While writing can earn you enough money to live frugally, it won’t exactly make $5k/month.
At some point, you’ll have to diversify and multiply your income streams to make sure you can pay your bills at the end of the month.
This is the topic of today’s lesson.
1. Sell to Your List/Audience
The first obvious way to make more money is to sell stuff.
With time, people will send you emails with questions about XYZ.
These are the best occasions to engage your audience and ask them what they’d like to read from you.
You can subsequently create a course and sell it to them.
Sales aren’t restricted to courses. You can also sell products like clothing, digital products related to your niche (or not), or even food.
The Instagrammer Sylwia Tabor has created Carnivore Snax, a food product and brand which she sells nationally in the US.
I am selling the Summary Database on Gumroad which has made me hundreds of dollars without doing much.
What matters is to sell something people want.
You can test that out by asking them or simply posting a Stripe payment link saying “if I get $1000 of pre-commitment, I’ll build the product”.
2. Scale Your Content
The second way is to scale your content to other platforms.
Benjamin Hardy was Medium’s best worldwide writer from 2015 to 2018.
He subsequently moved to YouTube where he makes weekly videos.
The great thing about writing is that you can spin your content in plenty of ways:
- Ebooks
- Tweets
- LinkedIn excerpts
- YouTube videos
- YouTube shorts
- Instagram reels
- TikTok videos
As you do so, you increase your audience which enables you to sell more stuff, or you simply increase your viewership which enables you to earn more money.
Videos remain the top format of content consumption, so moving to video-making is never a bad idea.
The earnings potential on YouTube is also much higher than on Medium, or any other blogging platform for that matter.
3. Sell Your Skills
Another way to earn more money is to simply sell your skills.
The YouTuber Captain Sinbad offers YouTube coaching, for example.
The creator behind the Twitter account @cokedupoptions built a content agency after his fake character John W. Rich went viral.
Writing online is great as you will learn a lot about yourself – what you like, what you don’t like, what you’re good at, and what you’re not.
If you practice long enough, you’ll become better in your field than the average person. That’s when you can start selling your service.
Conclusion
We’ve learned how to choose a niche, which platforms to write on, what to write about, how to write, how to set up an email list, and how to scale and monetize content further.
It’s great to get started and to make your first $100, but there are a lot of things we didn’t talk about like titles, pictures, the seven content principles, storytelling techniques, the advantages and disadvantages of writing online, writing structures, and more.
This is why I have written a full e-book called Blogging Principles.
Blogging Principles is the sum of everything I have learned after more than three years as an online writer, +270 articles, over 1 million views, and…$20 000 earned purely due to writing content.
My aim with this book is to boost up-and-coming writers’ learning curve and reduce it from 18 months to 1-4 months.
You will learn in this book:
- How to choose high-quality topics the audience is interested in.
- How to develop a writing style your audience gets addicted to.
- What is the unique psychology of writing.
- How to operate the three mental shifts to become a highly productive writer.
- What are the advantages and pitfalls of writing online so you avoid the traps most writers fall into.
- How to use the four dimensions of a story to create high-quality articles.
- How to distinguish great writing from bad writing and what sets them apart.
- How to write titles people click on.
- What are the secret storytelling techniques the top 1% of writers use.
- What visual rules help you maximize reach and readership.
- How to choose the perfect picture that compels people to click on the article.
- The seven principles of top-performing content used by the best content creators around the world.
- How to find over +1000 article ideas to never run out of things to write.
- How to effortlessly get into flow to write as best as humanly possible.
- Which platforms will pay you for your content and how their business model works.
- How Medium’s algorithm works so you know how to maximize exposure and readership.
- How to get into the Medium partner program.
- How to best deal with comments.
- Who are the best Medium.com writers to follow and learn from.
- What are the free tools I use to research, write, and publish a great number of high-quality articles.
- How to get started to succeed as soon as possible.
- The secret to being a part of the 0.1% of online writers.
- One last chapter I cannot even tell you about.
And of course, there is a 30-day guaranteed refund, no question asked!
Check the book out on Gumroad.
If you’re serious to get your writing career to a professional level, this is the only book that you need!
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