A (0:00)

Do you want to make money online? Do you want to launch digital products? Maybe even make an online course or start a business? Then you have to be a digital writer, okay? If you want to build an audience on X or LinkedIn or Instagram, you have to know how to write. If you want to use ChatGPT or Claude and create prompts, you have to know how to write. Writing is the new software engineering, but not just any kind of writing, specifically digital writing. Writing is the new software engineering. It's the most valuable skill you can have in the age of AI building audiences and launching products online. But not just any writer, okay? You cannot be a legacy writer, all right? You can't be hemming away with a chapeau, lighting candles, smoking your corn cob pipe. You have to be a digital writer. So today we're going to do a whole crash course on the difference between legacy writing and digital writing and how you can get started writing in the digital age. Okay? So let's start with the differences between legacy writing and digital writing. If you think about it, you know, legacy writing is really anchored in the age of the printing press, right? I mean, back in the day, if you were the author of a novel, what was your feedback loop? Well, you spent two or three years working on your novel, and then you gotta wait for a publisher to pick it up, and then you gotta wait for the publisher to publish it. Then you gotta wait six more months for the magazine review to come out, right? And then it's not until three years later when you're down at a pub somewhere and you hear someone say, ah, Hemingway's novel sucked. Right? That's the feedback loop of legacy writing. With digital writing, it's very different. With digital writing, you can come up with an idea, you can hit publish on X or LinkedIn, and within 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, five minutes, an hour, you instantly get feedback on that idea. And so the whole game is essentially shortening your feedback loop from I gotta wait five years and get a publisher's permission in order to test ideas out in the world to I can just come up with an idea and I can tweet it and start getting feedback on that idea in 30 seconds or. Right? So what are some differences between legacy writing and digital writing? Well, legacy writing is what I like to call practice in private. Okay? So if you're a legacy writer, you think you're the smartest person in the room. So you sit in your cabin in the woods and you light your candle, you got your chapeau, your corn Cob pipe. You're staring out the window, and you're waiting for inspiration to strike, right? That is what the world of legacy writing believes makes you a real writer. Digital writing is the complete opposite. Digital writing is what I like to call practice in public. Okay, so instead of you thinking that you're the smartest person in the room, what do you do? You write with your readers. All right? So you put an idea out into the world, and then you see how that idea performs. You gather feedback with your readers in a specific niche. And when you notice something working, you double down on it. And when you notice something not working, you go, ah, maybe that's not my niche. Maybe that's not the best topic for me. Okay, a second difference is, legacy writing is you wait for permission. Okay? So in order for you to write in the legacy world, for you to get a book deal, you need someone else to give you permission. You need a publisher to say, I choose you. You are worthy. You are a good writer. Well, in the world of digital writing, you can give that permission to yourself, right? You don't have to ask for anyone's permission to write on X or LinkedIn or create shorts on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram. You can. You give yourself permission, and that is what allows you to practice in public, which makes the flywheel spin faster and faster. Right? So why. I still don't understand why people today think that the way to become a successful writer is to live by these old rules. The world today is very different than it was in 1920. 1950, 1980. Right? You should be practicing in public, testing ideas with your readers, and you should be giving permission to yourself. The third difference between these is, is that in the world of legacy writing, these writers write for their readers. So I'll explain what this means. If you're a legacy writer, you think you're the smartest person in the room, right? You think if I just quit my job and run away from society and have a couple months to myself to focus on my work, I'm gonna produce this magnum opus, and I'm gonna emerge and everyone is gonna see me as this genius, right? You are writing for. You think that you know what's best, and then you're going to share it with the world, or you're going to do this big grand reveal, and then everyone's going to see you as brilliant. Okay? In the world of digital writing, that is not what you're doing. You are writing with your readers. Okay? If you're a digital writer, you do not think you're the smartest person in the room. You're not trying to write for your readers. You're not trying to do this big grand reveal. What you're doing is you're writing with readers. So you're putting ideas out into the world. You're seeing which ones resonate, and then you're giving readers more of what they like and less of of what they clearly don't like. Okay? Which leads into the next framework, which is the Lean writing framework. Lean writing 101. Okay, so if you've read the book the Lean Startup, the idea is basically, don't spend three years building a product before you know if that product is something people are interested in. Right? So in the Lean Startup, you treat your startup like an iterative process. You want to ship what's called an mvp, Right? Right. A minimum viable product. You want to get that product in people's hands, and then based on the feedback that you gather, you then want to improve the product for the user. Okay, Lean Writing is the exact same idea. Instead of starting with let me go write a 300 page book, why don't you start with a tweet? Why would you start with a 300 page book when you could summarize the entire idea in 180 characters? Right. If that idea performs well, you should expand this into maybe a LinkedIn carousel. Right? Or maybe an essay, maybe an atomic essay, maybe a blog post. You take something that works, you expand it into different formats. Well, what is an essay? What is a carousel? What is 100 tweets? Well, all that is is a chapter, right? Maybe that's also a newsletter. It's the same idea. You're just taking something that works and you're expanding it into longer form and across different platforms. That's all you're doing. Okay? And eventually, you know, when you have, you know, 20 newsletters or 20 essays, that's really 10 chapters, which means you've written a book. Okay? Now, oftentimes, when I explain this idea, an objection I hear often is, okay, yeah, but Cole, that's not how all the most successful writers do it. The most successful writers quit their jobs and run away to a cabin in the woods, and they spend five years writing their perfect novel or their perfect nonfiction book, and then they put it out into the world and they're a best seller. And what you don't know is that is not how most bestsellers are written. Okay? Most people don't know that the book, the Tipping Point. So if you've read the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It's one of the best selling nonfiction books of the past 20 years. The tipping Point did not start as a book. The Tipping Point started as an article that he wrote for the New Yorker back in 1996. When a publisher went to Malcolm Gladwell and said, we want you to write a book, their first question was, what is the most popular topic that you've written about? Malcolm Gladwell goes, I don't know. Let me look at my analytics. He pulls up all the articles that he wrote for the New Yorker, and he goes, I wrote this piece called the Tipping Point. They go, great, why don't you just take that piece and expand it into 300 pages? He goes, that's a great idea. What. What should the title be? The title should be the exact same title as the blog post that already worked. The Tipping Point is just an expanded version of essentially a viral article, okay? You go, Cole, that happened 20 years ago. That's not what's happening today. Okay, well, what about the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck? That book, that orange book that you see in airports, the exact same thing happened whenever it was five years ago, eight years ago, publisher goes to Mark Manson and goes, hey, you're a successful blogger. We want you to publish a book. What should the book be about? Mark goes, I don't know. You tell me. They go, well, what was your most viral blog post? He goes, I wrote this one called the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. They go, great, you should just add some stories and expand that into a 200 page nonfiction book. What should the title be? The title should be the exact same title as the viral blog post. Great. So he does that. It becomes one of the best selling nonfiction books of the past 15 years. 20 years, okay? Same thing with atomic habits. Same thing. And this isn't just true for nonfiction. This is true for fiction too. Like if you ever read the Twilight series. Not saying that I have just the Twilight series, okay, that is also based on viral fan fiction that showed up on an underground forum and there was so much data from readers saying, this is what I'm interested in, that I want more of it. So you might not realize it, but lean writing is everywhere, okay? And it's just this idea of realizing you aren't the smartest person in the room. You don't have all the answers. And it's a much better strategy to start with atomic forms of writing and then expand them as time goes on. That's all lean writing is, actually. So my book, the Art and business of online writing. This is a great example of lean writing in action. Every single idea in this book, I have written about 100 times for free Elsewhere on the Internet, I've written Quora answers about these topics. I've written medium articles about these topics. I've written tweets, threads, carousels, essays, newsletters. All of the content in this book is scattered around the Internet, and you can find it for free. So why do people buy the book, then? Well, the reason people buy the book is because, A, they don't want to go spend 100 hours scouring my entire library of content trying to piece it all together. B, they want the compressed, cleaner version. Right. You could piece it together. It would just take a lot of time and a lot of effort. And C, maybe you want the physical copy on your desk. Okay, so if you want to write nonfiction, especially a nonfiction book, you shouldn't start by writing a book. You should start with writing and creating all of this content first, and then realize that you can repurpose all of this content into a book, and you're going to have to do this work anyway. How do you think I've driven over a million dollars in sales for this book? Okay. How I've done that is by tweeting about it and creating carousels about it and writing essays about it and sharing newsletters about it. So you're going to have to do this work anyway. You might as well do it up front and then turn it into a book thereafter. Okay. Now, you might be thinking, cole, that all sounds great, but that's easy for you to say. I'm a beginner, I'm starting at zero. And all of this sounds really hard. Well, I hate to break it to you, but everyone starts at zero. When I started writing on QUORA Back in 2013, it's not like I logged in and I won. I won the jackpot, and they instantly gave me 10,000 followers to start with. Every person starts at zero. That is what makes writing online such a fun game because it has democratized access to distribution. Okay. And writing online is what I like to call a lottery game. So most people don't know this about how algorithms work today, but algorithms today are not based on how many people follow you. Okay? Algorithms are based on your for you page, your for you newsfeed. So if you notice, if you open any social platform, if you open X or Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn, the majority of the content you see in that feed is not from people you follow. Maybe 10% is from people you follow. The other 90% is from people that you don't follow. But the algorithm says, I think you'd also be interested in this, and I think you'd also be interested in this, and I think you'd also be interested in this and this and this and this. Right? So what that means is actually having 200,000 followers or two followers, it doesn't impact your ability to play the lottery game, okay? Instead, the thing that impacts your success writing online is whether or not you keep publishing. Every time you hit publish, you are buying a little lottery ticket. So you go, I got another lottery ticket, another one, another one. And all of these might be zeros. And then all of a sudden, one day you got a winner, and this one gets 6 million views, right? And that is why writing online is a lottery game. And so the only thing you have control over is your output. It's not about followers. It's not about you being seen as some huge expert. It's not about you having all the credibility in the world, okay? The only thing that matters is whether or not you keep hitting publishers. And I continue to learn this to a painful degree. So, actually, just last week, you know, I'm publishing upwards of six to eight times a day on X and maybe twice a day on LinkedIn and two to three times a day on Instagram, right? Each platform has different volume. Just the other day, I, quote, tweeted someone else's meme on X and I shared one sentence of opinion, and that post, one sentence, got 6 million views on X. Whereas everything else that I publish maybe gets 2,000 views, 4,000 views, 5,000 views, 10,000 views. Okay? So even for me, the things that you think, oh, I spent 20 hours working on this piece. This is my masterpiece. Everyone's gonna love it. That's the thing that's gonna get no distribution. And then one day, you're gonna do something in four minutes and you're gonna hit publish, and that thing's gonna get 100,000 views or a million views. And. And that's how the game works. It's a lottery game, okay? So it doesn't matter how many followers you have. Anyone can play the game. The only thing you have control over is if you keep hitting publish. Okay, now here's my favorite topic of all. What is the point of all this? Why should you write online? Right. Yes. Maybe you want to build an audience. You want to drive traffic to your business. You want to launch digital products. You want to monetize side hustle main gig doesn't matter. Okay, but none of those are the real benefit of writing on the Internet. The real benefit of writing on the Internet is what I like to call scaling yourself. Okay, so this is a bit of an advanced topic, but you're smart, so I trust you can follow along. When you meet up with someone and you go grab coffee with them at a coffee shop, what do you do? Especially if it's your first time meeting? Well, what you typically do is you introduce yourself. You share a little bit about who you are. And the way that you help the other person understand who you are is maybe you share some stories about you, right? You're like, oh, I grew up in Chicago. When I was a teenager, I was a pro World of Warcraft player, I played hockey all growing up, I really wanted to make it to the NHL, right? I'm gluten free, right? There's like, you share all these random little stories about you and that's what helps the other person understand you understand who you are. Maybe you also talk about some experiences, right? So you're like, oh, yeah, common ground. I just got back from Finland or I just went to France, or yeah, I speak a little French. Oh, you speak a little French, right? You talk a little bit about your experiences. Third, especially if it's a work interaction, what do you do? You share ideas, you share frameworks. You might explain to the other person, here's how I think about solving problems, right? Here's how I, I just achieved this really cool outcome. Here's how I did it, right? Especially when you connect with someone in a similar industry, what do you do? You share alpha, right? You're like, hey, have you tried this? This just worked for us. It would probably work for you. What you don't realize is that every time you have a conversation with someone, you are doing these things and you are doing them manually. So every coffee conversation, you're telling the same stories, you're sharing the same experiences. You're probably repeating the same ideas over and over and over again. Especially if you work in a service business or you have some sort of service business. Like I had a ghostwriting agency for a while, I was repeating these over and over and over again. Multiple meetings a day. So what is the true benefit of writing online? The true benefit is that you can scale yourself. Why repeat the same story over and over and over again? Or when I could make a video that includes those stories, why would I talk about the same experiences over and over and over again? When I could post a picture, maybe on X or LinkedIn and be like, hey, I just got back from Finland. Anyone else been there? What was your favorite part? Ideas. Why would I repeat the same frameworks over and over and over again? I could turn that into all sorts of different content. And you don't realize how powerful this is until you go and have a meeting with someone or you get on the call with someone, a potential client, maybe someone you want to network with, and they start repeating your stories and your experiences and your ideas back to you. That is what it means to scale yourself. So instead of doing all these things manually, you create leverage by turning your stories and experiences and ideas into content. And all of a sudden that allows you to meet more people, connect with more of the right people, and accelerate all your conversations. Because they don't have to start from zero, that they can start from level one or two or three, because they already know all these things about you. This is the true benefit of writing online. Which leads to the big question at the end. When are you done? You are never done. At what point would you want to stop? Right? If writing online is how you scale yourself, why would you stop that process? You're gonna keep growing, you're gonna keep changing, you're gonna keep having new experiences, you're gonna keep learning new things, you're gonna keep developing new frameworks. So when are you done? Well, you're never done because you're never done growing. And so as long as you are living and learning and experiencing, you should continue writing on the Internet, because all that's going to do is crystallize everything that you've experienced, everything that you've learned. It's going to crystallize and clarify your thinking. It's going to allow you to scale yourself, and it allows you to build a library of content that you can leverage forever. So you are never done. If you want to be successful in the age of AI and building audiences and fast moving social platforms, you have to write online. You have to build the skill of writing. And if you want to build the most leverage for yourself in any industry, in any niche, in any business, you have to start writing online and you are never done.