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5 Simple Steps to Earn $10,000 Writing Online

2024-12-03 · Podcast or interview · Ali, Nicolas Cole · recording, 33:19 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, His medical past, AI, Sponsor segment present

In a Business Class episode cut from an interview, Nicolas Cole gives five steps to earn $10,000 a month from writing by selling a service rather than a product: find your information advantage, sell to businesses or start with free work, pitch the problem before the solution, talk in education rather than sales, and generate many leads, warm before cold; Ali adds a takeaway after each step.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: writing as an overlooked way to make money online; Nicolas Cole as visiting professor of Business Class

  • ★★ Ali says writing is an incredibly powerful way to make money online that most people overlook: digital writing, rather than novels or journalism. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says people who do digital writing well earn at least six figures a year, sometimes seven, from anywhere in the world on their own schedule. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali grew his second business to six figures while working full time as a doctor, and a few years ago quit the day job to focus on it. — 00:00:58 · first in: 2024-11-22, How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months
  • ★ Ali says his business now generates seven figures a year in profit. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali welcomes Nicolas Cole as visiting professor of Business Class, his series on starting and growing an online business, for a masterclass on building a $10,000-a-month writing business from scratch. — 00:01:27

00:01:52 — The biggest myth about online writing: you don't need attention; the fastest path is selling a service

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says writers wrongly think they need a lot of attention before they can monetise: you don't need a million followers. — 00:02:21
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole says the fastest path to monetising a craft such as writing is selling a service, not a product: ebooks and courses cost a few hundred dollars or less, and the lower the price, the more volume you need. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali says Feel-Good Productivity has sold about 200,000 copies but has not yet paid off its advance, and his royalty is about 15%. — 00:03:42 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says the cliché that nobody makes a living as a writer comes from selling a $20 book with no recurring revenue, of which the writer gets only 10%. — 00:04:12
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole: To replace a full-time income, Nicolas Cole says, a writer's fastest path is to find one client and offer to help solve problems in their business, not to become a viral creator. — 00:05:10

00:05:58 — Step one: identify your information advantage; a guide, not a guru

  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole's step one: instead of imagining the most legendary version of yourself, ask where you already have an information advantage. — 00:07:02
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says a doctor of a few years inherently knows more about medicine than people without that experience, but we all take our knowledge for granted. — 00:07:02
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says ghostwriting is the fastest path to monetisation because wherever you have an information advantage you are already fluent in that industry, as a biotech company would rather hire someone who understands medicine. — 00:08:00
  • ★★★ Ali's takeaway from Cole's step one: you only need to know a little more about something than the person you are selling to, not everything about the topic. — 00:08:00
  • ★★ Ali says it is okay to be a guide rather than a guru; many people hold themselves back thinking they are not enough of an expert. — 00:08:00
  • ★★ Ali says that if you are interested in a topic and have read about it or done it, you probably know more than most people, and you can be authentic as long as you do not fake expertise. — 00:08:47

00:09:16 — Sponsor read for Trading 212

  • ★ Ali says that he, like many medics he knows, would once have used his information advantage of getting into medical school to tutor applicants. — 00:10:15

00:10:27 — Step two: sell to businesses; Cole's $10,000 white paper; a small number of people paying a lot

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says tutoring sells to cash-poor students or their parents and is already price-anchored at an hourly rate. — 00:10:44
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole's step two: with your information advantage, find the most affluent customer, such as a biotech startup that has raised $30 million or a pharma executive, for whom $5,000 or $10,000 is nothing. — 00:11:10
  • ★★ Ali says many people would be amazed to realise that different people value money very differently, and businesses value it completely differently from individuals. — 00:11:34
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says he undercharged for a long time, starting out at $25 or $50 an article. — 00:12:02
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole: At about 27, pitching a client in LA to ghostwrite a crypto startup's white paper, Nicolas Cole asked $10,000; the client said he had been prepared to pay three times that. — 00:12:47
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says his ghostwriting academy tells ghostwriters they can sell an educational email course for $5,000, yet many cannot say the number the first time they pitch. — 00:13:16

  • ★★★ Ali's takeaway: the fastest path to a full-time living as a writer is to find a small number of people willing to pay a lot, never a large number paying a little. — 00:13:16

    “you need to find a small number of people willing to pay you a large amount of money.”

  • ★★ Ali says his bestseller Feel-Good Productivity does not make very much money: he makes maybe $2 or $3 per copy, maybe even less. (hedged) — 00:14:05 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

  • ★★ Of the ways to reach $10,000 a month, Ali says, the fewer customers you target and the higher the price, the easier they are to find and the easier the sale, though $5 from 2,000 people sounds easier. — 00:14:35
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole often advises not even trying to charge for the first thing you do. — 00:15:14

00:15:20 — Alternative step two: do free work

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says that in the beginning free work is a marketing cost that removes all friction. — 00:15:36
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole: Early on, Nicolas Cole says, cash is not the most valuable payment: you want to be paid in confidence and in a network that introduces you to other clients. — 00:16:57

  • ★★★ Ali's takeaway: at the start you are trying to learn, not earn, so doing work for free is often the fastest way to learn valuable skills and build a portfolio. — 00:16:57

    “At the start, you're trying to learn, you're not trying to earn.”

  • ★★ Ali says testimonials do not show what clients paid, so a client paying $10,000 need not know your testimonials came from free work. — 00:17:26

  • ★★ Ali says even free work should ideally be for a business rather than a consumer. — 00:18:05

00:18:29 — Step three: the problem pitch to a family friend's private practice; your niche is your network

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole: For a junior doctor who likes writing, Nicolas Cole suggests a simpler first client than a pharma executive: a family friend who is a doctor in private practice and wants LinkedIn content to promote it. — 00:18:59 · LinkedIn
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says applying for jobs on Upwork or Fiverr signals that you have no control, no pricing power and no leverage. — 00:20:06
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole: To charge more, Nicolas Cole says, flip the power dynamic: go to the client and educate them on a problem they didn't know they had, or one they know but haven't fixed. — 00:20:51

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole's pitch script anchors the prospect in the problem first, because people can't care about the solution until they care about the problem; then come the solution, its benefits and the outcome. — 00:21:55

    “they can't care about the solution until they care about the problem.”

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole: Only after the problem and solution does Nicolas Cole name the offer, for example monthly social content for $3,000 a month needing about 30 minutes of the client's time. — 00:23:03

  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole's phrase "in the beginning, your niche is your network": pitch first the people most likely to answer, such as a family friend who is a doctor. — 00:23:29

    “in the beginning, your niche is your network.”

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole's opening message asks about the prospect's problem, such as whether they struggle to get leads, and if they reply, offers a call to walk them through some ideas. — 00:24:04

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says pitching one client this way is significantly easier than building an audience of 100,000 people to sell 200 courses a month, every month forever. — 00:24:33

00:24:51 — Step four: talk in education, not sales; abundance versus scarcity

  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole's step four: every text, email, phone or Zoom call should sound like free consulting, pointing out a mistake to help rather than pitching. — 00:25:02
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole says that if you build the skill of talking in education rather than sales you will make money forever, because the bottleneck is that people usually don't know the problem they have. — 00:26:02
  • ★★ Ali says talking in education takes the fear out of selling. — 00:26:02
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says over-pitching signals scarcity and turns prospects off, while an abundance mindset, pointing out a problem just to help, makes them want to work with you, whether or not you are actually full. — 00:26:59
  • ★★★ Ali says the idea that the goal is to educate rather than sell helped him when he struggled with sales a few years ago. — 00:26:59
  • ★★ Ali cites the law of reciprocity: if you give someone something valuable for free, they will want to find a way to pay you back. — 00:27:48

00:27:56 — Step five: generate lots of leads; leaks and faucets, 50 warm and 100 cold, and not automating with AI too early

  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole: Asked how many cold emails it takes to get someone on a call, Nicolas Cole says not to open the door to cold leads until you have fully exhausted warm leads. — 00:28:10

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole sorts leads into leaks, people who have the problem you can solve, and faucets, people who don't need help but know many who do. — 00:28:34

    “I call them leaks and faucets.”

  • ★★ Nicolas Cole says to start with everyone you know: ask whether they have the problem, or whether they know anyone who needs help creating content on LinkedIn. — 00:28:57 · LinkedIn

  • ★★ Ali says asking whether someone knows anyone who needs the service feels like a gentler pitch than offering to help them directly. — 00:29:26
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole's ghostwriting programme tells people starting warm with their network to begin with a list of 50 people. — 00:29:26
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole: Going cold, Nicolas Cole says, you need to reach out to at least 100 people. — 00:30:04
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole: By 100 people Nicolas Cole means 100 quality prospects, each researched and messaged individually, with a Loom video and the problem-and-solution pitch for those who reply, not scraped emails. — 00:30:30
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole: If 100 well-researched prospects all say no, Nicolas Cole says, the method still works: find the bottleneck in your process, remove it and do it again. — 00:30:53
  • ★★★ Nicolas Cole: Asked about automating outreach with ChatGPT, Nicolas Cole says the big misunderstanding with AI is wanting to automate things you have never done: you can't automate what you haven't done. — 00:31:19
  • ★★ Nicolas Cole: Doing outreach by hand first seems the longer road, Nicolas Cole says, but it teaches you what drives the outcome so you can then leverage technology; skip it and the shortcut ends up being the longer road. — 00:32:02

00:32:35 — Ali's takeaway on AI and a pointer to his earlier video on writing online

  • ★★★ Ali's takeaway: go through the whole process yourself first so you understand how it works; AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can come later, but using them as a crutch early means you probably won't make it. — 00:32:35
  • ★★ Ali says his earlier video on how writing online made him a millionaire takes a creative-first, audience-first approach to making money through writing, a different method from Cole's. — 00:33:04

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Replying to a viewer who knows no one who would pay so much for writing, the channel says someone raising $1m+ for a business would almost certainly pay $30,000 for a white paper that lends it legitimacy, and the key is finding business owners like that. — creator comment
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Replying to a viewer who expected tips on writing better, the channel says people pay $5,000 for writing that will help them make $10,000: it needs to do its job, which is often to sell something. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: ghostwriting · information advantage · Nicolas Cole

Also: Projects: Business Class

Works: 1000 True Fans · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: Fiverr · LinkedIn · Upwork

Concepts: abundance mindset · guide, not guru · law of reciprocity · leaks and faucets

Products: ChatGPT · Claude · Loom

Also centred on ghostwriting: How to Make $10,000/Month Writing Online · VoicePal - a ghostwriter in your pocket 👻

Also centred on Nicolas Cole: How to Make Money Writing Online ✍️ · How to Make $10,000/Month Writing Online

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