The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention

It didn’t take me long to realize that readers didn’t just want to learn how to be better gamers themselves. They also wanted to be entertained. Watching Ming execute this strategy perfectly, I began to mirror my writing style off his. Every one of his posts was a blend between informative content and controversy-inducing tangents. In one single pa

For the rest of the afternoon, and the rest of the week, and ultimately the rest of the month, all I did was read answers on Quora. My feed was filled with a never-ending stream of questions—and attached to them, answers written like short stories. That’s what hooked me. Someone would ask the question, “What’s it like to be a serial entrepreneur?”

Everything changed for me when I started incorporating more of my real life into my writing. I wrote about how my parents, my teachers, even my peers at high school didn’t respect video games—but for some reason enthusiastically supported football, basketball, and other organized sports.

James Clear, the author of “Atomic Habits,” one of the best-selling self-help books of the past few years, is a perfect example. On his website he has a $299 video course called “The Habits Academy,” which is him, sitting in front of his bookshelf, essentially walking listeners through the same information that’s already in his book—just in video f

We are living in an age where sometimes the best path to making a living “doing what you love” is finding creative ways to monetize not necessarily the craft itself, but all the things that surround the craft: how you write, where you write, who you write with and learn from, your knowledge about writing, etc. You might discover you can make far mo

Final Thoughts If you want to become a successful, professional writer today, you have to become more than just a writer. You have to also be an entrepreneur.

But the truth is, the art of copywriting goes so much deeper than that. I’ve spent time around some of the most financially successful copywriters in the world, and I can tell you they spend as much time obsessing over which words will trigger the right emotions in their target readers as Dostoevsky probably spent refining Crime & Punishment. C

Sell A Course While writing a book might seem like the most “literary” way to make money, it’s usually not the fastest (or most profitable) path to earning a living as a writer. For context, in order to make $1 million dollars as a writer, you need 100,000 people to buy your $10 book. Or, you need 5,000 people to buy a $200 course.

The reason why I believe paid newsletters are going to be the future for writers is because they provide monthly subscription revenue. For example, I have no idea how much I’m going to earn every month on Medium. It’s the same problem I had when writing for Inc, where my earnings were tied to performance. When one of my articles goes viral, I make