“How I Made $39,589 From Writing In January”
Me, seeing this in my inbox: *EYE ROLL*
I’ve written my fair share of articles like that before. You know, the ones where I talk about how much money I’ve made or how much money I will make from writing.
The one thing every author who writes this type of article doesn’t realize is one simple thing:
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares that you made $10,000. We don’t need to know the details of your income, bro. Why do you need to shove how much you made in front of everybody’s face? Suppose you were walking to work and some random guy popped up in front of you yelling,
“HEY GUYS BY THE WAY I MADE $10,000 LAST MONTH”
You’d likely think about macing him.
So why do we shower people with attention when they write headlines with a similar message?
We certainly don’t care about how much money somebody made. We care about something else.
What we care about is how we can do it.
We’re not reading your story to pat you on the back for making $10,000 in a month. We’re reading your story to figure out how we can steal your process.
But therein lies another problem.
We think it’s some mystical thing, right? As if they have this secret formula for success that’s unreplicate-able?
I made that word up.
I’ll save y’all a lot of time. Here’s the steps to follow if you want to succeed as a writer on any platform:
Write a lot.
Write a lot.
Write a lot.
95% of writers can’t even write at a proper cadence that’ll support income like $10,000 per month. So why are we reading about all the other useless shit the author’s telling us to do?
It’s simple. Write a lot. Write like 2 articles per day. Absolutely kill it with the productivity. That’s something you’ll never learn to do in a “How To” article because you can’t teach work ethic.
You want facts? Most people who read articles like that don’t have the work ethic required to make that kind of money online.
My Issue Isn’t With These Kinds Of Articles
On their face, I don’t have an issue with these kinds of articles. I have an issue that so many of them are being written so fast.
That’s clickbait for you, though.
When writers see a certain formula works, they’ll start dog-piling on top of it to get their share. The problem is, this formula requires writers to puff out their chest and slowly dance around what actually matters to succeed to make you think you’re getting some new insight.
We all know what actually matters, though:
Exorbitant amounts of practice.
Tweaking of what works.
Doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
It’s that simple. You can learn how to be a great writer on your own if you commit to writing 100 blog posts. There. That’s what all the writers who write shit like that don’t want you to know. That’s your goal. But hardly anybody will do it because they don’t have the work ethic for it. You can’t really teach work ethic to people who are old enough to write online. It must be instilled in people when they’re growing up.
If you’re old and lazy, you’ll likely continue being old and lazy unless you have some divine turning point in your life.
I tell people all the time that you can learn how to be a great writer. That’s true. You’re not born as a good writer — you become a good writer with practice and dedication.
What’s hard is to put in the work to get there. And none of these writers bragging about their earnings talk about that enough.
It’s a shit ton of work, and that’s where the rubber really meets the road. We can sell you a dream life all we want and act like it’s possible for anyone, but the truth is it’s only possible for people who can commit to writing 100 blog posts.
That’s your advice.
Write 100 blog posts. Test out styles, topics, headlines, and publications. If you do those two things, you’ll likely succeed on your own in due time. If not, then, well, I’m sorry.
It’s just not going to happen for you.
You can spend a lifetime reading self-improvement and business books. Guess what? They only work when you put the books down and do some work! Who would have thought that?
Great, honest, no BS article. So many people keep reading those articles looking for a magic tip instead of just doing the work. I have to admit to being one of those people. You know you’re just not putting in the needed effort but you feel like you’re doing something by reading those clickbait articles. ☺️