selling create it take it make it better under your own name sell what's already selling stick your hand in the money that's already flowing that's how you make money don't try to be clever don't try to create something new at least for the first product just create what you know is going to work but if you want to take it a step further then consider enrolling in digital economics which is my higher price course that has all of my monetization systems it goes over all the Evergreen skills writing speaking Marketing sales it goes over branding it goes over literally everything or if you want something else go watch the video on value creation it should be called value creation the skill that built my one person business the third principle so we have distribution offer that's how you make money the third is leverage and scalability so if you don't prioritize leverage and scalability you won't be able to make a million dollars a year or at least without hating your life because you're spending so much time on like freelancing clients like you could technically go and land $25 to $50,000 clients once you get really good at what you're doing 5 years down the line and then land two clients a month that's just that's a losers game like that's hard and to me that's not worth doing especially because I would argue if you don't like working a job then you're not going to like client work because you're not doing your own thing you're not doing what you really want to do you're doing projects that are still assigned to you by a client so the internet and to the point where it's developed now with all the resources and software allows you to build a business in scale without hiring an insane amount of employees the software is now your employee as you are writing and building you have to continue to evolve the products that you are creating the obvious and priority thing to do is to turn your service like freelancing into a digital product like a course teaching the same thing to a more beginner level audience so if you're selling copyrighting services to these clients for $110,000 but you've attracted a broad audience teaching about copyrighting then don't turn the freelance product into something that is targeted at something super Niche just create a basic copyrighting course teach people the basics everyone's a beginner 90 however 90% of the market are beginners you're going to be much better off taking on fewer clients charging more and building the base of your income with a lower pric digital product that allows you to scale so in my case I was a freelance web designer so to free up more time and take on less client work I created two products in my first year as a Creator as my audience was growing the first was a freelancing product so I just taught the principles of freelancing the basics what I knew under my name with everything that helped me and how I just did it the second was a web design product because I understood that okay if people don't have a skill to freelance with then I need to give them a skill to freelance with and teach them that skill so I created a web design course on how to create websites and landing pages in my second year I stopped freelance web design as a whole I had so much more experience at this point it didn't make sense to continue doing something less profitable and more timec consuming so I transitioned into marketing Consulting for online businesses I had Direct access to them on social media anyway it just made sense and eventually I did the same thing so I evolved one my previous freelance into digital product and then that the freelance service pivoted and changed into something more valuable with the experience that I had I wasn't stuck to it or attached to it I just did something new so after that I got rid of the other digital products and I created better ones from the service that I was already offering the marketing Consulting and brand Consulting so the fourth and final principle is just promotions which is the destroyer of Brands so I've talked about my book The Art of focus launching soon Link in the description for close to 3 years now because it's taken that long to actually write it and the thing here is is that I still have people message or comment that they didn't know I was writing a book even if they've been following me for three years so just because someone has followed you for a certain amount of time does not mean that they know what you sell or how they can pay you even if they're a perfect fit you have to promote promoting means that you're telling people about your product or service and sending them to a landing page with a payment link so a simple framework for promotions and you can study copyrighting Frameworks in order to learn more or to practice but this is one you can just practice with now it's called Pas problem amplify solution so with the problem capture their attention by talking about the problem they are facing that your product solves quote unquote if you struggle with is a great place to start amplify is talking about how the problem impacts their life and why it needs to be solved solution is positioning your offer as the solution to the problem so they click and read more you can plug your products services or newsletter in the comments of your post in your story or randomly in your writing like I did above with the book and whenever people come to me with problems with their marketing it's it's usually just a lack of promotion and good promotion getting people to click and then guiding them down the page and they can't monetize consistently because they don't promote consistently they don't have a schedule or system in place to promote every single day they don't have that block on their calendar that says go and make some money because you're broke then that's what allows you to make money is promoting you don't have a marketing and sales department like the job you work at you are the marketing and sales department so just to summarize how to make a million dollar a year as a writer first thing is that I wish I could tell you that it's going to be easy but it's not as anything worthwhile in life the principles are pretty straight forward they're set out for you use writing to build a readership that grows infinitely with the internet if you know how to improve when you hit a stunt in growth if you're as I said if you're an entrepreneur then you have to be able to identify problems in both your life and your business and solve them if the problem is there like oh I'm not making enough money I'm not making the amount of money that I want to make then you have to change something you have to create a solution you stick it out for multiple years if not the rest of your life entrepreneurship means you are in full control of how much you make your income is only limited by your perspective beliefs skill set and real world practice that is it enjoy the rest of your week again the art of focus first link in the description if you want to learn how to write buy to our writer if you want to learn brand marketing writing entire everything about online business digital economics I'm so good at promoting you see other free stuff in there like subscribe I'll see you later thanks for watching peace

Channel: Dan Koe

Views: 270,517

Keywords: self improvement, mindset, personal development, online marketing, online business, make money online, spirituality, entrepreneurship, motivation, personal growth, social media growth, self mastery, actualization

Id: gtMqg_QWMzA

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2023