Have you ever wondered how to start writing online? Are you curious about what it takes to become a successful digital content creator?
In his book The Art and Business of Online Writing, Nicolas Cole shares valuable insights on how to start writing online. He emphasizes the importance of consistent publishing and offers practical tips for choosing the right platform and finding your niche.
Read on to explore Cole’s advice and learn how you can kickstart your digital writing career.
How to Start Writing Online
Cole argues that the first step in becoming a successful online writer is consistently writing and publishing your material online. When discussing how to start writing online, he says it requires you to publish something at least once every other week—ideally more. At the beginning of his career, Cole gained popularity quickly by publishing something every day—and he argues that, the more frequently you publish, the quicker your career will progress. Writing consistently in this way is important for a few reasons:
- It indicates whether you have the drive and desire to become a writer. If you struggle to write consistently or dread the process, writing likely isn’t for you.
- It improves your technical abilities (like organization and word choice) and helps you discover your niche as a writer—your topic, audience, and style.
- It’s the only way to build an audience. If you’re not writing consistently, it’s nearly impossible to gain popularity and credibility because your content will get lost among the thousands of other pieces published every day.
(Shortform note: On Ship 30 for 30, Cole and Dickie Bush explain that writing and publishing every day does more than just help you become a successful writer. Committing to writing consistently will also strengthen your accountability and make it easier for you to follow through on commitments in other areas of your life. Further, when you write regularly you become more articulate, which in turn improves your confidence and helps you trust yourself more.)
In the following sections, we’ll discuss Cole’s tips for how to start writing online.
Tip #1: Choose Where to Post
Before you start writing, you must choose an effective platform to publish your content on. Cole says to avoid publishing content on a personal website or blog—this sets you up for failure because there’s no way to bring traffic to your site unless you already have an audience.
Instead, write on a social platform that 1) already has a large user base and 2) provides you with data to measure your success—for example, the number of views, likes, and comments each of your publications gets. This allows you to measure what’s working for you so you can determine your niche and produce more of that content. Some of the top sites Cole recommends are Quora, Medium, LinkedIn, and Substack. Choose the one most suited to the type of content you want to write, he says, and be ready to branch out to others as you gain popularity or the site loses popularity.
| How to Choose the Right Social Platform Other writers agree that being a successful online writer requires you to publish your content on social platforms that have large audiences and features to monitor your success. But some platforms are better than others—and you want to select a platform that has high traffic, high visit duration, and fits your targeted topics and demographic. Let’s look at the top online writing platforms and some statistics about each that can help you make an informed decision about where to write. LinkedIn: LinkedIn garners five billion visits per month with an average reading time of 731 minutes. Its main demographic is professionals aged 25-34 who are interested in business, shopping, software, games, and blogs. X (Twitter): X garners 18 billion visits per month with an average user duration of 1042 minutes. Its main demographic is people aged 18-34 who are interested in business, sports, shopping, software, and video games. Medium: Medium garners 430 million visits per month with an average reading time of 201 minutes. Its main demographic is people aged 25-54 who are interested in business, science, research, software, and technology. Substack: Substack garners 140 million visits per month with an average reading time of 244 minutes. Its main demographic is people aged 25-34 who are interested in business, sports, shopping, travel, and politics. Newsbreak: Newsbreak garners 68 million visits per month with an average reading time of 158 minutes. Their main demographic is Americans aged 55-63 who are interested in local news, weather, shopping, breaking news, and sports. |
Tip #2: Choose Your Niche
Once you’ve been writing consistently online for about six months, Cole says you should gather metrics and use those to focus your efforts on a specific niche. To be successful in the world of online writing, you must stand out by doing something unique and being the best at what you do. This requires you to determine where you’re the most successful and dedicate yourself to that area—if you spread yourself too thin by writing about too many different topics or for too many different audiences, you’ll never become the best at anything, just decent at a lot of things.
Step #1: Gather Data and Get Focused
Cole says the first step in determining your niche is looking at the likes, dislikes, views, and comments on your posts and seeing which topic is most popular with your audience. This is because your audience determines your fate—if they continue to read your content, you’ll gain popularity and credibility and can start making money. To grow and maintain that audience, you must continue giving them what they want.
For example, imagine that your posts about relationships are getting the most views, likes, and comments. While you don’t have to stop writing other things, you should dedicate the vast majority of your time to relationship pieces because this is the content that builds your audience.
Step #2: Narrow Down Your Topic
Once you’ve determined the topic you’ll focus on, Cole says you must narrow down your topic into a niche by getting as specific as possible with your subtopic, audience, and style. This is an ongoing process throughout your career—the longer you’ve been writing and the more data you gather using the above process, the more you can narrow down your niche until you eventually create an entirely new niche that no one else offers.
Subtopic
First, Cole says you must narrow the scope of your topic into a subtopic. For example, if the general topic is “relationships,” subtopics you might try are “relationship management” or “breakup management.” Under a subtopic like “relationship management” you could then create numerous articles with content like how to spot communication issues, how to spice up the relationship, and so on. Cole says you should continue trying out subtopics and use your data to determine which one to focus on for your niche.
Audience
Specifying your audience—who you’re writing for—will help you narrow down your subtopic further until it becomes a niche. For example, if you determine that the subtopic that works best for you is relationship management, especially the articles written for people with mental illness, you should try creating more content for this audience. Your subtopic will narrow into the niche “relationship management for people with mental illness.”
You could then narrow this down even further, for example, by targeting your advice toward people with a specific mental illness like depression. Use data in this way to continually focus your writing throughout your career.
Style
Finally, narrow your niche further by choosing your style. Cole says that your style will exist somewhere on a range between educating and entertaining. For example, if you’re a hard educator, your content might be very formal and include scientific research. If you’re a hard entertainer, your content might be largely opinion-based, with humor and drama to highlight your points. Your style can exist anywhere in between.
To narrow down your niche into something completely unique, Cole says you should adopt a style that’s unusual for your niche. For example, if your niche is “relationship management for people with depression” and most writers in this niche use a highly educational style, you can stand out by incorporating elements of entertainment like stories and humor.
