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.

Why are you making this so hard?

I promise you, if you work on your writing consistently, you will get much better. You don’t need a giant bag of tricks. You need a few simple skills, routines, and practices that you drill over and over again.

If one word describes my writing, it’s simple. I don’t get cute at all. I get to the point.

The point I’m trying to make here?

You’re a few simple disciplined actions away from exploding your writing career. And if you don’t do these things, you’re just getting in your own way and suffering for no reason.

For this post, I’ll be explicit. If you did these three things alone for the next 90 days, you’d see a dramatic increase in your skills.

The Number One Needed Skill that 99 Percent of Writers Avoid

It’s painfully obvious to me that most aspiring writers don’t practice writing headlines. They’re so bad. If you spent 90 days straight writing ten headlines per day, you’d instantly be in the top 5-10 percent of all bloggers on the planet earth. Easily.

My advice? Do exactly that. 10 headlines a day. Takes 10 minutes. I’ve done it daily for five yars. Do it even if your ideas suck — especially if your ideas suck.

Getting good at writing headlines doesn’t just help you come up with more compelling strings of words to get people to click on your articles, but they help you create better articles period.

Why?

• Good headlines make a promise, hence you write a check that your writing has to cash. Writing quality headlines puts pressure on you to create quality content.
• That promise helps you create the content you’re going to write about. Most aspiring writers “don’t know what to write about.” Having a headline ready to go beforehand solves this problem.
• Good headlines keep you in-tune with what people want. In coming up with great headlines, you take the focus off of yourself, which allows you to write in an empathetic way that draws more readers in.

Headlines are the definition of the 80/20 rule when it comes to becoming a top writer.

I promise, if you don’t learn how to write good headlines, you’ll never have a career as a blogger. Never. So do it.

Don’t Build a House Without a Blueprint

If you’re struggling to consistently create quality content, I’m guessing you don’t take the time to plan your articles before you write them.

You just sit down to a blank screen and start writing. I’m laughing right now at that strategy, literally. Of course, you’ll have problems trying to write if you do it that way unless you’re a true natural.

Even though I do have the ability to write articles from scratch using an intuitive process, I draw from an outline and have an idea of what I want to write about before I sit down to write.

Here’s a simple process you can use:

• Mind map – Brainstorm ideas using big bubbles and smaller bubbles for sub-topics
• Outline – Organize those thoughts onto a physical document. A simple essay structure has three main points and three sub-points for each main point, sandwiched between an intro and conclusion
• Extras – You can so fo far as to hunt for quotes you’re going to use in each section to add extra flavor or specific sources you want to cite and link to, as much as you need to to have a crystal clear idea of what you’re going to write about

Ask Yourself This Simple Question

Most aspiring writers suffer from the same exact problem. They can’t see outside of their own work. They’re self-centered.

How do you solve this?

Ask yourself a simple question after you’re done with a draft of your blog post:

Why would anyone, aside from you, want to read this article?

It’s funny. As a reader, you’re very fickle. You won’t tolerate low-quality writing. You wouldn’t take the time out of your day to read something that didn’t educate, entertain, or inspire you.

If you were to read writing similar to what you’re prone to writing, idiosyncratic personal accounts of your life, you wouldn’t want to read it.

Writing is similar to starting a business. Many business owners fall into the same trap. They’re picky and discerning when it comes to buying products, but all of a sudden when they have a product for sale, they expect everyone to buy it for no other reason than the fact they created it.

Are you suffering from the delusion that people should read your writing just because you wrote it? Gotta fix that if you want to be successful.

As best you can, try to use a dispassionate lens and judge your own writing as if you were someone else.

Writing Isn’t That Hard…You’re Making it Hard

It deeply frustrates me to see aspiring writers getting in their own way.

They don’t want to take the simple steps required to get better. They’d rather complain and surround themselves with other unsuccessful writers.

I’ve never once joined a group for writers specifically because most writers are full of shit and don’t want to do the work. Why would I surround myself with people like that?

Get out of those Facebook groups and just write, trust me.

Don’t participate in those promotional pyramid schemes where you all support eachother’s work. Just go and get some real fans who like your stuff.

You’re not disciplined. That’s the problem.

If you simply practiced headlines, outlined articles, published them, and stopped being so self-centered with this “build it and they will come” mentality, you’d be well on your way.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say other than that.

Practice and win or continue to struggle, spin your wheels, complain, and get nowhere.

Your choice.

You’re making this harder than it has to be.

I see so many aspiring writers who just get in their own way. You’re probably one of these writers.

There are simple little writing hacks you can use to get better fast.

But, you have to use them.

You have to listen. 

Honestly, basic blogging techniques are so good and persuasive that you can teach almost anyone how to write the type of content that would build an audience.

But, on top of that, you actually have the desire to be great. Combine that with blogging techniques, and you’d be unstoppable.

The only real thing that’s stopping you? You want to do it your way. You’re Daniel son. You won’t just wax the damn car. Is your way working? Do you have the audience and income you want? No?

Then, listen, grasshopper.

Use these tips, practice them for six months, and I’d be shocked if your audience wasn’t ten times the size it is now.

Use This Deadly Persuasive Combination

If you write the most clickbait headlines possible and combine them with the most in-depth and thoughtful prose possible, you’ll create a weird but positive cognitive dissonance.

People will comment things like:

“You know, I thought this was going to be another one of these fluffy articles, but this was actually good.”

Notice all the psychology going on here:

• People expect to be disappointed by clickbait, but they still click, what does this say? First, sometimes click-bait triggers emotions so deeply they can’t help but click. Second, when a reader clicks your article, they are holding out hope you’ll actually have something useful to say.
• Your content sticks in their mind because of these opposite forces working at once.
• You use clickbait to meet people at their lower and selfish nature, but you help them rise up to their higher nature, which is what they really want.

See, when you say you don’t want to write click-bait, you’re not communicating what you think you are communicating.

You think it’s a sign that you trust your writing, but it’s a sign of the opposite.

If you have powerful words to share, why wouldn’t you package them the best way possible?

You’re scared to make big promises with your headlines because you’re afraid you can’t deliver on them.

Companies with useful products don’t treat their packaging as an afterthought. If good writing was all it took, book covers would be brown with no words on them.

Think, my friend.

Learn how to write killer headlines and write killer prose.

People will love you for it.

Stop Saying Phrases Like This

Remove phrases like:

• I think
• I believe
• In my opinion

We know what you think and believe because you’re the one writing the post.

You don’t want to come across as being unsure of yourself. People want to be led. If you’re the writer, you’re the leader.

You have to get comfortable with making generalizations. Obviously what you say won’t apply to one hundred percent of the people who read your work. If it misses, fine. But if it hits, and it will for most, you’ll be golden.

This doesn’t mean you have to pretend to be infallible.

You just want your words to have more of a backbone.

The more conviction you have behind your words, the more power your words have over your audience.

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Reader

You don’t have to use a bunch of one-sentence paragraphs like I do, but take a look at the spacing of your articles in general.

Can you get away with writing large walls of text? Yes. But are you Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, no? You’re an aspiring writer just trying to get by?

Maybe, just maybe, you should try good ol fashion blogging techniques for a while instead of trying to write the next Cat Person.

Again, not using simple writing hacks like spacing is a telltale sign that you don’t want to be successful. It’s not that you need to use this technique, but from your vantage point, you should be trying everything possible.

The way you space your writing affects how the message comes across to readers. Also, it affects whether or not they actually read your entire article. Most people see a huge wall of text and run.

A few simple rules are:

• Never use more than three sentences in a paragraph
• Use one-line sentences occasionally to make points stand out
• Use bullet points and subheadings to separate ideas

Here’s the way I look at blogging techniques.

First, learn the rules.

Second, break them.

Learning blogging rules helps you not suck at writing. After you no longer suck at writing, you can write any way you want to.

Can you succeed without doing it my way? Yes, but it will be harder and you’ll probably quit before you ever get good enough to be successful.

Your choice!

The Cure For Writing That Nobody Wants to Read

Use the word ‘you’ much more often than you use the word ‘I’

If you went through a draft of your article and simply worked on changing that ratio, your views will skyrocket.

Here’s the reason.

It’s not so much that you’re not allowed to use the word ‘I’ or talk about yourself. It’s that when you do it, you almost always have the wrong energy behind it.

You’re not telling a first-person story because you want the reader to draw something from it. You’re just self-absorbed and want to use your blog as a journal.

This speaks to a deeper truth, the ultimate writing hacks if you will:

Nobody cares about what you have to say.

Nobody is eagerly awaiting your words. The opposite, actually. People have every incentive not to read your writing:

• They don’t know who you are
• There are about 287,392,400 things more fun and easier to do than read a blog post
• Most online writing sucks

Come to writing with the attitude that you have to do everything possible to get attention, and you’ll be successful.

Again, this doesn’t mean pandering.

Learning to use the word ‘you’ helps you understand how to put the right energy behind your writing.

Now that I have practiced this technique so long, I can write an entire story about myself and keep your attention. I doubt I would’ve learned how to do that without first learning the ‘you technique.’

See a theme here?

Study the basics and get as esoteric as you want when you actually know how to write and build an audience.

Focus on the Critical Points

You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule before.

80 percent of the outcome comes from 20 percent of the effort.

This applies to writing online. If you get a few parts of the article wrong, it’ll tank the whole thing. If you master the ability to get really good at what matters, the rest of the content itself won’t matter a ton.

These are things like:

• Headlines – Honestly, just getting these right sets you apart from most writers.
• Intro & conclusion – Start and end with a bang.
• The order of your points – Put your best points and items in your listicles at the top and bottom
• The order of your content – If you’re writing a blog post or essay, make sure to start and finish the points themselves strong.
• Elements of beauty and persuasion– Subheadings, bullet-points, italics — these things can seem like window dressing when they’re actually quite important and persuasive.

One comment I get about my writing a lot?

People say it’s basic.

And it is basic but in a good way.

While other writers try to get cute with their fluffy prose, I can hit people on a deeper emotional level with writing simple sentences.

That’s the key to learning how to write.

Writing isn’t…about…words.

Writing is about the concepts and emotions behind words. Words are just the medium you have to use to get the point across. That’s why I say there’s such a thing as a technically boring yet gifted writer.

Who do you want to impress? Readers or snobby writers?

Honestly, those snobs can keep their little journal awards and sell less than a thousand copies of their books. Have fun MFA grads.

Me? I’ll take making a six-figure income with my words, having millions of readers per year, and fans who can’t wait to read what I put out next.

Which path do you want to follow?

If you’re smart, you know there’s only one correct answer.

Writing a book for the first time is hands down, the best decision you can make as a writer.

Why?

You get this huge monkey off your back. Writing a book for the first time makes you feel like a real writer regardless of how well your book sells.

That’s the thing — books aren’t even close to the best way to make a living writing, so you shouldn’t look at them that way.

Books are a timestamp of your thought processes and worldview at the time you wrote the book. Books are momentos. There’s just nothing that can replace the accomplishment that comes with making the commitment to a long-form piece of knowledge.

I just published my third book.

The funny thing?

When you’re writing a book, you tell yourself you’re never going to write one again because it does take a lot out of you. But as soon as you publish your new book, you want to write another one.

Writing books creates this masochistic joy that I can’t fully explain. You have to experience it for yourself.

That being said, writing a book for the first time is the trickiest of all the writing beasts.

Here’s what you need to know if you want to finish the process successfully.

Your First Book is For the Trash

Ugh. In my opinion, my first book sucks. I can’t even bring myself to read it. Seriously, it makes me cringe.

But even if I write a book that sells a million copies one day, it won’t be a tenth as important as that first cringy book I wrote.

I’ve used this example ad absurdum, but I’m going to use it again because it’s a great example. James Altucher, my favorite blogger, struck gold selling a million copies of his ….17th book.

But you’re waiting until you have the chops to write the Great American Classic.

You’re not going to write it. Ever.

Across the globe, there are a bunch of pretentious MFA grads who are constantly tweaking their perfect manuscript, only to never publish it.

Meanwhile, there are a bunch of writers who decide to get their work out the first, and figure out the details later. The point isn’t to write a shitty book on purpose, but rather to write your first book knowing that it’s just not going to be all that great compared to what you put out years from now.

Writing that first book facilitates better books in the future.

Would I say to write a book right away if you have no experience? No. I’ve seen some writers who weren’t ready that published truly god awful books.

But, if you have a year or two under your belt, for sure go ahead and write that crappy first book.

Speaking of crappy….

Follow the Golden Rule of Writing Books

I wrote an entire guide on writing books that you can find here, but let me pull this most important piece of it and share with you.

Your first book will suck.

And your first draft will…really suck.

You’ve heard the “crappy first draft” cliche, but like I say in much of my self-improvement writing, true improvement comes from embracing cliches.

When you write your first draft, work on it daily until you’re done with it. 7 days per week, non-stop, until it’s done.

Don’t edit while you write, at all. Even leave the typos in there. Do nothing to break your mental flow. Nothing.

Life is a game of momentum. Writing is the ultimate game of momentum. Stops and starts aren’t neutral, they push you even further away from your goals. Each gap and lull you create in your writing career makes it even harder to get back on the horse, so never get off it.

I credit my writing success to the fact that I never stop writing, ever. Even when I don’t feel like writing, I write. Even when I think my ideas suck, I write. Especially when I feel any tinge of perfectionism coming on, I write.

Get your draft done.

When you’re done, you’ll have something to work with. A crappy manuscript is better than no manuscript.

Finish the Race

After you write your first draft, you’ll go through your editing phases:

• Developmental – During this phase, you’ll go through and look at the entire book from a bird’s eye view. You’ll see certain sections that don’t fit, incomplete ideas, and areas that need to be revamped
• Second pass polish – During this phase, you’ll go back and look sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and chapter by chapter to omit all needless words, phrases, and even full paragraphs. You’ll also go back through and add ideas.
• Read aloud – Reading your book outloud will astound you. You’ll hear phrases that sound completely off and your prose will come across better and more conversational after this phase
• Final pre-edit polish – You’ll go through your book one more time to make sure everything is near perfect before sending your manuscript to a real editor
• Professional editing phase – Your editor will show you how much your book still sucks and you’ll go through the entire process all over again. And it’ll be well worth it.

Again here, remember your goal. Your goal is to publish the book. Your goal is to put your words out into the real world where other people aside from you can read them.

Seth Godin has a term for this “shipping.”

Until you ship your work, it doesn’t count. A dusty manuscript in your drawer might as well have never been written. Until you face an audience with your words, you’re not a real writer.

I have to try to put myself in the shoes of someone who won’t publish their stuff because I’ve never had that problem.

Why? To me…it never, ever, ever, ever made any sense to give a damn what random people in the internet thought of my writing.

Sure, sharing my writing with people I actually knew was one thing, but strangers? Don’t care at all. Never did.

Why would you? They’re 1’s and 0’s.

Don’t get me wrong, I deeply care about the opinions of those online in that I want to write prose they love, but I could care less about the negativity.

Put yourself in the mind of a troll or someone who goes out of their way to leave some sort of negative comment or review on your writing. Why would you care what they think? These types of people are losers with nothing better to than troll online.

You’re going to let them get in the way of your dreams?

Hell no. Publish the book, know that the one star reviews will surely come, and get over it.

Create an Upward Spiral of Success

I’ve published three books now.

Three assets that earn me money while I sleep, purchased from people all around the world.

Three solidified pieces of thought I can always look back on and say “I did that.”

I plan to write at least one book per year until I croak. Maybe I’ll hit the New York Times bestseller list when I’m 87. Or maybe never. Doesn’t matter.

I looked at my amazon author profile the other day and saw the covers for all three books.

It doesn’t even feel like I put it all that work, but I did.

If writing a book for the first time is the cake, writing books two, three, four, and beyond puts you in a sugar coma of icing.

It’s not so much that you need to build a giant catalog, but you’ll want to.

That catalog is the accumulation of your effort. It’s the accumulation of pieces of confidence you added to your soul.

Write your first book.

Then write the next one.

And never stop.

That’s my advice.

I hesitate to write articles like these.

Articles about making an income writing, or making an income doing anything else online, are almost always self-serving humble brags.

I make it a point to avoid sharing exactly how much money I make because I know it breeds envy more than it does inspiration.

So why am I doing it now?

One, because I put together a bonus online course on making a living writing that you can gain access to for buying my new book. So, it’s a blatant self-promotion piece in one sense.

Also, though, I want to pass on the type of insights that helped me move forward as a writer. There was a small handful of people who talked about how to make a living writing in the most honest, non-B.S. way possible.

Thanks to those teachers, I’m here today living out the caveat-ridden predictions they made.

This is what I’m going to give you now — educated guess on how you might eventually make a real living as a writer, combined with a ton of caveats and warnings about the cold reality of actually pulling it off.

Ready? Cool.

You want to make a living writing, right?

Right. Let’s break that sentence down.

“Make a living” – Most aspiring writers fail because they refuse to become marketers. If you don’t study marketing, persuasion, and sales, you’ll never become a successful writer.

Why?

Marketing and Persuasion = Lizard Brain Effectiveness

Studying marketing and persuasion teaches you a skill that a writer in any genre needs. You need the ability to get inside people’s heads.

You need to understand:

• Human nature
• What people want deep down, but might not admit they want out loud
• People’s deep-seated fears

If you know those, you’ll know how to craft words people want to read. Any genre. The Alchemist speaks to the  hero’s journey and aspiring to be better. Anna Karenina touches on household and family dynamics. 50 Shades of Grey…you know what that tickles.

Speaking of 50 Shades…why is a book with, frankly, bad prose, so successful?

Because writing isn’t about the words themselves, it’s about the underlying concepts and emotions framed by those words.

Most aspiring writers simply can’t get this through their skulls.

Be different.

You’d honestly be better off reading a bunch of copywriting books and studying the headlines of the national inquirer than you would by getting an MFA – I’m serious.

Marketing helps you understand that you’re writing for an audience, not for yourself.

99 percent of aspiring writers think they should be able to write whatever they want without targeting a specific audience or actively promoting their work whatsoever. Logically, this makes no sense, but writers are emotional creatures. You think of your writing pieces like your children. To be successful, look at them for what they really are — products.

The Most Important Aspect of Making a Living Writing

I’ve said this a few times now, but I feel bad for writers who initially started writing on the Medium Partner Program.

Why?

Because the allure of money is clouding their judgment.

I continue to see them say things like:

• “I’m not getting curated…wah!!!!”
• “I’m not making any real money”
• “Why don’t I have any fans”

I observe these Facebook groups. These “writers” come up with all these reasons why they’re not successful. And they always miss the most obvious reason.

Their writing sucks. Medium is saturated with garbage writing.

By the way, I’m fine with that.

Almost every writer sucks when they start. I’m thankful I had the chance to write a bunch of crappy articles for free without making a dime. By the time the Medium Partner Program came around, I was already a decent writer.

It took about five years to finally look at my writing and consider it good. And five years, deep, I’d still say I’m at about 30 percent of my full capabilities as a writer — haven’t scratched the surface.

Since no one else seems to want to tell you this, I will.

If you want to make a living…writing, learn how to write. Admit, that right now, you don’t know how to write that well. Write poorly until you become mediocre. Go from mediocre to pretty good. Then, you will start to make a little bit of money.

I thought Medium’s saturation was the issue, but then I noticed some writers come to the platform recently who were established outside of Medium and knew how to write well. Guess what? They’re making money.

Now with those two items out of the way, let’s take a deeper look at what the process looks like.

Step 1 – Write 3-5 Articles Per Week for 90 Days

Another thing I’ve observed with “writers” who complain about how they aren’t making a killing on Medium?

They don’t seem to write all that much.

If you’re just starting on Medium, I’d commit to at least 1-2 articles per week at a bare minimum. But if you really want to accelerate your progress, write 3-5 articles per week.

If you block out 1-3 hours per day to focus on writing and publishing your stuff, yes including weekends, you should be able to meet this quota.

Up to 3 hours? Yes, alleged aspiring writer, up to 3 hours. Yes, including weekends, alleged aspiring writer.

What exactly do you think it takes to make a living writing?

Did you really think you’d become an overnight success?

No, you didn’t. But, you use quitting early as a form of self-sabotage because, deep down, you don’t believe in yourself. Writing a half dozen articles and throwing up your hands when you don’t get curated is your way of protecting your ego.

Here’s a useful thought for you – stop wanting to feel good. Just write anyway.

Step 2 – 90 days – 12 Months = Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

First, you want to get the habit down.

Second, if you want to make the leap to become a successful writer, learn how to practice the right way.

What do I mean?

Most people don’t know how to practice.

Writing a blog post doesn’t equal practice. Writing a blog post while trying to implement new techniques equals practice.

Each time I’d stumble across a new writing technique, I’d forcefully try to jam it into new articles. Say I was learning about writing compelling subheadings. My only goal during the period, let’s say a few weeks, where I was working on subheadings was…making sure my subheadings were killer.

Each new little technique eventually becomes second nature.

Next, I’d work on something new. Say I saw an article that said contractions make prose flow faster and better. Each new blog posts I’d focus on making sure each blog post had 100% contractions where possible:

• You’ll
• I’ll
• We’ll

I’d do this until I had a stack of writing techniques that came second nature to me.

On top of writing skills, you want to start developing marketing skills and iterating those as well.

This includes things like:

• Creating an opt-in freebie to collect emails
• Slowly beginning to build your list
• Comitting to nurturing your list by sending weekly emails
• Promoting on social
• Doing outreach and networking

By the end of year one, you’ll have a realistic understanding of the landscape.

Some great articles to read for this are:

Step 3 – Begin to Make Major Splashes

After about a year, you can attempt to make major splashes.

This could happen in many forms:

• Starting to write articles that go semi-viral
• Working on your first book
• Creating your first product

I published my first book 10 months after I published my first blog post online. The book, to date, has made like $6,000. For me, publishing the book made things serious.

I also started to think of other ways to make a living writing. I created an email series product that sold zero copies. I got butthurt about that for about a week, then moved on.

I worked on my second book, You 2.0., and published that about a year after my first book. To date, that book has netted about $20,000 — not too shabby!

I dabbled in little experiments like Amazon Affiliates, other affiliate marketing techniques, and I also did 1 on 1 coaching for other writers after I’d spend a couple of years learning the craft myself.

At this point, you have a bit of a recurring income and the prospect of making a living writing becomes…really real.

The “Beginning of Your Empire” Stage

Exactly two years and seven months into my writing career, I published my first handful article on the Medium Partner Program.

• The end result? $225.08
• Month 2? $654.02
• Month 3? $777.58

I was in the right place at the right time, yes. I started writing on MPP when there was less competition and I had a decent number of followers at the time.

The real lesson here, though? I practiced for nearly three years without knowing such a profitable opportunity was going to come along. Had this opportunity came along at a time where I was just getting started, I wouldn’t have been on pace for major growth.

If you, newbie writer, were to join Medium when it was less competitive, but you still had little to no writing experience, your results wouldn’t be all that great either.

You write, iterate, and practice marketing to be ready to seize opportunities.

Jon Morrow says it takes four to six years to simply have the writing skills and business acumen to make a six-figure living as a writer.

I’ve seen other writers do it faster, much faster, but modeling yourself after anomalies isn’t smart.

So, when did I have my first $10,000 month as a writer?

March 2019 — four years into my writing career and 19 months into joining the Medium Partner Program.

I just laugh when I see these alleged writers complaining about their income on Medium or in general.

You are a baby in this writing game. An infant. You don’t even know how to walk yet. Calm down.

The Secret? There Are no Secrets

I just released my third book. It will sell 10-50x the copies of my first book.

Millions of people read my work per year.

I make $10,000 a month reliably.

But…none of that matters to you, not right now.

None of this will happen to you or become real to you unless you do the work.

So, for the love of god, will you do it?

I put together a course on making a living writing with Medium. Here’s how you can get access to it.

First, buy my new book, Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement.

Second, enter your email to this landing page and get access to the course.

Start your journey now. I’ll see you inside.

I always wondered who came up with the phrase “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Like, actually, what the hell?

But, when it comes to writing, there’s definitely more than one way to skin a cat. I’ve seen writers succeed in every niche, genre, style, voice, and tone you could possibly imagine, but they all share common traits.

In fact, if you don’t have or cultivate these traits, you’ll never reach your potential as a writer.

You’ll keep wondering why you never really get any better.

You’ll never grow your fan base the way you want to, and you’ll be scratching your head and spinning your wheels the entire time.

Then, you’ll probably just quit. Like most writers do. A bunch of shadow artists dying with all that potential left in them. So sad.

Don’t let this be you.

I know how bad you want to pull this writing thing off. I know it seems distant. But it can happen. In fact, it probably will happen if you adopt the following traits I’m going to share.

Are you ready to begin the path to writing mastery? Ok cool, here goes.

The Ability to Practice (the Right Way)

“The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. Instead, these differences reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance.” – Anders Ericsson

How do you practice writing? You just write, right?

Yes and no.

I’ve seen writers who write a lot, but they never actually get better. How does this happen? First, writers who don’t know how to properly practice are self-indulgent and narcissistic. Harsh terms, but there’s no other way to describe it.

I talk about this type of writer in almost every post I write. This is the person who thinks they are going to build a writing career by using their blog as a personal journal to vomit out their random thoughts. This is not practicing.

I see people post these articles online all the time — cryptic and weird headlines, meandering thoughts, and no real attention paid to the reader on the other side of the screen.

When you truly practice, you’ll, you know, change your strategy if what you’re doing doesn’t seem to be working. You won’t just keep plowing ahead with these word-vomiting sessions.

When you practice, you’ll learn to refine your skills by first improving awkwardly until the process becomes smoother.

I remember the first time I read an article about using active voice. I jammed it in as much as possible thinking I always had to use it, e.g., I distinctly remember one article where I wrote: “Your bank account isn’t going to fill itself with money.”

Now, I know the active voice is important, but I don’t have to use it 100 percent of the time. I picked up a ton of little tricks like this — contracting words, omitting needless words, using the word “you” more often, writing interesting subheadings.

I focused on building a bag of tricks over time instead of “just writing.”

A Level of Patience Most Writers Simply Won’t Reach

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.” – Ira Glass

Patience is a skill you can learn and cultivate over time. Most aspiring writers are impatient and even downright neurotic.

I silently check in with Facebook Groups for writers all the time — the entitlement is palpable. These “writers” seem to be doing damn near everything except for actually writing. They complain about their stats, lack of progress, lack of love and adoration.

I always tell aspiring writers to just write more. It’s super simple and cliche, but it’s really the crux of it all.

That’s why I always tell aspiring writers — don’t try to become a writer if, deep down, you really don’t like to write that much. You will get a super low ROI on your time, for a long time, before you achieve any sort of success.

If you want to be a writer, your timeline for mastery should be your entire life, shouldn’t it?

That’s my timeline.

I’m naturally impatient, too, but I use that impatience to work, not to complain. I’m hasty about getting the words on the page every single day, but I know I have no choice but to just wait for the long term results to come.

Waiting annoys me, too, but I still get to work while I’m annoyed. Then, one day, I look up and see the results have jumped again. I do this process over and over again, surprising myself with each new level I reach.

The same will happen for you, too. Block out years to make this work. Go check your favorite writer’s archives. It’s always years, decades, sweat equity, relentless work.

This is the only way.

A Third Eye to View the World With

“Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.” – Phillip Roth

One day, I was sitting in the parking lot and I saw a nice, like nice nice, BMW parked next to me. For some reason, I pictured the owner of the vehicle in my mind — late 50’s executive, six-figure salary, lowkey hates his life, but at least he has the shiny toy. This moment in my life was the seed for an article I wrote about people who sacrifice meaning for objects.

I take little random moments of my life and turn them into art all the time.

My 3-year-old daughter provides me so many moments that show me what true happiness, joy, and fun looks like. I’ve even turned the worst moment of my life into art. Sometimes that’s the best stuff, actually.

Conversations with friends and family have turned into articles. Sitting in the coffee shops I write in provides fodder — observing faces and eavesdropping on conversations.

The more you write and observe, the easier it is to come up with ideas. If you suffer from writer’s block, you’re just not paying enough attention to life. The fact that we are even here, sentient, and conscious, is utterly ridiculous. Thinking about that alone provides enough material for infinite blog posts.

Life can be mundane and routine at times, but there’s even a story in that. It doesn’t matter what genre you write in. Being more present, awake, and aware in your actual life makes you a better writer. Living a more interesting life makes you a better writer. Don’t just sit at home and write all day every day — explore, travel, have conversations with random strangers, live. Then write about it.

A Crystal Clear Lens When it Comes to People

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.” William Shakespeare

I’d rather have most aspiring writers read direct response copywriting books than go to school to get an MFA.

I stand on this — copywriters, marketers, sales and persuasion experts, etc are the smartest people in the world. On top of that, read novelists who focus deeply on the theme of human nature — Bukowski is my favorite. Knowledge about the nature of people trumps academic knowledge.

You’ll become an excellent writer in any genre when you understand this:

Human nature doesn’t change.

People, you, have buttons, levers, and puppet strings that can be pushed and pulled at will, without your permission. The way human beings work has been explained to the point of redundancy. It’s an open secret.

Understand how people work and how to persuade them. Understanding what really goes on in people’s heads matter more than the words themselves.

Why do you think books with shitty prose can still sell well? They aim right at the lizard brain and tickle it.

The most popular books on Amazon are romance novels — books that aim at prime animalistic instincts, deep-seated fantasies, the true nature people don’t show in public but curl up at night and get lost in.

Great memoirs tell stories people have lived out or wish they lived out. Great self-help plays on people’s aspirations. It’s all about reflecting the nature of your reader right back at them. That’s it.

If I owe my own success to anything, it’s the ability to articulate what people are thinking, but can’t articulate themselves.

If you can create that feeling of “I’ve always felt this, but I didn’t quite know how to say it,” readers will love you.

Stop thinking about yourself. Start thinking about your readers. Don’t think about their pre-frontal cortex. Think about their caveperson’s brain.

The Ability to Stay Focused and Refine ONE Theme

“Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.” – Nassim Taleb

Every post I write about writing is the same blog post.

Every self-improvement post I write is the same blog post.

The writing posts boil down to — write more, iterate, observe, improve.

The self-improvement posts boil down to – take full responsibility for yourself, understand no one can force you to do anything, put your life into the proper perspective.

Ryan Holiday once said something along the lines of “every great book should be derived from one central axiom.” I say that every great career should be derived from a central axiom.

You keep trying to say the same thing, except you try to say it a little bit better.

I remember a fellow writer once saying he was worried about repeating himself and his writing getting stale. I told him that his writing would never get stale, even if he kept talking about the same thing. Why?

Each time you’re trying to get at that central axiom when you sit down to write, your life is a little bit different each time. Maybe you’re a little wiser, or dumber. The experiences you have between each session color your life in subtle ways that bleed into the prose.

Your writing catalog is the combination of little timestamps in your philosophy — solidified pieces of thought.

And you’re never quite sure you have it exactly right. So you keep trying to get it right. It gets closer, but it’s never quite there. You keep doing it until you’re dead.

That’s a writing career.

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.

“How to write an article.”

Seems easy enough, right?

Just sit down, open up your computer, and let the ideas flow onto the page, right?

If writing articles is so simple, how come few people ever do it?

From my years of experience as a writer, I’d guess less than 10 percent of people who read blogs about blogging ever, you know, blog.

For whatever reason, sitting down to write an article seems daunting. If you find yourself lacking the ideas, motivation, or structure to write articles consistently, this is the post for you.

Once you learn and embrace the process fully, you’ll become unstoppable. You won’t need motivation to write, you’ll just do it. The ideas will flow easily, once you’ve built the foundation.

If you practice enough, you’ll get to the point where you can generate an entire article by simply opening up your computer and writing.

Would you like to be able to do that?

Are you tired of feeling blocked creatively?

Are you ready to become a writing machine?

Ok, cool. Let’s get started.

I Give The Same Piece of Advice to Start Every Post About Writing

Stop trying to be cute.

That’s your main problem. You look at writing like some special process that produces magic. In many ways, that’s true.

Writing does produce magic and beauty. But, like a rose sprung from the ground, the foundation is always built from the dirt.

So, just give up your dreams of becoming the next great writer and learn basic blogging techniques, will ya?

You can get to your esoteric essays later. A few listicles won’t tarnish your reputation. If you never produce anything ever, then you have no reputation to tarnish anyway.

Just trust me on this. Leaning the basics, beginning to hit the publish button, and getting some positive feedback will lead to more creative and unique writing in the future.

I have a voice no writer on the planet can match because I started by blogging like everyone else does. Submit your ego, become a student, obey directions, and you’ll be miles ahead of most aspiring writers I come across.

Ok, let’s build the foundation.

The Biggest Myth in the Blogosphere

To keep things simple, let’s help you overcome a common hurdling block — your perfect little niche and audience. In my experience, the niche is overrated.

Again, stop being cute.

If you think you have five broad topics you want to write about, just pick one and focus on that for the next 90 days. Publishing 1-3 articles per week will teach you more about your writing preferences than thinking about them ever will.

I have a few guides on choosing a writing topic here. Read them, pick, and commit to writing in that space for 90 days:

• How to Pick a Writing Topic and Stick With It
• Read This if You Can’t Decide Which Topic to Write About
• How to Start Writing: The Ultimate Guide

Once you’ve chosen an area to write about, there are simple ways to find out what your potential audience likes to read:

• Find other writers in your niche and study the responses from their audience. You could go so far as copying and pasting certain responses to use in the future when you’re generating ideas.
• Study the other writers themselves. Read their articles thoroughly and make guesses about what works so well for them. Write these ideas down. Become an active student instead of a passive reader
• You can use exercises like creating a reader avatar or hunting through forums and Amazon reviews to get a crystal clear idea (although you don’t need it)

Once you have a “good enough” idea for your main topic, you’ll start to build the foundation for your article writing empire.

The Bedrock of Every Successful Article

Don’t simply open your computer and start writing. Dumb.

Instead, you want to have ideas waiting in the wings to write about. Those ideas will come in the form of a headline.

To this day, no matter how in-depth, nuanced, well researched, and balanced the content of my articles is, I will use a click-bait headline.

Why?

Understanding the building blocks of a great headline means you understand the building blocks of persuasion in general. Understanding persuasion makes you a better writer.

If you get good at headlines, it’ll be easier to write articles because:

• Headlines create the promise your post fulfills, so you’ll know how to direct your writing to that outcome
• Good headlines hit emotional cues that can direct your writing, e.g., a positive and inspirational headline means you’ll write with a tone that matches
• Since headlines are 80% of the success of an article, you’ll feel less pressure when it comes to the writing

There are formulas you can use to generate headlines, but understand these important elements:

• Good headlines promise to solve a problem. Think about what pains and frustrations your audience has and identify outcomes to solve those problems, then write the headline based on the outcome
• Good headlines promise a better future or transformation. People don’t want to diet, they want to look good naked. People don’t want to learn self-improvement techniques. They want health, wealth, love, and happiness.
• Good headlines play to fears and frustrations your audience has. Why do you think headlines like “Are You Making One of These 7 Mistakes When it Comes to Raising Your Newborn?” What parent wouldn’t at least be curious to read that article?

Understanding the foundation of a good headline, begin to start writing headlines within the framework of formulas.

Some great headline formula lists are:

• 10 Surefire Headline Formulas That Work
• 51 Headline Formulas to Skyrocket Conversions
• 47 Headline Examples: Steal These Nifty Formulas From Popular Blogs

I write down 10 headline ideas per day. Jon Morrow, who taught me most of what I know about blogging, wrote 50-100 headlines per day until he became a master.

The more you practice headlines the faster you’ll improve at writing great articles, period. Start practicing headlines and store the good ones in a document on your computer to draw from.

Ideally, before you sit down to write, you’ll have a bunch of ideas to choose from. Each session, you can choose the one that speaks to you most, and then you’ll do this.

Keep it Simple Stupid

If I were you, I’d stick with two basic formulas for articles, to begin with:

• The 5 point essay
• Listicles

Both are easy to use and provide a definitive structure for your post.

When you’re a beginner, trying to write a loose and open-ended article will frustrate you. You’re not skilled enough, creative enough, nor do you have the proper writing habit needed to stick with such an article.

This advice isn’t for everyone. My advice is aimed at bloggers. People who start as “just bloggers” go on to be creative and unique. Often, people who aim to become stellar essay writers, memoirists, or any of the other esoteric forms of non-fiction, seem to have a harder time sticking with the process. Just my .02

So for each style, you can use a similar process to generate the structure of the article:

• Mind Map – Brainstorm the potential topics and sub-topics on a piece of paper using big bubbles and little bubbles
• Outline – Take those loose ideas and fit them into the frame of your article. Write down the main ideas and bullet points underneath each main idea. The simplest formula for the 5 point essay = intro,  three main topics, three bullets underneath each topic, conclusion

Imagine how much easier it will be to write an article with:

• Background on your audience
• A headline ready to go that frames your brainstorming of the article
• Ideas plotted out before you pen a word

I’m telling you. Don’t be cute, structure your shit, and work within a frame to start. It will be 100 times easier.

Now, let’s look at some of the elements of writing an article people love.

Gone in Less Than 5 Seconds

“I smashed a lamp over my head. There was blood everywhere. And glass. And I took a picture.”

Regardless of how long you stay for the entire article, you’re at least reading the next few sentences are you read a line like that.

Copyblogger has a saying, “the goal of each sentence is to get the reader to the next one.”

You want people to be surprised when they finish your article. Like, “damn I’m done already?”

Your intro serves this purpose more than anything else.

By any means, you must grab their attention asap, or they will click away from your post.

Some of my go-to techniques are:

• Ask 3 questions you know your reader will mentally nod their head yes to
• Open with what pains and frustrates your reader and be mean to them, spelling out the consequences and painting the bleak future they’re already imagining
• Look at your first line and ask whether it will stop people dead in their tracks

Pro Tip: Don’t let the intro consume a ton of your time if it isn’t coming to you right away. Go ahead and write the main points first and circle back to both your intro and conclusion.

How to Write Your First Draft With Ease

For the main points, keep it simple. You have the three main ideas and the three sub-topics underneath.

Write the draft using that outline and don’t overthink it.

If you’re writing a listicle, you can use a similar formula. Depending on the length of your list, you won’t need to have elaborate sub-topics, just focus on the core idea of each point.

Some simple rules of thumb to help you stay focused:

• Use no more than 300 words per main point
• Open the point alluding to the idea, support the idea, and close the idea. Make an essay within the essay
• End each point by trying to segue into the next point. Here’s a great article on how to do that

I’m not going to go into a ton of depth here about the exact thing you should write because…that’s your part of the deal. In a bit, I’ll show you some of my techniques to make your articles shine, but the content of what you write comes from, well, you.

You’ll find your voice by writing articles.

You’ll find your voice by writing shitty articles.

The most important part of writing articles isn’t the writing itself, it’s publishing them. If you’re worried about people’s opinions, just know you won’t have many opinions to deal with because nobody knows who the fuck you are. Stop being cute.

You are a baby. Crawl. Bump your head on the coffee table. Imitate what you hear. Next thing you know, you’ll be walking, talking, and in consumer debt up to your ears with a loveless marriage.

Get it? Got it? Good.

The Book End Technique

If you get the intro and conclusion right, the content in between won’t matter as much.

You want a great intro and conclusion because people won’t remember much of the content they’ve just read.

They’ll remember the way you made them feel. You’ll build an audience by creating the type of feelings that attract people to you. Writing isn’t about … words.

Writing is about emotions. You can write well, fail to hit an emotional nerve, and fail. It happens all the time. So my approach always starts with things like:

• Outcomes
• Emotions
• Desires
• Fears
• Transformation

You’re a manipulator of emotions who uses words to perform the manipulation. Thought that way, you understand how to make your words serve a purpose instead of being empty.

For your close, think about how you want your reader to feel.

What do you want them to take away?

What promise are you making?

How can you leave them scratching their heads in a way that makes them come back again and again?

Use the formula from start to finish, then add these stylistic elements to make your articles sing.

Elements of Style

Pay careful attention to the way your blog posts look.

Example:

Do you want to become a great writer? Are you afraid no one will ever read your work? What will your life, career, and dreams look like if you continue to struggle with writer’s block?

vs.

Do you want to become a great writer?

Are you afraid no one will ever read your work?

What will your life, career, and dreams look like if you continue to struggle with writer’s block?

*******

The second version makes the reader pause and say yes three separate times. The former creates a blended together yes for all three.

Spacing has a huge impact on how your writing comes across. You don’t have to write the way I do. I’ve seen writers who write large walls of text and complicated paragraphs who do quite well. Often, though, they’re advanced.

You want every advantage you can get, right?

You want the process of writing an article to become easier, right?

Ok, use my tips then!

Well, not my tips, but rather the basic blogging tips you kind of already know:

• Use short sentences
• Use short paragraphs
• Bold to emphasize points overtly
• Add photos tactfully to break up the words and give the eyes a “mental break”
• Italicize to emphasize points subtly
• Use bulleted lists to organize information cleanly.

Use H2’s to Emphasize the Major Points Of Your Article

Use H3’s for Your Sub-Points

Go through some of my articles on the site. Some of them are very long — 5000 words or more. The only way to get people to read from start to finish is by using these stylistic techniques. In addition to that, there are some ways to craft better words themselves.

Notice I’m giving you more detail as you go through the article. Remember, the foundation is everything. Going from the “outside-in” gives you the blueprint to build the house.

The other way around is like someone dumping a bunch of wood, nails, and tools onto your lawn and saying “go build a house.

My Little Bag of Effective Writing Techniques

Learn my process, then create your own.

As far as the writing itself goes, you want it to punch and pop. Notice the words I just used. You can almost hear them. There is a percussion to them.

You can accomplish this in a few ways:

• Using onomatopoeia like I just did – punch, pop, crackle, spark, crack
• Strategically placed italics – you don’t people to read your writing, you want them to feel it
• Contractions – Instead of “you will” write “you’ll”
• Active voice – Instead of “John was hit by the car,” say “The car hit John”
• Use future pacing words – “Picture yourself” “Imagine” “What would your life look like if you [insert action?”

Also, here’s a super-detailed guide on persuasive writing you can reference later.

Aside from those little tricks, when you go back through to edit your article think about whether or not each line deserves to be there.

If you can learn to honestly assess your writing as if you were the reader, you’ll become a better writer. Many writers never get there. They have delusions of grandeur about how good they are.

Don’t be one of these people.

Don’t be a perfectionist either. Get your drafts to “good enough” and hit the publish button.

You Know This,  I Know You Know This, and You Know I Know You Know This

You know how to write an article.

You get the gist of it.

I didn’t read articles like this when I first started writing. I just started writing. I’d been reading articles for years. I kind of just looked at popular articles and reverse engineered them without thinking too much about it.

I’m blessed to be the type of naive person who just dives and without fear.

But if that’s not you, you have to understand that you’ll learn more from actually writing articles than any “how to write an article” guide can teach you.

Trust me.

If you wrote a new article 1-3 times a week for the next 90 days, you’d be shocked at how good you’ll become.

Then, you can develop the path to doing all the things you know you want to do so so badly — make a living writing, publishing books, build a big audience, and spend the rest of your life doing what you love.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now — my office. I wake up when I want, write when I want, and get paid for it. It’s as nice as it sounds. The grass is greener over here. Believe me.

You can and will get there, one article at a time.

Write one today.

What is persuasive writing?

Simple. Persuasive writing gets the reader to do what you want them to do. Often, the end goal is to get them to, you know, read your stuff at all.

See, for the most part, aspiring writers go unnoticed. For every successful blogger, author, novelist, etc, there are thousands of failures, abandoned blogs, and writing careers that never get off the ground.

I can guess how you probably feel. The words don’t come out on the page the way you thought of them in your head. Getting any sort of traction seems like an uphill slog.

You’re worried about wasting your time, effort, and even money when it seems like no one will ever read your s***. Your deepest fear? That you’re going to stay in the aspiring phase forever.

That you’ll be in the middle and late stages of your life talking about that book you were going to write, but never did. In the back of your mind, you feel like you’ll die without your words really being noticed.

That would be a shame. Fortunately, I’m here to save you.

So how do you become a writer people do notice?

You must master the art of moving people with words.

How do you do that? Let me explain.

Why the Quality of Your Writing Isn’t Important At All

Persuasive writing has much less to do with using fancy words than it does with connecting to emotions.

This is why poorly written books can fly off the shelves, e.g., 50 Shades of Grey and flawlessly written prose can turn into a total dud.

Before we get into any of the writing techniques themselves, you must understand the most important aspect of writing. The reader.

I hammer this point home in almost every blog post I write because it’s the most glaring problem I see in almost every aspiring writer. Regardless of what point of view you’re writing from, your writing isn’t about you. Ever.

It’s about the reader. Always. And the most important thing to understand about your reader is this — they’re a human being.

Human beings can be persuaded because, for the most part, we don’t use logic to make decisions. All great writers know that connecting with readers involves tapping into their emotions, tickling their lizard brains, and connecting with the more primal self than the logical one.

What do I mean? I’ll share some specific techniques later, but here are some themes.

Persuasive Writing Foundation – Fears, Dreams, Hopes, and Aspirations

Imagine you’re living in a nomadic tribe.

You hear a rustling in the bushes. It could be the wind. Or, it could be a lion that wants to eat you. Do you take any chances? No. You run like hell.

When you make it back to your settlement you think everything has gone well, only to find you’ve offtended the alpha leader of the tribe and will be abandoned. This form of social rejection is life or death. Literally.

Zoom back to present times now. Let’s take a look at a little catchy headline trick I like to use, “Are you making one of these 3 devastating career mistakes?”

When someone reads that headline, they don’t just logically think “career mistakes,” they emotionally feel abandonment from the tribe and death. 

This is why tapping into fear works quite well. Especially fear that involves social rejection. If you know what you’re reader is afraid of, you know how to persuade them.

On the flip side, for the same deep-seated caveman reasons, we want more status. Better status means a better mate means better offspring means better passing on of genes. You could take that same headline earlier and do something like “7 Simple and Effective Ways to Become a Star at Work.”

You want to know both what keeps your readers up at night and what they want to cross off their bucket list. If you know both, you can use persuasive writing to get them to join your tribe.

I added the caveman anecdotes because I want you to understand how deep these emotions run. Some copywriters make millions of dollars per year because they understand the true power of understanding human nature and evolutionary psychology.

The WIIFM Principle

Are you reading this blog post because you love me?

I mean, I am pretty damn lovable, but you’re not here because you want to help me grow my writing coach business.

You’re here because you want to learn persuasive writing. You want to learn persuasive writing because you want more people to read your work.

You want more people to read your work so you can achieve your writing dreams, gain status, boost your self-esteem, get validation, and ultimately please…you.

Until you fully understand human self-interest, you won’t become a successful writer. Ironically, like I said earlier, most writers are too self-interested and don’t deliver anything to readers. They’re selfish.

You must always answer this question with your writing:

“What’s in it for me?”

It doesn’t matter which type of writing you use either. For how to blogging content, you’re providing the reader a solution to their problems or a path to something they aspire to.

Novels provide entertainment, an escape from the banality of life, and a lens with which the reader can see themselves and identify with. Often, the hero. We love superhero movies because we don’t feel heroic in our own lives. Are you starting to get the ethos of this all?

If you’re not providing useful entertainment, education, inspiration, or compelling story, your writing will fall flat. Yet people do this all the time.

They’ll write a picturesque description of their travels around the world, but all those pretty words mean nothing.

Contrast that with a memoir of essentially the same content, but talks about the emotions, experiences, and scenarios in a way that creates a bond with the reader, e.g., Wild by Charyl Strayed

The difference is subtle and huge at the same time.

My Personal Bag of Tricks

When it comes to persuasive writing tricks, there are more than enough to last you a lifetime.

Fortunately, you only need a few.

Remember the principle of simplicity. Getting really good at a handful of techniques is better than being bad or mediocre at a bunch.

This is how you get exponential growth without having to work hard. I know some writers who work way harder than me and bang their head against the wall trying to be perfect.

My style is simple. I like it and so do my readers. That’s all I need.

Quit overcomplicating this.

That message applies to so many aspects of not only the writing itself but writing careers in general.

Writers are neurotic and overthinking creatures.

In reality, though, you don’t have to do anything fancy to get readers to like you. Just master the fundamentals.

Here are some of my favorite tips, tricks, and formulas for writing better content.

The P.A.S. Formula

Remember when I talked about tapping into readers fears or hopes at the beginning of this post?

Well, if you don’t learn how to do this, here’s what will happen.

Nobody will read your work. This will frustrate you. Not only won’t you get any better, but you’ll bang your head against the wall because you are practicing, yet you’re not bearing any fruit from that practice.

You’ll observe other writers who don’t seem to be much more talented than you, but they’ll lap you in terms of audience. While they rise, you won’t just stay stagnant, you’ll fall.

You’ll fall because with each failed post you write, your motivation will decrease. It will decrease to the point where you lose all motivation and quit writing forever. Your dreams will die with you.

How do you avoid this fate? By using the P.A.S. formula as I just did.

P.A.S stands for problem, agitation, solution. The process is simple:

• Problem – State the problem the reader is having
• Agitate – “Twist the knife.” Make them feel even worse by projecting out the consequences of not resolving their problem.
• Solution – Allude to a solution and then provide it later on

Copywriters use the P.A.S. formula in sales letters quite often. I like to use it to open my blog posts because, rightly or wrongly, fear is a great trigger. Now, I use that fear to jolt the reader awake and give them the solution, not to punish them.

Use this power for good. The P.A.S. formula is similar to the next trick — one that will have your readers thinking deeply.

Future Pacing

Copywriters often use future pacing to persuade readers to take action on a product that serves to give the reader a better future. It’s similar to P.A.S., but I like to use positive imagery of the future to keep the reader’s attention.

You’ve seen this on a sales letter or video from a marketer on Youtube, “Imagine yourself six months from now. Your business is running on auto-pilot. Sales are coming in automatically as you sip Pina Coladas on the beach […]”

Laugh all you want at those type of ads, but people wouldn’t run them if they didn’t work.

See, humans spend most of their time either agonizing over the past or wishing for a better future. If your writing can project a better future, you give the reader what they want most.

People don’t want to buy products, read blog posts, or become your customer. They want a transformation. They want that product or piece of content to help them become a better version of themselves.

Examples:

• People don’t buy “weight loss products,” they buy bodies that look good naked, energy to play with their kids, and longer life.
• People don’t buy luxury cars, watches, and clothes, they buy status, admiration, and yes even envy of their peers.
• Readers don’t read “how-to” content. They search for solutions to their problems to become better.

If you write non-fiction “how-to” content, are trying to sell a product, or want to persuade people with writing in general, think about what the reader wants to happen in the future and allude to it.

Use words and phrases like “Imagine,” “What would your life look like in [time period] if you [followed through with action provided by content/used product]?” “Picture yourself…”

Even though non-fiction is my gig, think of great novels. They have you wondering what’s next by putting the protagonist in a pinch, writing about what motivates them, and foreshadowing potential scenes.

Move your reader into the next phase with your writing.

Speaking of move…

Sweater-Knit Copy

You want people to read your writing all the way through.

To do this, you should make each sentence easily connect to the next one.

You want the reader to be surprised when they’re done with your post, sales letter, even book. Like “damn, I’m done?”

Your writing should move them from the top of the page to the bottom. Lines should connect like a knit sweater.

Some ways to achieve this are:

• Omit needless words/sentences – Every word should earn its way onto the page.
• Contractions – “You’ll” instead of “You will” “We’re” instead of “We are.”
• Confidence – Remove phrases like “I believe” and “I think that.” They know you think/believe what you’re writing about because you wrote it.
• Transition phrases – “Because” “therefore” “as a result of”
• Active Voice – Instead of “The post was edited by John,” use “John edited the post.”

The Writing Technique that Increased the Popularity of My Writing 10X

You definitely want to know which technique caused such a dramatic shift, right?

It would be weird for you to stop reading after that specific phrase.

Intriguing subheads compel the reader to continue.

I owe all credit for this technique to this blog post.

Some highlights are:

• Give the reader a clue to what’s next, but don’t give it away
• Tap into fears/aspirations
• Don’t just write the literal definition of the content below, e.g., “Use Powerful Subheadings”

Bonus: An additional trick I learned from Benjamin Hardy — a top writer on Medium. Add quotes underneath each subheading. This works especially well on personal development posts.

Why does this work? Because of a persuasion technique called “mere association.” Attaching yourself to credible people makes you seem more credible by default.

The Word Every Reader Wants to Hear

You want to become a more persuasive writer because you want a bigger audience.

You’re worried about having no fans because you’ll lose motivation if you don’t build an audience fast enough.

Almost all aspiring writers use the word “I” too much and it shows how self-absorbed they are.

You have to cure your addiction to yourself when it comes to your writing. People don’t want to read your thoughts, stories, and advice, per se. They only do so in so much as it helps or entertains them.

This is why using the word you is so effective. When you use it, the reader doesn’t have to guess if you’re trying to relate your content to them.

The 3-Nod Technique

I often like to open blog posts with three questions that’ll make the reader mentally, or even sometimes literally, not their head yes.

Example:

• Do you want more fans for your writing?
• Do you wish the words came to you more easily?
• Are you worried that you’ll burn out and quit before you build a big audience?

Each time you get the reader to nod “yes” in their head…they are investing into you and committing to you a little bit with each “nod.”

This is why salespeople will ask you questions about your preferences and tastes, get you to answer yes, and then offer a product that meets those preferences:

• Do you like to travel?
• Do you love a good deal?
• If you could travel around the world without breaking the bank, would you do it?

“Well let me tell you about our frequent travel membership […]”

Get it? Good.

This is How You Want Your Reader to Feel

Whenever you can, you want to make your reader feel like you’re reading their mind.

If you can figure out not only what they want, but what they’re objections and resistance to your content are beforehand, you can connect with them by addressing it before they do.

This often involves saying something like “I bet you’re probably thinking…” and inserting either an objection, fear, or aspiration after.

By this point, you’re probably thinking all of these tips sound good, but when it comes to pulling them off, you still feel overwhelmed.

That’s okay. I learned all of these tips one by one and integrated them over time. This post is meant to be something you can come back to time in time again.

You might be thinking, “this is easy for you to say!” But if you look at some of my old writing, as I show examples of in this post, you’ll realize how much I used to suck and how much better I got.

You can get better, too.

But you have to do this.

Why You Feel Creatively Blocked (and How to Cure it)

You need to get out of your own way.

This isn’t just true for writing, but for success in life period.

You want it to be hard, so badly. Deep down, you want the process to be difficult to give yourself an out.

Writing isn’t hard.

It’s time-consuming. That’s all.

Consume the time. Like I did. It should be fun!

You say you want to be a writer so bad.

Then, write, dude.

Before I give you writing motivation tips, I’m going to make you hate me.

I don’t get writer’s block at all, ever. I can write a 2,000-word article in one hour without using an outline.

Catchy headlines ooze out of my brain. I have too many ideas, not too few. I don’t struggle to find the right words. It’s as if the right words are hunting me down like I’m a fugitive.

Oh, and I also know exactly what you’re thinking.

You don’t have enough writing motivation. Not even close. You feel like the gap between where you are and where you want to be is so wide, trying often doesn’t make sense.

You’re in one of three categories:

• You don’t write at all – You read blog posts like these, only to do absolutely nothing with the information
• You write in ‘fits’ and ‘spurts’ – But never enough to get your writing career off the ground, not even close. At least your not the next person.
• You’re a perfectionist – You have a bunch of unpublished drafts. You can’t bring yourself to finish anything because it’s never good enough.

Ok, now I’m done rubbing salt in your wounds.

I do have solutions for you.

You can become like me.

See, I used to be just like you.

I really didn’t have writing motivation right away. I procrastinated, read the blog posts without doing the work, and found myself wishing I could become a writer but thinking it was a pipe-dream.

Now? Like I said, absolute beast mode, daily, without tiring.

Do you want these writing superpowers?

Rhetorical question.

Let’s jump in.

The Cornerstone of Writing Motivation – Answer This Question

This is going to sound like a dumb question, but it’s important.

Because the answer will determine whether you should pursue a writing career or just quit.

Do you like to write?

Is it enjoyable for you?

Even when I was just starting out, I liked writing. It was fun. Sure, parts were frustrating, but I enjoyed it.

Does that make sense?

If I was really good at writing but, for some reason, didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t write.

I have to get this out of the way in almost every blog post because some of you seem to think writing is the gateway to wealth or something. I don’t know who sold you that, but…no.

Only write if you…like to write. No writing motivation can save someone who doesn’t enjoy it.

Click to Page 10

Whenever you worry about how long it will take to get your writing career off the ground, find a writer you admire who has a blog.

Visit their archives.

You’ll notice the same thing every time. A minimum of five to likely 10 plus years of archives.

I banged my head against the while trying to gain popularity for about four years…and then my platforms exploded.

Your time will come. You need time to get better. It will take a few years. But you can get really, really, really good.

I remember I once heard one of Eminem’s first mixtapes — legendary top five rapper ever Slim Shady himself. It was pure trash. Horrible.

You’re supposed to suck right now. It’s okay! You will be good, if you practice, I promise.

Want more proof?

You’re gonna get a kick out of what I show you next.

Read This (But Don’t Laugh too Hard at me, PUHLEASE)

I break this out every once in a while because it’s a great source of writing motivation.

But. Ugh. It embarrasses the hell out of me.

I know some people don’t think I ever sucked at writing. But I have proof, here it is:

“I remember when I was young how thrilling, and terrifying it was to go walk up to a girl and talk to her. When I was young I would describe a girl with phrases like “she is really pretty” or “she is beautiful”. When I say young I mean grade school days, because not too long after that things began to change. I’m not sure exactly how old I was, but I estimate that around the age of 13 was when I first watched a pornographic film. I talk a lot about the cognitive functioning of the brain and how neural pathways are built constantly by one’s behaviors, especially is the behavior is repetitive.”

I mean seriously, what the fuck is that?

That, ladies and gentleman, is something I wrote.

Keep practicing.

Time Travel

I have a masochistic joy in reading my old work.

So bad.

I analogize it to when you’re exercising a lot. You don’t notice how much better shape you’ve gotten into…until you see an old picture of you and it startles you.

Rack up a catalog of work — six months is all you need — and you’ll notice that change. It’s a great way to content with Ira Glass’s famed taste gap:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you […] It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. ”

When you look at your old work, you realize how much of that gap you’ve actually closed.

How to Get Everything You Want Without Trying

You want the success part of writing, badly. But, until you do the work, you’ll never get it.

Funny enough, if you just focus on the process itself, you’ll get all the results you wanted anyway without feeling like you had to exert yourself to get them in a direct way.

In other words, when you just work on writing your best stuff, opportunities come to you.

I obverse writing groups. Mostly, people are overly worried about gimmicks, little promotion strategies, basically anything from just writing their best stuff. Me? I just write.

By just writing, I get what they try to get through gimmicks:

• Top-tier publications ask for my permission to publish content. I don’t pitch anyone
• When the opportunity to monetize my writing came around, I had 100+ articles available to use
• People I look up to now read my work

“Become so good they can’t ignore you” is a cliche that’s truer than you’ll ever know.

Do This, Even if it’s Not Very Good

For whatever reason…

Publishing a book seems to get a huge monkey off your back — like King Kong sized.

It lets you know you’re serious.

Write consistently for 6-12 months, and publish a book that won’t be very good or sell well, but will be all the evidence you need that you’re a legit writer.

For my personal standards, my first book is garbage. But, when it’s all said and done, it will be more important than every other book I write combined.

“Your first book is for the trash.”

Sign up for Self-Publishing School. It’s one of the best online courses ever made, has a 90 + % completion rate, and if you follow the steps, you will publish a book.

Oh yeah, that reminds me.

Put Your Money Where Your Words Are

If you haven’t already, buy an online writing course.

Yes, some people do buy online courses and still do nothing with them, but an online course can shorten your learning curve and give you 10x the writing motivation you’re able to conjure up on your own.

Jon Morrow’s guest blogging certification program is great. It’ll teach you how to write blog content.

People who learn how to write blog content first can learn to write almost anything else later — the opposite isn’t true.

Learning how to blog teaches you discipline, which is about 99 percent of what it takes to become a great writer.

Maybe I’ll create a writing course one day, who knows?

Anyway…

If SHE Can Do It, You Can Definitely Do It

I love picking on E.L. James — author of 50 Shade of Grey. I do it lovingly, though, because she is the perfect example of the attitude you should have as a writer.

From what I heard, the prose itself is terrible. Doesn’t matter, though. She hit the nerve of secretly horny women all across America and she gets to cry herself to sleep in a pile of money.

What lessons for writing motivation can you draw from this:

• “You never know” – If E.L. can do it, maybe you can too
• Pretty writing is worthless – So many people want to be pretty writers. Broke-ass technically gifted writers populate the shelves of Barnes and Nobles. Bloggers and writers who know marketing, human nature, and psychology are 10x more popular. Because 50 Shades hits that nerve, the prose itself doesn’t matter. You can learn how to write popular content without being that great of a writer.
• Hustle can payoff – Apparently, James wrote a bunch of stories on a Twilight fan-fiction site, which lead to the popularity of her book. Sometimes making it as a writer has less to do with writing than it does the pure hustle. Just publishing a lot is a major part of the battle.

Instantly Jump To the Top 10% of All Writers Everywhere

Sign up to the Medium Partner Program and make $1 from your writing.

You are now in the top 10% of all writers, ever.

Add on top of that the people who want to write, but never do, into that equation and you’re in the top 1%.

Most writers make zero. But now there are many opportunities to make a little bit of change.

It’ll make you feel like you’re more serious about your craft.

Again, if you practice at it, publish a lot, and persist, you can eventually make more than just chump change.

The process is simple:

• Publish – Like, actually hit the publish button
• Iterate – Just watch what other writers do and try to implement it. Increase your observational skills
• Truly practice – You can write 100 blog posts without actually practicing. People do this when they stubbornly write their own way without ever trying to adopt new writing techniques. Don’t be this person.

Understand The Most Misunderstood Aspect of Practice

Most people suffer in life, and especially writing, because they think like employees.

Example – I noticed some people in the peanut gallery of a Facebook group for writers talking about how the fact that while a certain writer made $1,000 in a month, the number of hours it took to make that $1,000 was less than minimum wage.

While technically true, people who think this way don’t understand what entrepreneurs and investors know. They think like wage earners.

If you thought like an entrepreneur you’d realize:

• Doing work for little to no money can build a foundation for a thriving platform and business. It’s because I wrote free content for years that I now earn money.
• Skills and platform sizes compound exponentially. That writer who earned $1k is building a following, which means that over time, his posts will get higher views for the same amount of work. His skills and platform will grow like compound interest in a bank account. My views from the 8 months of 2019 are more than all previous years combined. People are plagued by a fundamental misunderstanding of power laws.
• “Work to learn, not for money” this is a quote from Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Writers with a wage earner’s mentality think too transactionally. Learning and building your platform isn’t a ‘tit for tat’ game. You work, often for free, upfront to get the skills. The skills are your currency. Once you know how to write well, you’ll never go broke again.

Speaking of the entrepreneur’s attitude.

You’re in the Business of Writing

Do you have to convince yourself to go to work every day?

No, you need to get paid, so you work.

Taking the esoteric nature out of your writing career and focusing like it’s your job will help you build a writing career.

It’s called a writing career for a reason.

Why are you treating your writing like a hobby if you want it to be your profession? Why aren’t you being a professional about it?

I knew I was going to eventually make it, even when I didn’t have the money or results to show for it.

Because I was a relentless professional about it.

Stop whining so much. Write. Hit publish. Nobody is going to laugh at you, let alone even care or read your work (yet).

You say you want to write for a living, right?

You say you want to do this forever?

Then, do it.

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.

You want to learn how to start writing.

But it’s not as easy as they say, is it?

“Just start writing!”

“Write, write, and write some more!”

“Writer’s block is a made up excuse, just go.”

These statements have a hint of truth. The solution to learn how to start writing…is to start writing.

But getting started, in general, is a different animal altogether. I’d know.

I kinda sorta knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in middle school. I even tried writing a book when I was 18. As a young adult, I pondered becoming a writer in the back of my mind for years before I actually did it.

Thanks to a chance encounter, a friend asking me to write for his website, I started writing and I never stopped.

It’d be easy to say I willed myself to start a writing career, but that’s not true. I seized an opportunity that someone else gave me. I needed someone else to believe in me to start.

I’m guessing you do, too. Let me be that person for you.

Getting started is hard. I know how you feel. You’re a nobody. Zero fans. No writing habit. You think about everything ahead and it just looks daunting.

Don’t get me wrong. It is. But if you get started and find a way to put blinders on for a little while, it gets a lot easier.

Ready to learn how to start writing, for real, once and for all?

Ok.

The Prerequisite Every Aspiring Writer Must Have (No Exceptions)

Writing has been in the background of my life for as long as I can remember.

I loved words. I’d tried writing in some shape or form a handful of times throughout my life — poetry, little essays, terrible attempts at novels. I’d say things like, “I’m going to write a book one day.”

I had what I call the itch.

If you’re a writer, you kind of know. You’re filled with doubt about it, but you have a sense that it’s something you want to do.

Steven Pressfield’s quote comes to mind here:

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

Without that itch, you’ll never be successful. And you should just give up, honestly.

Some people try to become freelancers, write books, or start blogs to make money. You can pull it off, sure, but if you don’t actually like to write, it won’t work in a real and sustainable way.

Also, I’m not sure where it got into people’s heads that there are all these rich bloggers and authors out there. Untrue. The vast majority of them are broke.

If you want to make money online, there are many easier ways to do it. I chose to write because I feel like I’m designed to do it.

Now that didn’t mean I was good at it right away, not even close. But I could tell pretty early on that I didn’t only want to be a writer, I wanted to do the writing. I enjoyed putting my fingers on the keyboard — the act itself.

You gotta have that in you, or develop it soon after you start, or it won’t work.

If your heart’s in the right place, you can move to the next phase.

The Mindset You Need to Have to Start Writing Successfully

Ok, I have to put one more filter here and weed a few more people out before we get to the nuts and bolts.

There’s another category of writer who won’t succeed in addition to the one who’s in it for the wrong reasons.

It’s your word vomiters. Online diary aficionados.

I add this line in nearly every blog post about writing because it’s such a huge glaring problem.

Bury this thought into the depths of your brain permanently…

Nobody, nobody, nobody wants to read random ramblings about your life. If you attempt to write this way and gain an audience, you will fail.

I ask new subscribers to my e-mail list to send me links to their blogs. 99 percent of the blogs I see look like a diary.

Nobody cares about your random vacations, your emotions, what you ate for lunch, and all the other random bullshit you put on your “personal blog” Ugh.

Forgive my vulgarity and frustrated tone, but some of you are just thick-skulled about this. I’m not saying you can’t write about yourself. You can. But you can’t just empty out all your thoughts onto a blog and expect people to want to read it.

Look at one of my first blog posts here. The writing was crappy, but the post was about a concept, not about the random thoughts of Ayodeji Awosika.

Even if you tell stories, the stories have to be tied to concepts. Concepts that relate to other people. Which leads me to my next point.

You Should Become a Blogger (Even if You Don’t Want to be)

This is my bias speaking here. I can only teach what I know.

But even if you eventually want to write more esoteric, flowery, philosophical stuff, you should become a regular ol’ blogger first.

Why?

Because blogging teaches you skills most people with ‘Hemingway Syndrome’ lack:

• Discipline – Blogging teaches you that boots and lunch pail attitude you need to build a writing habit
• Audience – If you want to have a writing career, you need people to, um, support you. Traditional blogging techniques help break the habit of using the word ‘I’ 3,539 times per blog post
• Marketing – Blogging (and promoting your stuff) rids you of the idea that you’ll get to sit in a cabin, drink whiskey, smoke a pipe, write your book on a typewriter, magically get accepted by Harper Collins, and become famous

Aside from the skills you learn, you also have a better chance of making a career as a writer through blogging.

One Thing Bloggers Have Over Most Other Writers

I used to get jealous of all the authors with books at Barnes and Nobles. Until I realized the dirty little secret of the publishing industry.

Most traditionally published authors are broke and don’t sell many books. Sure, they’re “better writers,” than me. Their prose is much better, polished, refined, pays homage to the greats, blah blah blah. But I’d rather be a pretty good writer and have the shekels.

Mark Manson is one of the most famous writers in the world. Guess how he started? Blogging. Through blogging and building a huge platform, he attracted publishers to him and had a platform to make his book successful. He’s co-writing a book with Will Smith. Not too shabby.

You have people like Jeff Goins, Sarah Cooper, Ryan Holiday, Elle Luna, and Benjamin Hardy who leveraged blogging into traditionally published success.

There are people like James Altucher who used blogging and self-publishing to write best selling books like Choose Yourself and Reinvent Yourself, which have sold more than a million copies combined.

Publishers are taking notice. They’re cherry picking star bloggers for book deals because they have proof of concept.

If you want to get your MFA, cross your fingers, and gamble on writing the next Cat Person, go ahead, but I wouldn’t advise it.

I had to spend time getting your head on straight because the mindset is most of the game here. Lower your ego, so you can actually start to write.

Getting Started: How to Begin Writing For An Audience and Building a Habit

I suggest you start writing for an audience right away.

Why? Because you get useful feedback.

Of course, you never try to pander to an audience, but you can’t write shit no one wants to read either.

If I had to start all over, here’s exactly what I’d do.

Start a Self-Hosted Blog

You want a self-hosted blog because it provides a home for your writing on the internet, which is important.

We’re going to soon talk about other places to publish your work and get an audience faster, but it’s important to have your own blog because platforms come and go.

In the beginning, very few people will come to your self-hosted blog, but you should still get it set up right away:

Here’s a quick guide to help you get started.

Sign Up for a Medium Account

Medium is awesome.

If you’re not on Medium yet, you’re missing out.

Medium is a website that allows anyone to sign up and start publishing your work right away.

You can even get paid for your writing. With Medium’s Partner Program, you can put your work behind a paywall and get paid based on how Medium members engage with your content.

I personally know people who went from zero to a full-time writer in a year using Medium. Those results aren’t typical whatsoever, but it’s a great jumping off point for any aspiring writer.

Here are some guides to help you get started:

How to Become a Paid Professional Writer in 30 Days or Less

How to Get Thousands of Views by Publishing on Medium

Is Medium Rigged? How to Succeed If You’re Just Starting Out

Here’s what you’re going to do next after you’re signed up:

• Publish blog posts on your site first
• Republish those posts on Medium
• After you build a catalog of posts on both, start linking back to your self-hosted blog posts from your Medium ones

So I use Medium as the jumping off point because they have a built-in audience, then I build my own blog views by linking back.

Make sense?

Ok. Now let’s get into the nuts and bolts of choosing a niche, generating ideas, and writing stuff people want to read.

How to Pick a Niche

Don’t over think this.

You don’t need to have this super specific niche to succeed anymore. Especially on places like Medium where you have such a diverse array of voices.

Essentially, the big niches fall into the following categories:

• Self-Improvement
• Parenting
• Personal Finance
• Creativity
• Business & Entrepreneurship
• Marketing
• Social Media and Blogging
• Freelancing
• Careers
• Gadgets & Technology
• News, Culture, and Entertainment (this is a very wide and broad category, plenty falls in here)

Then there are some little mini-topics underneath each of the big ones, but you should have a general idea of which one you want to jump into.

Jump in. 

You want to start writing. Not plotting out your perfect niche.

I wrote a guide that goes into this deeper, but the niche thing is overrated. It’s more important to start generating ideas and writing blog posts that follow a similar structure (to begin with).

After you write, let’s say, 100 posts, you’ll magically know your niche. Clarity comes through action, not the other way around.

How to Generate Ideas

Each day, I write down 10 ideas for new blog posts. You should do the same.

There are some basic blog post headline formulas you can and should use to start:

• How To – These work if your niche is educational and instructional
• List Posts – As much as people scoff at list posts, people read them, and they just make it easier to get into the flow or writing
• Subject: Mini-Subject – An example would be something like “Flow: The Creativity Behind ‘Getting in the Zone'” Or something like that

Here are some resources that can give you an in-depth look at coming up with headlines:

• How to Write Magnetic Headlines (CopyBlogger)
• 13 Type of Headlines to Get More Traffic (HubSpot)
• 5 Easy Tricks to Write Catch Headlines (From the master himself, Jeff Goins)

Now, if you’re still struggling to generate the underlying ideas to create the headlines in the first place, try the following:

• Pains, Hopes, Fears, and Desires – I learned this technique from Jon Morrow (read his post for a full explanation here). Essentially, you’re asking the question, “What keeps your readers up at night?”
• Avatar – An avatar is a written out description of a single person that you’re writing for. What are their problems? How about their fears? What are their hopes and aspirations?
• Swipe – Go on places like Medium, find similar writers who are popular and swipe headline styles. Don’t plagiarize, but look at how they formulate their headlines and ideas to reverse-engineer it

The bottom line here: If you don’t develop an intuition about what works and what doesn’t by observing other writers, you’re going to have a hard time. Most people don’t take the time to be observant because they get in their own way. That’s why I added the mindset section earlier. Don’t be that person. Observe, reverse-engineer, steal.

The Basic Structure of a Blog Post

Now you’ve generated some ideas and you’re ready to start writing.

So, how do you write a blog post?

Again, just use the basic and traditional formulas first, then you can move onto the esoteric later.

Here’s a synopsis.

How to Write an Introduction

Your introduction answers the question, “Why the hell should I read this?”

You want to tie it to the subject of your headline in a way that makes the reader curious to read more.

You can do this in many ways:

• Ask questions – Questions, especially ones that make the reader nod their head in agreement, work especially well. Example: If you’re writing a blog post about productivity, you could start by saying, “Do you always feel like you’re busy, but never actually get anything done?
• Twist the Knife – If your post is about solving a problem, play on that problem, show the consequences of the problem continuing to linger, then offer your content as a solution. Here’s a detailed post on that here).
• The Story Hook – Open with an intriguing story that’s related to the content of the post

Some useful guides on writing intros are:

• How to Write Spellbinding Introductions by Shamelessly Copying the Pros (Smart Blogger)
• How to Captivate Your Readers: 3 Ways to Craft Irresistible Opening Lines (Henneke Duistermaat – She’s a freak of nature. Read all her stuff)

How to Write the Body of a Post

You can do this one of two ways.

If you write a list-post, list out your points and add short descriptions for each.

If you’re writing any other type of post, the simplest way to do it is stick with three main points. A simple essay format works just fine.

Some tips on writing body content:

• Use interesting subheadings – Here’s a really cool guide on this, but you want to write little headings that make the reader curious or either detail what’s coming next
• Simple language – Some people say you must write super short sentences. I don’t subscribe to that view, but simpler is better
• Distinct thoughts – Break each distinct thought into a separate paragraph

In the end, your body content should look something like this:

[Section A]

• Point 1
• Point 2
• Point 3

[Section B]

• Point 1
• Point 2
• Point 3

[Section C]

• Point 1
• Point 2
• Point 3

Start with a mind-map, a brainstorming session, and then solidify your ideas into a format like this, and it will be ten times easier to write a post.

How to Write a Closing

Your closing should motivate the reader to take the next step on their journey after reading your content. Or it should leave them thinking, pondering, even questioning what you just wrote or scratching your head a little bit.

You want the closing to tie back into the idea you started with and bring the post full circle.

Read these posts for great examples:

• On Dying, Mothers, and Fighting for Your Ideas by Jon Morrow
• 5 Time-Management Tricks I Learned From Hating Tim Ferris by Penelope Trunk
• 33 Unusual Tips for Becoming a Better Writer by James Altucher

How to Start Writing, Keep Writing, and Create a Career From Your Words

I’m keeping this high-level because there are many little skills you’ll need to learn along the way.

You can come back to this post often and use the resources I linked to for assistance.

The goal?

Get your blog started and write until you get traction.

Traction is that point where you’re not in “start and stop,” mode. You write often and consistently, preferably every single day.

If you follow my advice and start a blog on Medium, you’ll start to build a following and you’ll have feedback in the form of fans and comments.

This will make you feel good.

You will want to keep going.

So how do you get there and stay there?

Whatever Your Routine, Make it and Stick With It

I write in the mornings.

My routine looks like this:

• Write 10 ideas for new posts
• Choose an idea to work on from my long-list of saved headlines
• Create a mind-map
• Write out a simple outline
• Write the first draft (one to two hours)
• Edit the post for a second draft (half hour to one hour)
• Final-polishing edit (a half hour at most)

Some people write faster than others.

Some can deal with daily writing. Others weekly (you should never go below weekly).

In your case, you need a routine:

• Write at the same time
• Follow the same process
• Repeat

Stick With Writing For An Audience for 6-12 Months

Most people don’t make it for six months.

If you make it six months, you’re in the top 25 percent of all writers. Pat yourself on the back. And, at this point, you should have some fans and a somewhat large body of work. That is, if you listened to me 😉

If you can make it to a year, you will make a dramatic leap in year two.

I published my first book in year two, a huge milestone for me, and started doing more advanced stuff like building an e-mail list.

I’m approaching year five and I’m a full-time writer. But the early days counted the most. Hitting the point of traction accounts for most of the journey. After that, you don’t coast, per se, but you know what you’re doing.

Hone Your Own Unique Voice and Style

Using headline formulas, structured outlines, and traditional blogging techniques seems formulaic.

That’s because it is.

But, after you write this way for a while, you develop a second nature understanding of how to write for an audience.

Then, when you try different styles, you’re apt to write them in a way that connects with other people better.

Thanks to my blogging days, I do think I could write a memoir or even a novel. Not because I’m versed in those skills. I’m not.

But because being in blogging boot camp mode taught me how to get words on the page, which is the most important part of the process.

My blogger’s attitude helps me get through new learning curves.

Coming Full Circle

Nowwwwwww after giving you everything you need to know up front, I’ll go back to the cliche.

Just write.

There’s so much magic in your future if you just write.

It feels so good to put words on the page, regularly, for a living. It really does.

You can get there. I know because I’ve been you. I’ve felt all the anxiety to start, the wishing, the underlying feeling you’re not good enough, all of it.

There is no other way through than to write your way through.

I just wrote something I could charge for. I’m giving the game away for free, because I care about the craft, thus indirectly about you.

With all the resource in here, from some of the best bloggers and writers in the world, you have everything you need. Everything.

Your journey begins today.

Raise your hand if you’ve said or thought this before: “I want to start my own blog…someday.”

It’s one of those things people continue to put off — some put it off for the rest of their life.

If you’re reading this it’s because you have a dream. You dream of creating work that matters and getting your ideas to spread. You want to add to the conversation and make an impact.

Starting your own blog creates an opportunity for you to do all of the above. If you don’t already have your own blog, I want you to start one today.

Blogging benefits your life in several ways. If you don’t believe me, listen to what the experts say.

Seth Godin, the author of 18 best-selling books and founder of multiple multi-million dollar businesses, says every one of us should have a blog and write on it daily.

Penelope Trunk, career expert and founder of four different start-ups, says blogging is “essential for a good career,” and “sets you apart as an expert in your field.”

Jeff Goins, an author of 4 best-selling books and owner of a seven-figure writing business, says his life changed when he committed to taking his blog to the next level.

Later, I’m going to tell you how to set up your blog today for $3 and in 10 minutes, but first I wanted to share my own story about the impact blogging has had on my life.

How Starting a Blog Has Transformed my Life

I don’t say this lightly. Committing to writing on my blog has altered the course of my life.

Before I found writing, I was headed nowhere fast.

I couldn’t find any motivation to do, well, anything. Then I found writing. Finally, there was something I could commit to, not because of overwhelming motivation, but because I enjoyed doing it.

I started blogging eighteen months ago and so far it’s lead to the following:

• The publishing of my first book. I wasn’t swimming in money after I published the book, but I crossed a major item off of my bucket list and made a profit.
• Paid writing opportunities.
• A following of people who seem to enjoy reading my work. I write for joy, but knowing I’ve helped even one person makes me happy.
• Contentment. I always felt called to write, but I kept putting it off. Now, I found my “vocation.” I have the peace of knowing what I’m meant to do.

When I started, I wasn’t on this grand mission to become a popular writer, nor did I realize how many opportunities would come my way.

I just wanted to put words on the page and I was sick of waiting and wondering.

Every once and a while you make a decision that creates a shift–a dramatic one–starting my blog was one of those decisions.

It could happen for you too, if you would only give yourself a chance.

Will today be the day you finally start that blog you’ve been thinking about starting for months, years, maybe even decades?

Why You Need Your Own “Home” On The Internet

When I started writing, I didn’t have my own blog. I wrote articles on other websites or on blogging platforms that I didn’t own. Eventually I wised up and create my own space to house my art. If you want to be a writer, a serious one, you need to have your own home — a self-hosted blog with a unique domain name that you own.

Platforms for writing such as Medium, Tumblr, Blogspot, and Typepad are great places to practice and hone your craft, but they don’t offer the freedom and flexibility of a site you’re in complete control of.

Here are some of the challenges you face when you write on a platform you don’t own.

• Lack of creative control – You can’t use plugins that could help your blog on these types of websites. You have minimal control over the design of your blog. Most importantly, many of these sites have rules against you making money with your blog. If you violate their terms of service, they can delete your entire blog.
• They don’t look professional – Let’s say you write an amazing blog post on a website like The Huffington Post. People may try to find your website in order to contact you about an opportunity. If they don’t see a self-hosted website with a premium design they may not take you serious enough to do business with you.
• Lack of control over data – If you keep all of your blog posts on a website like Medium.com you’re putting your work at risk. What if the site shuts down or goes out of business? Your blog posts will go with it. I republish my work across the web, but I always keep the originals at home where they’re safe and sound.

The Good News

You can start your own self-hosted blog for as little as $3 and you can have it up and running in 10 minutes.

Today (August 9th), there’s a special sale which includes website hosting and a free domain name for only $2.95 per month. Bluehost, the company I host my website with, is offering this sale for today only. If you decide to take advantage of it, you could have the blog you’ve been dreaming of ready to go for the price of a happy meal.

You’re here because you want to be a writer, correct?

You want to have a place where people can find and follow your work, right?

You want to create a place that creates opportunities for your writing career, don’t you?

What are you waiting for?

Bluehost makes it dead simple to start your website. You’ll get hosting and a domain name through them. They also walk you through the installation of your website.

I even created a tutorial,  that walks you through the process of setting your website up through Bluehost.

After you sign up, read this amazing guide from my blogger buddy Michael Pozdnev on creating your first blog post.

Special Offer

I am a partner with Bluehost. This means I receive a commission, at absolutely no extra cost to you, if you decide to buy their services using my link.

I never recommend products I don’t believe in and use myself. They worked together with me to create this deal, and I know it’s in your best interest to get your website up and running today.

If the chance to create a space to help your writing career blossom for three dollars isn’t already appealing enough, I’ll add something more to sweeten the pot.

Anyone who decides to start their website today will receive a free 30-minute strategy session with me. We’ll talk about what you should do to get your blog off to a great start.

I am not an expert by any means, but I’ve made enough mistakes to know someone the ones you will make, and I want to help you avoid them.

If you’re ready to become the person of action you dream of being, sign up with Bluehost today, and send me an email at ayo@pro-writer.com once you’re done to schedule a time for us to meet.

You shouldn’t start a blog because I told you to.

You should start one because you’ve been toying around with the idea of getting your writing career off the ground for far too long.

Today is the perfect opportunity to get started, and the offer does go away by the end of the night tonight.

The choice is yours.

TL:DR

Today there’s a special hosting deal through Bluehost, which allows you to get your website up and running (domain name included) for just $2.95/month.

If you sign up using my link, I’ll give you a free 30-minute strategy session to help get your writing career on the right track.