Let’s call a spade a spade — most writers are abject failures. Just god awfully poor results. It doesn’t have to be this way either.

There are some people with no talent who are destined to fail, but that description doesn’t fit most writers and it probably doesn’t fit you.

Still, odds are, you’re going to fail, even though you could easily avoid it.

You don’t have to end up in the abyss of writers who quit, who never quite got the message right, and who couldn’t comprehend this one simple fact you need to know to be a successful writer.

Seriously, if you can embrace this single concept, fully, you stand a chance at building an audience that loves your work. If you don’t embrace this concept, you will fail.

So what’s the concept?

Simple. In order to build an audience and have a successful career, other people not named you have to like your writing.

Regardless of what you write — non-fiction self-help or vampire novels — your work has to be attractive to readers. This doesn’t mean you need to pander, but it does mean you have to understand what readers want.

So, what do readers want? What must you understand about them to be successful?

Start with these five core traits of any audience anywhere, and you’ll be well on your way to having a successful writing career.

Take Off Your Rose-Colored Glasses

You have to understand that your potential reader’s default position is to not want to read your stuff.

First of all, they don’t know you. The less social proof you have, which is zero when you’re new, the harder it is to gain attention.

Second, even for people who like to read, reading isn’t a high priority compared to all the other things they could be doing.

Last, even if they decide they’re really in the mood to read, they can choose from an infinite number of writers.

Why am I telling you all this? Aspiring writers are infected with this mindset that somehow people are interested in their work by default when the opposite is true.

Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about your work. And, for damn sure, nobody gives a damn about your dreams of becoming the next great writer.

You have to make them care.

How?

You need to become a better writer. Most aspiring writers aren’t good at writing and they shouldn’t be.

Then, you want to put your work in front of people who might be interested in your work. This means using websites like Medium and finding the right pockets of the site to publish your work on.

As you practice your writing, implement new techniques, and gain a bit of an audience, you’ll start to see what works and what doesn’t. But you’ll never reach that point if you don’t take full responsibility for your work.

Think of how you browse the internet. Are you thinking to yourself, “Hm…I really should read this person’s article because it might help them build their long-held dream of becoming a writer.”

Nope. You don’t care at all.

Why? Because you’re only interested in the answer to this question.

The One Question Every Read Asks Themselves

Why do you read an article?

You read an article because you think you’re going to get something from it. Before you decide to read an article, you ask yourself, “What’s in it for me?”

There are a variety of reasons why people read. Sometimes they’re looking for education and your article has an answer to a pressing question. Sometimes they’re looking for inspiration or seeking a transformation (often, this is the case).

Maybe they just want some entertainment and a bit of an escape from the world. Often, they’ll read because they think what they’re reading will say something positive about them — ‘I’m informed’ ‘I’m in the know’ ‘I have good taste.’

Always think of this question when you sit down to write.

Many aspiring writers don’t take this into account at all.

They’ll write some article — On my Whimsical Trip to the Maldives. OK. What are your potential readers getting from an article like what? What’s in for them? How are they better off for reading that?

Most people who write articles like this will say something like “Because the story is interesting!” Usually, it’s not. Usually, it’s masturbatory and self-serving.

If I sound harsh it’s because I want you to win. You can write about yourself. You can write in a unique non-cookie cutter style. But you can’t fail to answer that question.

A blog post on sustainable gardening answers that question, so does Kafka. Don’t blame lack of readers on the genre, blame it on yourself. Always answer the question.

Understand What Truly Moves Readers

Pretty words don’t move readers, emotions do.

Yes, people appreciate well-written prose, but the emotions do most of the leg-work. The most popular writers aren’t always the most technically gifted ones.

Take a book like 50 Shades of Grey. Safe to say it’s not a literary masterpiece, but it managed to strike a deep, visceral, primal emotional response in readers.

Also, you do have masters of prose like Tolstoy who were successful with a finer touch, but also primarily succeeded because of the emotional tones they hit in their writing.

Write at whatever literary quality you deem necessary, but understand you’ll persuade readers with the underlying concepts beneath the words as opposed to the words themselves.

In short, quit trying to be so cute. Understand what emotions your writing plays on, form the concepts around those emotions, and then use words to describe the concepts.

Some emotions/concepts that strike a chord with readers are:

• Fear – Fear is the most powerful and persuasive emotion you can use. Often, when I write self-improvement articles, I’ll allude to alleviating fear.
• Aspiration – Humans just want to be better. We want to transform. We’re never quite satisfied. You don’t have to be a self-help writer to appeal to aspiration. Why do you think the hero’s journey story arc is so successful in novels?
• Lust and primal sexual instincts – Romance novels are, by far, the best-selling books on Amazon. Not all that close.
• Excitement – People often live humdrum lives. If your writing can provide a jolt of energy, they’ll keep coming back for more. My blogging mentor Jon Morrow says, “When you sit down to write, don’t publish just another blog post. Don’t give your readers just another tip. Don’t tell just another cute story. Set their freaking hair on fire.”

I could keep going, but the main idea here — think less about appealing to reason and more about appealing to emotions.

Stay With Your Reader the Entire Way

Readers are always looking for a reason to dismiss you.

When you started this post, I bet you thought to yourself, “I probably know some of the points this guy is going to say.” If you had this thought in your mind and I just called it out, you now trust me a little bit more.

Why? Because readers love when you anticipate their thoughts. A classic technique in sales is calling out your customers objection before they say it.

When you’re writing, if you understand upfront that, while people are reading your articles, they’re trying as hard as they can to find an excuse to click out of them, you can add little techniques like the one above to keep them reading.

There’s a saying “Each sentence has one job. Get the reader to the next sentence.”

This seems like a jaded attitude to have toward readers – they don’t care about you, they want to dismiss your work, they don’t use logic, etc. But a lack of idealism helps you gain influence and win attention.

It’s the writers with rose-colored glasses, who think the world is dying to read their work and imagines themselves writing the next great American novel, who always fail.

Over time, you’ll rely less on persuasion techniques in your writing because you will have a loyal audience who wants to read your writing. You’ll have some fans who love your work so much they’ll read everything you write.

You reach that point by first humbling yourself and understanding you need to fight for attention with each line of each new article.

You want readers to be pleasantly surprised when they read your articles. They were expecting you to flop, but you wrote something insightful, in-depth, and emotionally satisfying at the same time.

This is how you build an army of readers.

Do This to Build a Loyal Tribe of Readers

The more you get readers invested into you, the more often they’ll come back and the longer they’ll stay.

You have certain writers like this in your life — when they drop something new, you drop everything and read it. When they have a new book out, you’ll buy it. You’re a part of their ‘1,000 true fans.’

How do you get readers invested in you?

Be consistent. The more top of mind you are for your readers, the more they’ll stick with you long-term. Most writers simply don’t write long enough to build a tribe of readers who are invested in their work.

Hone your voice over time and continue to work on inspiring, educating, and entertaining your readers. You want to create the feeling that your work is meant specifically for them as an individual, even if you have thousands of fans.

Show you’re serious about your craft by constantly refining it and paying attention to your audience’s needs. That’s the thing about self-serving writing — it’s disrespectful to your readers and they can sense you don’t care about them from the way you write your articles.

If you iterate, focus on your audience, and simply don’t quit, you’ll attract the right readers who will get invested in you.

Once you have enough readers invested in you, you’ll have a career, you’ll have your dream, and they’ll be happy too.

Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone on the planet earth wants to learn how to make money writing?

Making money writing is one of those strategies that sounds sexy, but when it comes to the following trough, it can be quite difficult.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Can you make money writing? Absolutely.

But you won’t be able to do either until you adopt the right attitude.

All of the strategies I’m going to share with you work. How do I know? Because I personally use each of these strategies to make money writing myself.

If you want to make a living writing, you need to have the following qualities:

• You really, really, really have to like writing – It’s okay if you’ve procrastinated on starting your writing career, I did, but once you start you have to begin to enjoy the process or else you’ll quit.
• You have to be patient – I’ve seen people execute some of the strategies I’m going to share in a year or less, but they’re anomalies. It’ll probably take you three to five years to go full-time.
• You have to focus on your audience – If you expect to write random stories about your life and make a killing without taking readers into consideration, you’ll fail.

Still with me?

Let’s take a look at the income streams I personally use to make money writing.

My Number One Blogging Income Stream by Far

As long as the website medium.com exists, I will bang the drum and be one of its top evangelists because this site almost solely afforded me the opportunity to quit my job and become a full-time writer.

I joined Medium in late 2015 after seeing someone on my Twitter timeline share that she had an article go viral on the website.

I had no idea how the site worked, but by that point, life taught me to always seek out and seize new opportunities. When I joined Medium, it didn’t have as many writers on the platform as it does today, but it had a sizeable audience already. Call it right place, right time, but the true lesson is to always be on the lookout for the next trend.

From 2015 to 2017 I wrote articles on Medium primarily to build my email list. In 2017 Medium rolled out the Medium Partner Program, which pays writers based on engagement from Medium members. I gave it a test run and when I saw the results I just kept going. 19 months later, I had my first five-figure month on Medium and quit my job.

Anyone reading this right now can start writing on Medium and start making an income in as little as 30 days. In the beginning, you likely won’t make much money at all. But if you stick with it long term, you can make anywhere from a decent living to a full-time living.

Pros of Writing on Medium

• You don’t have to do anything but write. I promote my articles a bit using my email list and social media, but primarily, I focused on creating the best possible content and publishing it on the right publications within the website
• There’s no barrier to entry on Medium. Everyday Joes and Janes publish on Medium on the same feed as award-winning journalists and experts.
• You can make money and build an audience at the same time. Medium allows you to add a link for readers to sign up for your email list without it affecting your ability to earn money.

Cons to Writing on Medium

• If you are just now starting to write on Medium, you will face more competition than I did. No question about it. As with any trend in its late stages, being successful becomes more difficult when more people find out about the opportunity.
• If you want to be successful on Medium, you have to write a lot, maybe even more than you’re initially comfortable with. I write anywhere from 20-30 articles per month to maintain my income. Some argue this incentivizes writers to rush and decreases the quality of the writing as a whole. I don’t disagree with that argument. For more patient and thoughtful writers, Medium may be an uphill climb. But it’s the perfect place for prolific writers.
• You have no control over Medium. I always tell writers to maintain a WordPress blog and an email list because you never want to have all your content solely stored on a third-party platform. I’m betting long on the success of Medium, but I don’t run or work for the company, so I can never truly know. Keep Medium as part of your strategy, even the primary part, but don’t make it your entire strategy.

Resources on success Medium

Some valuable guides on finding success with Medium are:

• How to Write on Medium: Advice From a Top Blogger
• Medium Blogging: 5 Benefits of Medium Other Than Making Money
• Medium Writing For Beginners: 3 Easy to Fix Mistakes

Make a full-time living writing on Medium, no strings attached Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.

How to Make Money Writing and Achieve a Life-Long Dream at the Same Time

According to a New York Times survey, 81 percent of people say they have a book in them. If you’re an aspiring writer, odds are you’d like to publish a book. And I think you should.

There’s nothing quite like having a book, a solidified piece of thought, out there in the world. Thanks to self-publishing, you can put together a professional book without having to use a traditional publisher in the process at all.

Self-publishing gives you total creative control over the content of your book, the design and packaging of your book, the price of the book, and the timeline for when the book comes out. You also get higher royalty payments from self-publishing than you would a traditional publisher.

I’ve published three books. My first book made a few thousand dollars. My second book did much better, making multiple five figures. And my third and most recent book is pacing to outdo both of those books combined and then some. With each new book you put out, you have a larger audience to share your book with.

Most self-published authors write multiple books to build up a catalog that can lead to a more substantial living. Again, if you like to write a lot, you can put out multiple books and making a living from them. I personally know writers who do just that. They’re not famous, but they make a living with serial publishing and reach the goal of making a living with their words.

Pros to Publishing Books

• If you publish a book and put marketing elements in place to keep promoting it, you have an asset that continues to pay you over time. I make money while I sleep from readers across the world buying books I wrote years ago. It’s a great secondary stream for me that keeps solid income coming in.
• Books establish credibility. It’s funny. Every time you mention to someone that you wrote a book, their eyes widen a little bit and they’re impressed. Writing a book makes you feel like a real writer.
• There’s just something about writing a book that gets a huge monkey off your back. When you get that copy of your book in your hands, you feel euphoric. A book is tangible. You always have something to look at and say “I made this.”

Cons to Publishing Books

• Odds are, you won’t sell a ton of books unless you have a huge audience. Many big-time authors who have massive hits, e.g., Mark Manson, have email lists of 100,000 people ore more. You can, however, go the serial publishing route if you don’t have a huge audience.
• Books aren’t the best ROI on your time, at least not initially. After you’re done writing your book you won’t even want to look at it anymore. The process can be grueling. It’s worth it, but it might not be the most optimal use of your time.
• Without proper promotion channels in place, many self-publish books tend to just die off. If you want to write a book that lasts, you will have to continue to focus on building an audience and sharing your book with them.

Resources on Successful Self-Publishing

• Kindle Direct Publishing: How to Make Real Money on Amazon
• 10 Steps To Making A Living As A Self-Published Fiction Author In 2020
• Self-Publishing School

Share Your Wisdom With the World

If you write ‘how-to’ content, you can leverage that knowledge to make money teaching people about your subject. You can become a coach, create online courses, or become a consultant.

After a few years of learning how to write myself, I provided one on one coaching for aspiring writers. Recently, five years after penning my first word, I created an online course teaching people how to build an audience and make money on Medium.

People kept asking me for advice on writing and wanted to work with me in a bit more depth, so I created the course and I’m currently working on a coaching program to go with it.

If you put your writing out there and share your expertise, you’ll have people who see the value in your work and want to work with you. When it comes to teaching others, you don’t have to be an infallible expert, you just need to have knowledge that helps other people.

One thing that struck me when observing new writers is the fact that there are many things seem obvious to me that are totally new to them.

When you write and build an audience, you build up a level of expertise you might take for granted. Just know that people are out there who want your help and if you’re suited for it, teaching can be a great option.

Pros to Coaching, Courses, and Consulting

• You don’t need a large audience to make a great living as a coach. With coaching, you can command higher rates, meaning you need to convert fewer people to reach your income goals.
• With online courses, you can scale them and make a great income as you build a larger audience over time. And courses are an asset that keeps you from having to trade your money for time. You can stay involved in your courses and work with students, but it’s not as constant as coaching.
• The upside is very, very, very high. This doesn’t guarantee success, of course, but most writers who reach huge incomes, six or seven figures, usually make it there through a combination of ‘the three Cs’

Cons to Coaching, Courses, And Consulting

• The degree of difficulty can be high for people who aren’t accustomed to working with others. You can suffer from impostor syndrome over teaching others. If you lack confidence in interacting with people, coaching will be difficult.
• Online courses tend to have low success rates. Most people don’t finish them. Hybrid models are becoming more popular, a combination of courses and coaching, because self-paced courses may leave students hanging.
• Some people just want to write. A few years back, it was a given that you had to teach others to supplement your income and support your writing career. Now, with places like Medium, you don’t have to do that. I’ve seen some prominent bloggers turn course creators who just stopped writing altogether. You can lose some of your free-spirited creative joy if you ‘go corporate’

Resources on Coaching, Courses, and Consulting

• 7 Ingredients of a Successful Online Course
• The Ultimate Product Launch Plan: How We Made $200,750 with a New Product
• The Step by Step Guide to Monetizing Your Blog With Courses

How to Make Money Writing Damn Near Out of Thin Air

If you have no idea what products to create or don’t want to become a coach, you can promote other people’s products on your blog and make money writing through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is simple. You get a custom link to a page for a product. You add these links to blog posts or pages on your website. When people click on those links and buy the products, you receive a commission at no extra cost to them.

That’s the great part. You just share products with people they might be interested in and get paid. I don’t do a ton of affiliate marketing. Mainly, I have a page teaching people how to start a WordPress blog that contains affiliate links to website hosting.

You’ll want to create helpful content around the affiliate product you want to promote to educate and persuade people into buying the product.

If you can attract traffic to pages on your site that contain affiliate links, you can earn anywhere from a decent trickle to a massive income. Depending on the niche and the price point of the products you promote, you can make a killing with affiliate marketing if you know how to do it right.

Pros to Affiliate Marketing

• The upside potential is huge if you can get traffic as you can see above.
• Affiliate marketing is cost-effective. You just need to pay for your website hosting, site design, and email marketing software. You don’t have to spend money on creating a product. Theoretically, you could start a six-figure affiliate business with less than $100/mo in expenses.
• Since you don’t own the products, you don’t have to run the business aspects of having a product, e.g., customer service, refunds, maintaining and updating the product, etc

Cons to Affiliate Marketing

• To get affiliate marketing to work well, you need to get a lot of traffic. This likely means learning SEO or running paid advertisements, which carry a higher degree of difficulty than, say, publishing blog posts on Medium
• You have no control over the commission structure and the terms with your affiliates. Amazon recently decreased the commission rate for its Associate’s program, which wiped out many entire affiliate businesses overnight.
• Your reputation is tied to the products you promote. You get the upside of not having to create the product, but you get the downside of having no control over the quality of the product. This is why I suggest promoting products you actually use. I promote Bluehost on my blog and my blog is hosted on Bluehost.

Resources on Affiliate Marketing

• 53+ Best Affiliate Programs for Bloggers in 2020 (to Earn Affiliate Income from Blogging)
• Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: Free Guide for Beginners
• How I Make Money as a Blogger: A Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing

A Straightforward Path to Cashflow

You can make money writing with this last model quite quickly if you’re dedicated.

It’s my lowest source of income, but I’ve still used it to make quick cashflow and when done right, you can build an amazing writing business from this model.

What is the model in question? Freelancing.

I wrote freelance articles for the digital marketing company I worked for prior to quitting to write full-time. I wasn’t making much money with other forms of writing yet, so freelancing was the quickest and easiest way to make a living at the time.

These days? I take on freelance jobs only if they come my way and only if they pay a lot of money. If you start to put your work out there, eventually people will notice the quality of your writing and want to hire you for jobs.

Also, if you start writing with the intention of becoming a full-time freelancer, you can quickly pave the way to making a full-time living if you do it right. Companies have bigger budgets to hire you than individuals.

Say you make $60,000 a year right now. To replace that income as a freelancer, you’d need 5 clients at a $1,000/month retainer, or you could piece together that living by finding a way to write 20 articles per month as $250.

Not only are these numbers doable, but you can charge much much higher rates than that if you have the skills and sales knowhow. Copywriting specifically, words that sell, is one of if not the most lucrative form of writing you can learn, with some copywriters making seven or eight figures.

The bottom line. The skill of writing sells. First, you develop the skill. Second, you create a portfolio displaying the skill. Last, you either go out and find or attract traffic to get clients.

Pros of Freelancing

• Freelancing is as straightforward as it gets. You can start a freelancing career with zero audience by creating a portfolio and pitching potential clients. It has the best of both worlds — a straight line to cash without having to write as much or build a large audience like you’d have to do with a strategy like writing on Medium.
• As you increase your writing skills and your confidence and ability to sell, you can raise your rates and increase your cash flow just like that.
• If you have a savvy business owner’s mindset, you can not only become a freelancer but teach your skills to others and create a business by having them do the writing while you take a portion of the profits because you know how to get the clients. You can eventually go from a solo freelancer to owning an agency, which can help you scale your income.

Cons to Freelancing

• You’ll inevitably run into bad clients. Pro tip: avoid cheap clients who aggressively negotiate and nickel and dime you from the start.
• You will always be chasing invoices to get paid. The accountant at the agency I worked for was constantly on the phone trying to get people to pay their past due balances.
• As a solo freelancer, there is a cap on how much money you can make because you’re trading your money for time.

Resources on Becoming a Freelancer

• Make a living writing
• Freelance to win
• How I Earn A Full-Time Living As A Part-Time Freelance Blogger

The Bottom Line on Making Money Writing

The bottom line here?

You have no excuses.

All of these strategies to figure out how to make money writing work. They’ve all been successfully done to the tune of six, seven, even eight-figures.

My advice? Choose one to work on as your primary strategy until you replace your income with it. Then, build your second, third, fourth, etc to create safety and hedge against having all your eggs in one basket.

Don’t try to do them all at once.

There are so many ways to not just make money writing, but make money online period, that you can suffer from ‘analysis paralysis’ or experience fear of missing out because you just don’t have enough time to execute them all at once.

Guess what, though?

If you wear yourself thin trying to do them all at once, you’ll surely make less money than you would have if you just chose a path and stuck to it. Not only that, but you’ll probably burn out.

Give yourself time. My blogging mentor told me it would take 4-6 years to make a full-time living blogging. I listened to him, put my heard work, worked hard, and it took just about that long.

It will probably take you that long, too.

But a half-decade is nothing if it gives you the chance to spend the rest of your life making a living doing what you love.

Did you know there’s a website called Medium.com you can use to make a full-time living writing, no strings attached? Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.

It’s crazy.

We all have the same 26 letters available to us. This finite number of letters can be spun into an infinite number of words, sentences, concepts, stories, essays, books, careers.

All great writers have one variable in common, no matter how disparate the way they use those letters. They have habits that work for them.

This list of habits isn’t exhaustive. Nor do you have to use all of them. Find some that work for you.

My goal is simply to get you to write more and write your best stuff so the world can see it. Your career is on the other side of finding and implementing the right habits.

That’s it.

Become An Idea Mchine

“The way to have good ideas is to get close to killing yourself. It’s like weightlifting. When you lift slightly more than you can handle, you get stronger.” – James Altucher

I give my creativity sensei James Altucher credit for this technique because it’s his technique, not mine. But I’ve been writing 10 ideas for new articles each day for the past five years.

It taught me this valuable lesson.

If you’re a writer, coming up with great ideas is your job. Notice I said “coming up with” and not “waiting for.” If you wait for great ideas to come to you, you’ll wait for your whole life and never have a writing career.

Quit putting yourself under pressure to have good ideas, just focus on the act of coming up with ideas, period. When you write down 10 ideas for articles or concepts to write about, 8 or 9 of them will suck. But you’ll get one or two good ideas.

Come up with ideas constantly and you’ll come across a few great ideas. You just need a few great ideas to build a writing career.

This takes time. People ask me how I come up with headlines. My little trick? I’ve written 15,000 of them or more. There’s your secret. I know you believe in this magical path where you somehow become an amazing writer without practicing, but you know it doesn’t exist.

Less idealism. More pragmatism. Remove the mystique behind coming up with great ideas and get them through grunt work instead.

Take the Next Step After “Practicing”

“Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. And Ship constantly.” — Seth Godin

Writing alone doesn’t make you a better writer. Publishing your work makes you a better writer. Putting your work out there to face scrutiny makes you a better writer. Letting the marketplace judge your work makes you a better writer.

I’ve had this conversation with many writers. We’ll be talking shop and they’ll tell me how they have this giant archive of unpublished drafts of their work. Why? What good is your writing if no one ever sees it?

How are you going to have a writing career without publicly displaying your work? You won’t. And you know that, but again, aspiring writers seem to have these weird little mind-viruses — warped illogical beliefs that can’t possibly be true. One of them is the idea that endlessly creating drafts without sharing them is helpful.

It’s not. It’s counterproductive and harms your self-esteem because hesitation causes more hesitation. You think that if you just keep hesitating it’ll make you feel better about pulling the trigger. It never will. It just creates more anxiety.

Put your work out there. In the beginning, no one will even care anyway. Over time, you will one hundred percent get haters.

But guess what? Fuck them.

Are you really going to throw away your dream over the opinions of other people? Hope not.

Get Out of Your Own Head and Into the Heads of Others

“You can write for an audience or you can write for yourself. You can’t do both” – Josh Spector

Good writers at least think about their readers even if they don’t write exclusively for them. Thinking about your readers doesn’t equal dumbing down your work. That’s the major cop-out excuse I hear over and over.

Writers who don’t get the readership they want and blame it on the readers.

“They don’t get it.”

No, you don’t get it.

It’s frustrating to watch. I see so, so, so many writers who are just vain. They can’t see outside of themselves or their writing at all. The same happens in business — people think they should have a successful business just because they started one and people should buy their products just because they created them.

A helpful question to always ask yourself – Would you want to read your own writing if you weren’t you?

Do you want to read someone else’s random story about their trip to Kansas?

Do you want to hear someone else’s “musings” about their relationship with their parents without any context that shows you a window into your own life?

Oh, no?

Then why would you expect other people to read your work for no reason?

This is the number one problem I see with aspiring writers. Like, all of them. Even if you write about yourself, your writing isn’t about you or for you alone. It has to be about and for other people, too.

Don’t Overcomplicate This, Please

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” – Attributed to like 97 different writers. Still a good quote

No need for an elaborate strategy to build good writing habits.

Keep it simple:

• Write around the same time
• Choose a length of time that works for you and that you’ll stick with
• Maybe write at the same place each day too

That’s all you need to do.

Do it for years, while publishing your work, and you’ll have a writing career.

On the one hand, there is such a thing as forcing the issue. Writing constantly just to write can lead to bad writing. Part of becoming a better writer is living an interesting life. Some day you should go out and get the right experiences before putting words on the page. Solid argument.

On the other hand, most writers don’t write enough, period. And going on a grand adventure probably won’t solve their inability to sit down and put words on the page.

Guess what? You can live an interesting life and practice your writing at the same time. If you write for a half-hour each day, you have 15 and a half other hours in the day to focus on being more interesting.

This stuff isn’t complicated. This goes back to the hesitation idea. Hesitating to get your writing routine started won’t help you get your writing routine started. Start.

There Are Two Ways to Practice: Only One is Right

“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” Vince Lombardi

When you do start to practice, focus on iterative practice, meaning you’re actively trying to tweak a specific part of your writing style or trying to implement a certain technique.

You can do this intuitively, I do, but avoid ineffective practice where you just sit down and ramble whatever you want onto the page over and over and over again.

How do you know which techniques to work on?

You can study proven methods and take advice from pieces like this.

You can read the work of other writers and try to reverse engineer their methods or emulate parts of their voice in your own work.

Careful with this one, but you can ask peers for feedback on your work and try to implement it into your own writing

Practice this way, without quitting, and you get much better. You find your voice. After you copy, steal, and swipe styles from a wide array of sources, you become unique.

Fuel Your Words With Words

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King

Ugh.

I don’t want to give this piece of advice, but I’m going to give it. Read this in a condescending tone. You can’t become a better writer without becoming a better reader.

Books give you useful ideas. You get to ‘download’ the life experiences of another human being in a few hours — either fictional or real.

You also get to study the craft of writing itself in its most elite form. Books go through much more rigor than essays or blog posts. You get to see what great writing looks like and this can inspire you to reach the same level yourself, one day.

Books unlock new parts of your brain and help you connect disparate ideas. In any one essay from me, you may find traces of psychology, biology, economics, marketing, human nature, literary inspiration, so it goes. Books are the cheat code to life, period, not just writing.

When I was dead broke with no future, I heard that you could improve your life by reading books. I just gave it a try and it worked. What should you read? As Naval Ravikant says, read the books that make you want to read more.

I hated reading assignments in school because the teacher chose the books for me. As soon as I could choose my own books, I fell in love with reading.

You probably already do read. But make sure to keep the habit consistent. I noticed my writing tends to fall off if I go through long droughts where I’m not reading. It’s like books are protein and supplements and my writing is the exercise itself.

Feed your brain and creative muscles. Use the information and inspiration from books to write your own best work.

Find Inspiration Everywhere

“If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days–listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you’ve taken in, all that you’ve overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)” – Anne Lamott

Life has so much material to provide — from the banal to the hard to believe to the joyous to the tragic. I’ve taken so many moments from my life and put them into my writing.

Random moments like the time I saw a BMW in a parking lot and used it to write an essay about the miserable corporate worker with “golden handcuffs.” Moments I’ll never forget like my dad getting kicked out of our home with all his belongings on our front lawn. Observations I make in the coffee shop when I’m people watching. Conversations I have with friends.

I’m always looking for new material, everywhere, in every single moment. Life is interesting. Even boring lives are interesting.

Being a human being is pretty insane if you ask me — sentient apes floating on a rock with just the right conditions to sustain life in the middle of an infinite abyss who pay taxes, fall in love, build pyramids, and take pictures of their butt on Instagram.

Tap into the wonderful awesome craziness that is being alive. If you actively build the habit of trying to take your observations and putting them on the page, you’ll never ever run out of material.

Your story is interesting, but you have to portray your story in the right way.

All these habits, at their core, deal with the fact that we’re mostly the same. Writers have the same problems and the solutions are similar. People have the same problems, the solutions are similar, the stories and myths we share have pre-defined arcs, and human nature is unchanging.

The ultimate habit is focus.

Just focus on your writing and use your writing to focus on the essence of what it is to be a human being. Paint that essence, with context, to the subject or niche you choose to write about, and you’ll be a good writer.

Did you know there’s a website called Medium.com you can use to make a full-time living writing, no strings attached? Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.

Breaking news: making a full-time living as a writer isn’t easy.

You know that, but do you?

Do you act like you know how hard it is?

I’ve spent the past five years learning how to become a better writer and make a living from it. I’m glad it took that long because I appreciate all the lessons I had to learn along the way. That’s the thing. Success without the work doesn’t even feel good.

You think you’d want fast success but you wouldn’t appreciate it even if you got it. You think the frustration that comes with building a writing career is something you’d want to avoid, but the struggles are the reward. Cliche? Sure. True? Hell yeah.

Now? After spending so much time trying to figure out how to become a successful writer myself, I’m focusing more on teaching and sharing lessons.

Here are some of the most crucial ones I’ve learned over the years.

The One Trait You Need to Be a Successful Writer

I love playing basketball. When I was in college I’d go to the gym and play every single day. There was just one problem. I wasn’t very good.

I’m 5 foot 10, which is small even for a point guard. I have bad hand-eye coordination and can’t shoot. I could practice 10 hours per day and I’d become mediocre at best. Wouldn’t even make a high school varsity team.

Talent matters. I hate when people who give writing advice pretend like it doesn’t. Even when my skills were raw, I intuitively understood how to write an essay pretty much instantly. That being said, no matter how much I practice I might never hit the New York Times Best Seller list or become a legendary writer.

What’s the lesson here? Be honest with yourself about whether or not you have the aptitude to do this.

I don’t think everyone should become a writer. And I think there are levels to writing success. I’m okay being “just a blogger” and I’ll never write a novel. I’m good with that. And I’m mainly saying this to discourage non-talented writers who get into the game to make money. Odds are, you have enough talent, but that doesn’t mean talent doesn’t matter. Get it?

Focus on becoming the best possible writer you can be. The great news? You don’t have to be a legend to make a living with your words. You can be pretty good. Hell, you can even be not so good as long as your words hit an emotional nerve, e.g., E.L. James, but still, I’d argue writing ‘good bad writing’ is a skill.

I just hate to see people spinning their wheels yet I see it all the time. Either the writers have the talent and don’t do the work or they’re the equivalent of first-round American idol contestants who can’t hear their own voice.

I’m not saying this to be discouraging. It’s just the truth.

Max out your talent with the understanding that maxing out your talent might not guarantee that you’ll become the world’s greatest author or a mega-influencer blogger.

If you think you have a shoot to be good, to be great, then do it. Stop bitching and put in the work. Show us.

The One Variable That Guarantees Success for Diligent Writers

I love giving this piece of advice to aspiring writers.

Find a writer you look up to who has a blog and go through their archives.

First, notice how long they’ve spent writing, period. Most archives of the writers you look up to will be five to 10 years deep. Next, bounce back and forth between reading their older and newer articles to spot the difference in quality.

If you practice writing long enough to compare your current self to your former self, do that, too. I look back at my first few blog posts and I can’t believe I wrote them. Another human being seemed to have stolen my identity and used to blog because that wasn’t me (read one here to see for yourself).

I wish I could give you a time machine and show you what your future self would look like. Not just the quality of your writing, but the attitude and confidence you’ll have after putting a few years of work under your belt.

You realize that if you make it past a certain length of time, your odds of quitting drop to essentially zero. I didn’t start to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of making a living writing until three to four years in, but I knew I’d never quit after about two years.

Why would I? I had done so much by then and, at worst, I could always write as a hobby without ever making it big.

You’ll get traction. And then you’ll have an audience who would miss you if you decided to quit. Make a little bit of money and that’s the icing on the cake. From there, you build a career.

Focus on the Intersection to Find (Commercial) Success

You don’t have to write for an audience.

You know that right?

Nobody is putting a gun to your head telling you to publish your work online or try to make a living from it. You can just keep a journal. If you want to write whatever you’d like, you can. But if you want to be a commercially successful writer, you have to find the intersection between what you want to write and what people want to read.

This doesn’t mean you have to write self-improvement listicles at all. People want to read Murakami, Cheryl Strayed, Robert Green, and Sylvia Plath, writers who are above my paygrade to even judge. Still, people want to read them. Most aspiring writers make the mistake of thinking they’re cultured and niche when really their writing just sucks.

You don’t have to sell out to make a living writing. You have to not suck and you have to write something other people are interested in reading. Most writers don’t do that and complain when readers don’t “get it.’

It’s not their job to get it.

It’s your job to articulate your thoughts and stories properly. For myself and many others, the blogging route makes the most sense to achieve this goal.

I used to knock  MFAs, but they are worthwhile and you can be a successful literary writer. I just noticed many literary writers were pretentious and didn’t write all that much, so I was turned off to the idea. Now? I realize pretentiousness, lack of writing often, and lack of trying to understand an audience’s needs is a problem that plagues all forms and genres of writing.

Yes, perhaps you are misunderstood and the universe just needs time to catch up to your bold style chalked with foresight. Or maybe the market just doesn’t want what you have to offer.

Success in writing is like success in any other marketplace. You have to meet the demand of consumers and, yes, get lucky.

Like misguided business owners, writers think they can put out any product and people should buy it just because they created it.

Iterate until you find an audience, or don’t. Your choice.

Luck Plays a Role in Your Writing Success

I was in the right place at the right time, many times. My whole writing career started by chance when a friend asked me to write articles for his website.

I discovered the website Thought Catalog because I randomly saw an acquaintance post about it on her Facebook profile. What are the odds? I submitted my articles to the site and landed on an editor who really liked my work and decided to mentor me for 18 months. Had my piece landed in the inbox of a different editor, this might not have happened.

I learned about Medium when I randomly saw someone Tweeting about it. I joined the site at the perfect time — new enough not to be crowded, but not so new it had few users.

I’ve had articles go viral, randomly. I’ve seen writers go viral early and build entire careers from it. Sometimes, I see writers who I think I’m better than getting better results than me.

What’s the lesson here?

You have to put yourself in a position to get lucky if you want to have a successful writing career. Each time you put your work out there, you’re placing a bet on your career. Train yourself to look for opportunities. Platforms come and go, but understand that the written word is never going to go away. You have the rest of your life to figure out how to become a writer and the odds that the profession of writing will continue to exist is 100 percent.

Sometimes luck will go your way and sometimes it won’t. Write anyway.

All Successful Writers Have One Variable in Common

Do you like writing?

Is writing fun for you?

If not, why do it?

Writing can be frustrating. The words don’t come out the way you want them to, sometimes you feel like you’re never going to be good enough, and the idea of turning your writing into a career seems super distant. Still, you have to like writing and it has to be fun for you, or else you’ll quit.

I don’t know why writing for a living has become this sexy get rich quick scheme. It’s not a great way to make money compared to all the other options, but it’s the perfect way to make money if you really want to make money writing. Not because you want the money, but because you want to do what you love and get paid for it at the same time.

I feel like most writers who become successful feel like they were put on this planet to write. Designed for it. If you don’t feel this way, maybe you shouldn’t become a writer. But if you do, and I’m guessing you do, you have to ride that belief, hard, until you get this to work.

If you feel like you’re designed to write, but you end up not writing, you’ll regret it forever. If you honor the way you’re wired and keep writing forever, you’ll be happy, regardless of how successful you become.

I could make more money doing something else, but then I wouldn’t be having any fun.

To make a serious go at becoming a writer, stop taking yourself so seriously the whole time. Work hard, but never forget the reason you started in the first place.

You have a message you want to share, right?

Then share it. Shouldn’t matter if you have an audience of 10 or 10 million if you mean what you write, right?

Of course, you want the fans. We all do. And you’ll get them if you have fun and practice with seriousness and playfulness at the same time.

Did you know there’s a website called Medium.com you can use to make a full-time living writing, no strings attached? Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.

With the rise in popularity of the website, more bloggers want to learn how to make money on Medium.

But just like any other online making money scheme du jour, most people flock to a platform or idea hoping to make a bunch of short-term money.

When they don’t make a killing right away, they quit.

If you want to learn how to make money on Medium you have to be different. You have to take the time to not only understand how the platform works but take the steps to become much a better writer in the process, period.

If you can do both, you stand a chance. If not, you’re toast.

Now that we have the caveat out of the way, let’s dive a little bit deeper into how you can start earning an income with your Medium writing.

How I Started Making Money on Medium

I joined Medium in November of 2015. Back then the Medium Partner Program didn’t exist. For the uninitiated, MPP is the program that allows writers to make money on the website. Members pay $5/mo for access to exclusive content and writers make money based on engagement from members. Simple.

When I first started on Medium, the number of writers paled in comparison to the number of writers on the platform. By all objective metrics, competition is higher on Medium now. No one can debate that.

My story is equal parts work and hard luck. What you’ll come to find in life is the fact that success in any arena is usually a mixture of both. And the important takeaways from my story involve the attitude I had throughout the process.

The first post I published on Medium essentially got zero views. So what did I do? Like most writers on the platform today, I concluded: “Medium wasn’t worth it.” I quickly snapped out of that attitude though and gave Medium a try again shortly after.

I tried to submit one of my stories to a publication, sort of a mini-online-magazine within Medium, and the editor rejected my submission. So, after going through the guidelines of the publication more carefully, I submitted a new article, which got accepted.

From late 2015 to fall of 2017 I grew my Medium following from zero to roughly 10,000 followers by doing a few things:

• Writing and publishing 3-5 times per week
• Adding all my new posts to publications
• Never taking a sustained break

That last point is key. Most writers burn themselves out on Medium, even experienced ones, even ones with results. My main key to success? I just never stopped writing. I never got tired of writing one bit.

Mark Manson talks about the type of attitude you need to make money writing:

There are only two valid reasons to start a blog. Either a) you have some other business and blogging would be a nice way to help promote it. Or b) you just really, really, really enjoy blogging. Outside of those two reasons, there’s no legitimate reason to start one.

You have to write for joy. Because you like doing it. And you have to write a lot.

My favorite hobby is creeping on Medium Facebook groups and watching writers complain about how they’re not making money.

I spent two years on Medium without making a dime. Prior to that, I wrote for a year on other websites, without making a dime.

And, yes, I early adopted on Medium, but focus on the attitude behind it. I was willing to try something new with no proof of success.

Would you have done that?

People who gripe about Medium being late stage are like people who get FOMO about bitcoin but never would’ve bought it in the early stages. And just like investments, even though Medium has a higher “stock price,” it’s not done growing. Some will invest now and some will complain about it being too late on Medium.

Which one will you be?

The Number One Thing You Must Understand When it Comes to Learning How to Make Money on Medium

If you’re a brand new writer, I have good news and bad news.

Bad news first, you’re not good at writing.

Good news, you can practice in public without embarrassing yourself all that much because no one is going to read your stuff anyway.

When the Partner Program rolled around in 2017, I already had three years of writing experience. I took courses on blogging, had a few books out by then, and published tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of words. Right place, right time, sure, but I guarantee a brand new writer could’ve been in my exact same position and not made that much money

Give yourself time to get this making money on Medium thing to work.

I didn’t use some scientific method to come up with this, but here are some good benchmarks for success on Medium:

• Give it a solid year – I know writers who weren’t making much to start who hit major growth after a year.
• Publish 2-5 articles per week – I’ll straight up tell you Medium incentivizes prolific writing. For better or worse, that’s how the game works.
• Put your work in publications – Every experienced Medium writer will tell you to do this, me telling you is redundant, yet to this day I observe a large number of writers who don’t heed this advice.

While you’re checking off those three boxes, adopt this attitude.

You are lucky to have Medium, at all. Medium isn’t a charity. Also, it’s the best blogging platform out there. For all its detractors, no one seems to be able to identify a better alternative.

Trust me, I do SEO, kindle publishing, online courses, coaching. Good luck getting those to work if Medium is too hard for you.

Reduce your sense of entitlement. You live in the best possible time to be a writer in, ever.

Relax, friend.

You might not get rich writing, ever, but if you do things right, you get to make pocket change and learn how to write at the same time. Eventually, you can make a living writing by, yes, becoming an anomaly on Medium. 

You must become an anomaly to make a living writing on Medium.

But…you have to become an anomaly to make a living writing, period.

So, how do you become this anomaly?

There are only two steps you need to take.

Two Simple Steps to Online Writing Success

I first started writing on a website called Thought Catalog. TC had featured columnists and I quickly became interested in two writers — Brianna Wiest and Ryan Holiday.

Both are top writers on Medium today and both are just flat out some of the top writers in the world, period.

I remember thinking to myself, “Damn, how are they so good? How can I ever get close to being that good?” I’d read through Ryan’s advice and he actively tried to discourage people from becoming writers. I loved that. He talked about how much work it took, how he wrote for five years without making a dime before he got his book deal, and how you shouldn’t write if you don’t love it. I studied his ethos and studied his techniques.

With Brianna, I loved how she wrote about self-improvement without being pretentious about it. She was always clever with headlines and could make a listicle seem meaningful. I dove into her archives and saw she’d been writing for years and years and years. I studied her ethos and studied her techniques.

Noticing a theme here?

Study ethos.

Study techniques.

If I openly tell you over and over again that it took me five years to go from beginner to full-time, that I wrote for 19 months straight on the Medium Partner Program before hitting it big, and that I ruthlessly practiced persuasive writing techniques, take that ethos to heart. I’m not hiding anything from you. This is hard.

If you want to write like me, you shouldn’t directly ask me how to become a better writer, ever. Don’t ask to pick my brain, ever. It’s just not a great use of your time. What can I tell you in an email?

For one, I have dozens of free blog posts on the subject, free courses, paid courses, everything. Two, you’re much better off observing me.

I never asked Ryan or Brianna for a single piece of writing advice, yet they felt like mentors to me because I was watching their moves carefully.

Notice I haven’t given you a ton of practical writing advice in this piece (you can find some here, here, and here though).

Why?

Because the techniques themselves don’t matter as much as having a proactive attitude about your writing career. You’re here because you want to learn how to make money on Medium and that’s great.

But embrace the attitude behind the way I learned to do it. When I got on the website, I wrote my ass off and also looked at what other successful writers were doing and tried to reverse engineer their work.

Aspiring writers tend to have this mind virus, just very low self-awareness combined with very little proactivity.

You have all the resources in the world to help you figure this out. Use them.

Want to Make Money on Medium? Stop Looking For The Easy Route

Sometimes I feel like I’m too hard on aspiring writers.

I get it. You’re looking for answers. You want to get your writing career off the ground. And you want it to happen now.

If you want to accomplish your goals as a writer, you need to work really hard. Not even hard, you just need to repetitively perform the act of writing while iterating along the way. Working at a coal mine is hard, writing just takes time.

I use such a blunt message because I feel like I need to. I feel like too many aspiring writers just don’t get it.

You realize what your dream is, right?

While the vast majority of people on the planet earth work at jobs they hate or tolerate, aren’t entrepreneurs, don’t have creative careers, and never get any traction with their dreams whatsoever…

…you want to become a superstar blogger.

Think about that for a second.

You want to blog for a living. That’s kind of crazy. You know that, right?

The difference between me and you? I knew that my dreams were crazy and I knew crazy dreams required crazy work. You can definitely figure out how to make money on Medium if you’re a little insane.

Get your crazy ass in front of the page right now.

When you Google the “best blogging platform” you get all of these results that have lists of multiple platforms. This is totally unnecessary.

Why? Because there is one blogging platform that stands out above and beyond the rest. It’s the best blogging platform of all time and it’s not all that close.

To this day, I can’t believe one hundred percent of bloggers aren’t using this platform. It’s almost like an open secret.

So what is this platform?

Medium.com: The Best Blogging Platform of All Time

Did you know there’s a website called Medium.com you can use to make a full-time living writing, no strings attached? Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.

Medium.com was founded by Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter. Since it’s creation in 2013, Medium has cracked the top 100 most trafficked websites on planet earth according to Alexa rankings.

WordPress.com ranks higher, but it doesn’t have the same self-contained nature and benefits that Medium has.

The question is, what is Medium exactly? For the uninitiated, and even those of you who are familiar with Medium a bit, let me explain how the platform works and how powerful it can be for bloggers.

Medium is a social media website and a blogging platform at the same time. It combines the best of both worlds. Anyone who wants to start a profile on Medium and start blogging can do so. The beauty of it? You can go from a totally unknown writer to having your own fan base of thousands.

On Medium, you’ll see articles from indie writers, award-winning journalists, even presidential candidates. Even Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, chose to publish an article on Medium because he knew it would have the greatest reach.

Medium creates as close to a meritocracy as you can get and it has built-in traffic with millions of monthly readers searching for articles that pique their interests.

Compare this with other platforms:

• WordPress – WordPress is great and I do think every blogger should have their own home base to store their work. I keep all of my articles on my WordPress blog and republish them to Medium. If you want to be successful with a WordPress blog, you need to have the patience to complete complex strategies like SEO and e-mail list building. My Medium blog has 20x the traffic of my WordPress blog.
• Blogger – In short, blogger is antiquated. It doesn’t touch Medium in terms of having relevant and easy-to-find content. When was the last time you personally found yourself on a blogger blog? Exactly.
• All other blogging platforms – Most of these platforms come with limitations, restrictions, and guidelines that hamper your ability to reach a wider audience. That, plus they don’t have features like Medium to expose you to a new audience easily.

From a pure audience standpoint, Medium is better than all other blogging platform choices, but I didn’t even get to the best part yet.

Make a full-time living writing, no strings attached. Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.

The Medium Partner Program: The Cheat Code That Sets Medium Apart From All Other Blogging Platforms

A few years back, if you wanted to build a writing career through a blog you usually took the following steps.

• Set up your own blog – You still need a blog today because you don’t want to build your platform solely on rented land, but as you’ll see shortly, it’s not going to be the main channel for your writing.
• Write (a bunch) of guest posts to get subscribers – From pitching the idea, to writing the draft of the post, and going through revisions, one solid guest post on a top-tier website can take 20 hours or more. I know from experience (check out this 10,000-word tome I wrote for a top blogging website).
• Monetize your platform…somehow

The last part is the trickiest.

If you thought getting subscribers was the hard part, wait until you need to try to turn that audience into paying customers.

It’s as hard as it looks.

This is where most people quit. They just want to write. They don’t want to have to create a premium online course, or write a book a month, or freelance, or become a coach.

The old method only worked for the most dedicated bloggers out there.

Now, there’s a better way.

You can get paid to write and build your platform. Straight up. No middleman. No excuses.

The Medium Partner Program allows you to get paid for your writing, directly, by getting engagement on your posts by Medium members.

Medium members pay $5/month to get access to premium content.

As a writer, you can “lock” your posts and make them eligible for earning money.

Before you can earn some decent coin, you have to build up a bit of a following.

I talk in-depth about how to do that here.

And here.

After you’ve been on the platform, published good work, and have a bit of a following, you can start to make money directly.

You get paid once per month through the program, which means you can become a professional paid writer in 30 days or less. 

If you write good posts and take the aforementioned steps, you’ll instantly join a select group of people online — writers that actually make money.

First, you might make nothing more than a few bucks.

But that turns a switch on in your brain. The minute you realize you can receive compensation for your writing, you can use the smallest amount of earnings as momentum.

You can move forward to making a hundred bucks a month, a few hundred bucks a month, and you can even crack $1k in a few month’s time if you put your head down and work.

The more you focus on writing great pieces on the platform, the more chances you get to “hit the jackpot” with one of your posts.

The $1,000 Blog Post and Medium’s Viral Potential

I was hesitant to show this and I don’t want to come off like I’m bragging, but I want to show you the viral potential the platform has.

I made $1,000 from one blog post on Medium:

I’ve had single posts that made a few hundred bucks:

I’ve hit #1 on the whole website:

I’ve also had posts that didn’t do well:

But I put the same energy and attempt to create the best quality posts each time.

Some posts don’t move the needle, but the ones that do really move it.

Medium has an algorithm that promotes posts based on readers’ interests (which is why it’s important to choose the right ‘tags’).

They also have a team of editors and curators who look for quality writing to put it in “featured” sections on the website.

The best part? They just look for great articles. It’s not just about your follower count.

I’ve seen writers with little to no following write amazing articles that get promoted and do very well on the platform.

For the first time ever, there is a platform paying writers straight up for quality work.

For some reason, it’s still not incentive enough for most to get off their butt and start working.

Why?

Do You Suffer From “Special Snowflake Syndrome”?

As humans, we all twist reality to fit into our own narrative.

Creative people are especially known for this.

The funny thing about it all?

Those courses, programs, training, seminars, blog posts, podcasts, etc, that teach you how to make a living, build a platform and create your own path in life — the advice works.

But most people don’t follow through with them because they have special snowflake syndrome.

People suffering from this ailment take perfectly good advice and say, “Sure, that worked for you, but you don’t understand, I’m an [insert excuse based on identity or circumstance].”

I hate to burst your bubble, but I’ve seen writers on Medium succeed in unique ways.

If you’re not doing well with your writing right now, it’s for one of two reasons:

• You’re just not cut out for it (rare)
• You don’t write enough (likely)

I always give aspiring writers the same benchmarks for complaining. You can complain about your lack of success if you:

• Have written 100 blog posts
• Have been writing for 24 months
• Tried to improve during that time frame

The last point is important.

Writing doesn’t necessarily equal practicing. I’ve seen writers who lament about their progress — claiming they’ve practiced — when what they’ve really done is repeatedly exercised their naval-gazing skills.

Let me explain…

The Only Rule You Need to Follow to Become a Good Writer

I can guess with 99.99% accuracy what ails an aspiring writer who gets no traction.

What’s your guess?

Here it is…

Nearly every struggling writer makes their writing all about themselves.

You can spot that type of writing when you see it. And nobody wants to read it.

I usually get push back when I say this.

“What about memoirs?”

Take a book like Eat, Pray, Love. Do you think people loved the book because they’re interested in Elizabeth Gilbert’s life? No, they loved the book because she wrote her life story in a way that allowed readers to see themselves in it.

There is a huge Grand-Canyon-like-difference in writing a relatable story that connects with readers and the ramblings of what appears to be a personal journal.

A telltale sign you’re making it all about yourself — you think people want to “follow your journey.”

Trust me. They don’t.

They want the words you put on the page to do something for them. Period.

If you catch yourself mostly thinking about yourself while you write, you’re on the wrong track. Any format or genre works, as long as you find a way to make it about the person on the other side of the screen in some way, shape, or form.

How to Write Blog Posts People Love

There are no hard and fast rules for writing successful blog posts, especially in places with diverse voices like Medium.

There are some common traits I’ve seen work:

• Be yourself – Don’t be fake vulnerable or fake guru or fake anything. Talk about the world from your perspective
• Headline – Your headlines don’t have to be “How-to” format, just communicate potential benefits with your headline
• A quick test – Genuinely ask yourself if anybody besides you would be interested in reading your post
• You/I ratio – It’s good to have an even balance of the world “you” or “I” in your writing
• Tell stories – Learn the basic story arc/hero’s journey and use it to add flavor to your writing
• Topics – You have to be a student of the zeitgeist. Talk about what’s going on in the world right now
• Don’t bite your tongue – As Nassim Taleb said “If you see fraud and don’t say fraud. You are a fraud”
• Steal – See what’s working for other writers and steal their techniques. Not their actual words — that’s plagiarism — but their post structure, style, imagery, promotion techniques, etc
• Make pretty posts — Take full advantage of Medium’s user interface and make your posts sparkle
• Write (a lot) – If you write a new blog post 3x per week for a year you’ll have a real writing career

The Proper Way to Think About Medium

I’ve spent this entire post raving about how Medium is the best blogging platform on planet earth, but even on the most powerful platform out there, only a handful of writers do really really well.

Only 8-10% of writers make more than $100 on Medium.

I’d guess that less than five percent make $1,000 per month or more.

I can’t put an exact number on it, but I’d guess less than one percent of Medium writers make the level of income that I do, which has been above $10k for about a year straight.

But guess what?

Those numbers, those odds, are vastly better than other methods of trying to make a living blogging.

Trust me. I’ve tried damn near all of them — kindle publishing, affiliate marketing, coaching, creating courses. And then you have the marketing you need to pull it all off — SEO, e-mail lists, guest posting, social media promotion.

Which is more likely to lead to success? Going all-in on Medium or trying to become a true blogging expert?

I’ve observed many an aspiring writer complain about Medium, writers who’ve only known Medium and nothing else. Shit, if they think Medium is hard then they’d have no chance at the alternative route.

The way to frame your opinion of Medium: even if it’s still difficult, you have no better alternative. Trust me. At least with Medium, you can make your way to a full-time living by almost solely just writing. If you can’t focus on writing your ass off, how would you be any good at the alternatives? You wouldn’t.

Not that this needs to be said, but it kind of does, becoming a full-time blogger is hard, period. Doing something few people do in this life, in any area, is hard, period.

If you think you have what it takes and can do the work, upwards of years, to succeed, Medium is the platform for you.

You Can Become a Professional Writer

I started writing four years ago. I had no intention of becoming a professional writer at first. I just wanted to write.

I wrote for years without making a dime because…I loved it! 

Now, my hard work has paid off.

It wouldn’t have worked, however, had I got started for the wrong reasons.

Look, if you want to do this writing thing. Do it.

Don’t half do it. Don’t do-it-for-a-little-while-get-a-tummy-ache-then-quit.

The only reason I have more followers, subscribers, and money than you is because I’ve been writing for a longer period of time with more consistency than you.

That’s it. 

I started at zero — followers, subscribers, dollars, network, all of that.

It’s all there for the taking but you have to do the work.

There is a website paying people to write and for some reason, this is still not motivation enough. I am truly baffled.

If I sound a bit aggressive it’s because I care.

I hate to see wasted potential.

And I write these posts because I know one of you will turn your potential energy into kinetic and build your writing career.

To recap:

• Sign up for a Medium account
• Write your ass off
• Study how the platform works
• Get paid
• Turn pro
• You’re welcome.

Did you know there’s a website called Medium.com you can use to make a full-time living writing, no strings attached? Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.

There’s no shortage of advice on how to become a better writer online.

How do you know which pieces of advice to trust and which ones to ignore?

How do you know if you have the talent it takes to be successful?

Is there a way to see the future and know exactly which steps to take?

No.

But that’s the best part of the process. If you knew exactly how to be successful beforehand, the process wouldn’t be any fun. You think you want the easiest possible path, but you won’t appreciate writing until you struggle to get better at it.

Why trust me? While I’m not an infallible expert at the craft, I’ve had a little bit of success in my writing career. From publishing three books to becoming one of the top writers on Medium, to building an audience of millions per year, I’ve collected useful strategies on how to become a better writer.

Let’s take a look at some of my favorites.

The Two-Sided Debate on How to Become a Better Writer

There are two camps in the debate on the process you should use to learn how to become a better writer. One side says that you should focus on perfecting your craft before you go public with your work.

Ernest Hemingway was known for his masochistic level of editing — sometimes revising the endings of his books dozens of times. Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power and other classic works, will spend years writing a single book and will research hundreds of different books in the process. Some aim to become the next Great American author and write a classic with their first work like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

Others debate that quantity leads to quality. The more you write and publish, the better you are at iterating in real-time by using the feedback from your published work to create better pieces in the future. Some take a similar approach to books like James Altucher who wrote a runaway bestseller, Choose Yourself, after previously writing 16 books that failed.

I prefer the prolific approach for a few reasons:

• The speed of today’s publishing world – Readers have an increasing number of options for what to read. Being prolific helps you stay on your target audience’s radar and keeps your work from being too dated in a fast-paced world.
• Your psychology – Perfectionism can pay off in a big way, but it can also devastate you if your work isn’t as successful as you thought it’d be and cause you to quit.
• Momentum and consistency – With the prolific approach, you set quotas to reach that can keep you motivated. Most aspiring writers lack consistency, which keeps them from building a career. If you have momentum and consistency first, true craftsmanship and timeless work can come from a result of it.

Tim Ferris said that a viral piece of content can change your life forever, which it can. Being prolific gives you more opportunities, bets so to speak, to make that happen.

Follow the Map to Traverse the Terrain

Most aspiring writers fail because while they practice, they don’t take the time to try to understand what works. You can write, and write, and write, but if you’re not paying attention to the results you’re getting, your practice can ultimately lead nowhere.

So what do you do? Become a student of writing success.

Many famous copywriters suggest writing down popular sales letters word for word. Why? Doing this helps you understand the persuasive elements of those letters by putting yourself in the shoes of the writer. When you read work that resonates with you, ask yourself why it resonates.

The process of finding writing heroes and modeling yourself after them helps you build the frameworks you can use to be successful in your own career.

Learn to ‘Steal Like An Artist’. Find many mentors and writing heroes to learn from. Combine their skills, knowledge, and insights with your own unique life experiences and writing voice. All a sudden you have original work.

Understand the concept of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Your predecessors worked hard at their craft, not just for their own sake, but to pay that knowledge forward to future generations.

Why waste unnecessary time trying to figure out what works when someone has already done it for you?

The Only True Shortcut to Writing Success

Speaking of what works. If you want a real shortcut for learning how to become a successful writer, study directly underneath a successful writer.

This is t how I improved my own writing skills. Early in my writing career, I was lucky enough to find a writing mentor in an editor from Thought Catalog I worked with for about a year. He pointed out areas of improvement that I wouldn’t have been able to see on my own.

When I wanted to learn how to write viral articles and get published on top-tier websites, I took a course by blogging expert that showed me how to do just that. I was stuck in the process of trying to write and publish my first book, so I bought a course that walked me through the process step by step. Both courses combined cost $1,200. Without doing the exact math, I can tell you I’ve gained at least a 100x return on those investments and I’m not exaggerating.

Maybe there are charlatans in the online writing coaching game, but I’ve yet to encounter them. Each time I’ve invested money into my writing education, I became a better writer and made more money writing.

What does that mean for you?

If you like my approach and style to writing, consider taking my online course on becoming a successful Medium writer. I never planned on putting together a course, but people kept asking me for writing advice over and over again. If you want to know everything I know, five years’ worth of knowledge, all the information is right there — structured in a way to help you avoid wasted time from trial and error.

That’s the key benefit of online programs and mentoring. Technically, all the information on how to be a successful writer is freely available online. If using it works for you, then do it. But if you’re tired of figuring out exactly what to do and when to do it, put your faith in someone who has walked the path.

Find the Right Tools to Build Your Writing Career

When you’re building skills on your path to learning how to become a better writer, you want to focus on building a “tool belt” of different little writing frameworks you collect over time. Once you have this set of tools, you can “build” in many different ways.

When I first wanted to learn headlines, I’d write dozens of them at a time. When it came to a new skill to add in each individual piece I wrote, I’d focus on mastering one skill at a time.

If I wanted to write great intros, I’d made sure the intro of each new article was amazing and I wouldn’t beat myself up about writing the entire post perfectly. When I learned about power words, words, and phrases that evoke emotions and persuade, I’d go overboard on adding these words, maybe even to the point I oversaturated my posts with them. I’d find a balance over time and all of my posts had the foundational pillar of great introductions.

Once you truly ‘hammer in’ a certain technique, it becomes second nature, which frees up mental space to try a new one. Eventually, you have this intuitive set of skills you can use in everything you write.

These days, I just go. I don’t need to create elaborate outlines or think about exactly what to write in every single sentence of my articles. I weave the persuasive techniques in seamlessly.

Once you have this tool belt available to you, you can focus on honing your voice over time. As your writing becomes more refined, you rely less on the rote use of techniques.

This is why I suggest learning traditional blogging frameworks first then experimenting more later. With the frameworks handy, you get quick wins from the positive attention you get from steadily improving articles. This gives you the confidence to branch out and create a style unique to you.

The Secret to “Finding Your Voice”

Where does your ‘voice’ come from?

How is it that we all have access to the same 26 letters, yet we come up with totally different ways of combining them?

Your voice is a combination of a few sources.

One, you’ll learn that certain techniques really speak to the way you want to write. For me, using direct and terse language just felt right.

Two, writing more often helps you shape your thought process and worldview. Writing forces you to articulate your beliefs. Sometimes you’ll try to form an argument with your writing, find holes in it, and change your mind because of the holes you found. In the end, you build a unique style due to a unique belief system.

Three, the confidence that comes from building writing skills helps you show more of your personality. You see the type of writing that works in your field — you’ll like some of it and want to differentiate yourself from the rest of it.

I mainly write about self-improvement. Over time I noticed I didn’t like the watered down, fluffy, and overly positive form of self-help. This lead to the more blunt, straightforward, brash, and politically incorrect style I like to use now. I’m a wise-ass by nature and injecting sarcastic humor, shit-talking, made writing more fun and helped me connect with like-minded people who appreciate that style.

The moral of the story – Audiences will start to love your writing because they love you. Every topic under the sun has already been covered. The only way to stand out is to use the only unfair advantage you have.

Nobody else can beat you at being you.

Friend, Please Understand This

I wish I could let you look at your future writing. If you could see how scary good you could be if you just practiced, you’d be more motivated to write.

Throughout your career, you’ll look back at your old writing and cringe. If you don’t, you’re doing it wrong. This speaks to a problem people have in life, period. They have commitment consistency bias, meaning they have a hard time changing their mind and forming new beliefs.

Your writing is nothing more than a timestamp of what you believe at the moment. Don’t be scared to write boldly about something you believe in at the time, only to change your mind later. Don’t be afraid to look a little foolish in the short-term to achieve mastery in the long-term.

View the early works of your heroes and compare it to their current work to see the difference.

Embrace shitty writing. Refine your raw talent.

I see so many intermediate writers and I love that time-frame in one’s career. I can see they’re so close to hitting that crescendo. They’re almost there.

And the goal is to always chase that new crescendo. I hope to look at this article a year from now and cringe.

Aim at perfection, fall short, do it again, fall a bit less short, and do it again. Do this your entire life and you’re a real writer.

Want to write on Medium? Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course to become a top Medium writer and make thousands each month.

Want to write on Medium? Get exclusive access to your free five-day email course to become a top Medium writer and make thousands each month.

Did you know there’s a website called Medium.com you can use to make a full-time living writing, no strings attached? Get exclusive writing advice for beginners to your free five-day email course on monetizing Medium.