Making my way through Nicolas Cole's book “The Art and Business of Online Writing.” Here is what I am learning so far:
-Online Writing is defined by writing on specific platforms that already have an active audience. Building an audience is an ongoing process so that you when eventually publish your product, you will already have an audience who will be more than happy to pay for your content.
-practicing your writing in public is how you get that data [likes, shares, comments, views]. Data gives you insight into what is resonating and not resonating with your readers which will help to inform your content for next time and increase your reach.
-Cole incorporated his personal stories into his writing on GameRiot [a”social blog” for gamers], becoming one of the most popular writers on the site. He then discovered Quora, which he used everyday, writing Quora answers [because they all turned out to be creative writing prompts]. He was by no means an “expert,” just shared his story with anyone, in the hopes of it resonating with someone. He only answered the questions that he felt comfortable answering, based on his experiences. A copywriter by day, he took whatever he learned from that job as inspiration for his Quora answers. He didn't focus on his credibility [something I am working on] and instead focused all his energy into making his story relatable. Questions popped into his mind like: When did you learn the answer, what had happened in this experience...? He also combined his past learning experiences with what he learned that day at work.
-When Cole did go viral with a Quora post that ended up on the front page of Reddit, that's when he launched his own website and put out a product [an ebook based on the viral topic/story he shared], not the other way around. When he found out what people wanted, and not what he thought they wanted.
-After he reached “Top Writer on Quora” status, a major publication asked him to write for them. Cole discovered ghostwriting when one of his followers on Quora sent him an email asking if he would be interested in ghostwriting his book. He saw Cole's conversational writing style, thinking this would be a good fit for his business book. This is another good reason to practice in public.
-Perhaps my favorite insight from the book so far is that writers are all operating within a specific category. The goal is to find out what category you are writing in and to get as specific as possible. The ultimate goal of success in online writing, an alternative to competing with someone else in the same category, is to create your own category [something that is really exciting to me!]. Right now, I think my category is” learning”, broadly speaking, because what I am doing is documenting what I am learning. This blog consists of topics about mastery/skills/rapid learning/language learning/writing/online courses. It's about my personal story of learning in order to improve my professional life and to build marketable skills for the workplace.
If I gain more experiences and knowledge in another category of things I learned, then that can be my category, tailored to a specific audience. There's a lot of topics I've learned at the surface level to obtain a specific result, that I can go back to and master the application, sharing my experiences and insights with readers along the way.
These are:
-copywriting
-learning a language
-female health/menstrual cycle
-how to go about dating
-how to start an online business
-accelerated-learning techniques/mnemonics
-marketing[in general, not specifics]
-how to get a job in the informal job market
-how to be productive...
A lot of people in my past have told me that I have a lot of knowledge. This learning phase is all about implementation, experimentation. Not so much tons of input, as I already have that. I'm more focused on output now. And that output includes online writing using the advice from this book.