How to “Hit the Jackpot” in Your Writing Career (Even if You’re Making No Money Right Now)

Can you still go from zero to a full-time living online?

By the time I’d starting blogging, blogging was already dead. In the few years before I started writing, blogging enjoyed a time of abundance and a lot of bloggers became successful partially because they were at the right place at the right time.

There was a point in time where you could write an article for your personal blog, share it on Facebook, and go viral. Before Facebook dramatically shrunk the organic reach on the platform, you could build an entire career off the back of a few viral articles shared on the platform. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, credits this period of time with helping him achieve the massive audience he has today.

Not too long ago, you could more easily build an audience using searching engine optimization (SEO). Basically, if you keyword stuffed your article, bought some links from personal blog networks (PBNs) or created them yourself, you could rank your articles on the first page of Google, get a bunch of traffic, and then use that traffic to build an email list that you could sell products to.

Kindle publishing used to be a proverbial money printing machine. One “author” cites how he made a six-figure living by first writing a few self-published books and then hiring ghostwriters to write books in popular topics on kindle. Authors like Steve Scott, who made their bones in the early stages of Kindle publishing, made upward of $50,000 month on the nascent platform.

There was a time where you could write a guest post on a popular website and pick up a bucketload of subscribers with a single blog post. Jeff Goins, a popular writer of the old-guard, did exactly this and built an email list of 10,000 subscribers in 18 months by writing a ton of guest posts. He also benefited from SEO traffic and built a massive audience to sell his premium online course called tribe writers, which has since become a multi-million dollar product.

Speaking of online courses, there was a point in time where you just had to build up enough of an audience to sell any online course to and you could create a healthy income to support your writing. Online courses were, at one point, a revolutionary way of making money online because the perceived value of courses was much higher than something like an ebook, which meant you could charge 10x the price or more. Since the boom of online courses, they’re still a viable strategy, but not nearly as lucrative as they once were. And students aren’t as trusting as they used to be after having taken many online courses without getting success from them.

In the first year or two of my own writing career, I’d managed to get on the Huffington Post when it was still reputable. They had an editing team I’d work with on articles and the ones I published helped grow my audience to the tune of thousands of subscribers. Then, one day, they abandoned the editorial model and opened up the platform to all contributors, thus diluting the pool, shrinking the reach, and ultimately dooming the success of the platform. Later on, I published articles on Thrive Global, a sister company of HuffPo, which inevitably followed the same trajectory, which led to me leaving that platform too.

By the time I found Medium, most of the blogging strategies had been used, overused, and used some more. People were questioning the validity of strategies like SEO, guest posting, and getting published on websites like the Huffington Post. Blogging was pronounced dead and there seemed to be more teachers of blogging success than actual successful bloggers.

I’d already seen many a blogger come and go — push super hard to build a successful blog only to burn out when the strategies didn’t work as quickly as they’d hoped. Me? I liked blogging. I liked writing. I wanted to become a writer. So I kept my head down and kept writing wherever I could. One day I found Medium, right place right time, and I published an article there. That was four years ago. I never stopped.

What’s the moral of the story? Platforms come and go. Platforms have sweet spots where it’s the best time to be on the platform as well as times where the platform becomes ‘mature’ or ‘saturated.’ Keep writing anyway. Your time will come. Luck is a factor, not just in writing success, but all success. The best you can hope for is to put yourself in a position to get lucky.

Throughout my entire writing career, I’ve ridden the waves of platforms that came and went. Also, I still use strategies that have been pronounced dead because they’re not dead. I just published a book on Kindle this year that has already made $20,000. I get SEO traffic to my website — SEO can’t be dead as long as Google exists. I have an online course.

When people say a strategy is dead, they just mean it’s not super easy to execute anymore. When something’s pronounced dead, it just means the weak writers will quit.

If you want to hit the jackpot in your writing career, the key is to keep playing the game and never stop. I can’t tell you how many private conversations I’ve had with writers who told me they wished they wouldn’t have taken sustained breaks on this platform. It does, indeed, suck to suck. I can count on one hand the writers who’ve been here as long as I have and have been as consistent. I won’t name names, but they’re very popular writers.

You can become a popular writer, too. But you can’t be weak. You can’t be impatient. You can’t take long breaks and quit. I swear, if you just write, improve your craft, and wait for all the pretenders to fade into the background, all that’ll be left is you and a handful of other writers.

You’ll see promising opportunities for writers and you’ll seize them, just like I did with this platform. Keep your eyes open and do the best you can with the current tools you have available to you. Don’t complain. And always remember that no matter what, the written word will never die.

You want to focus on becoming a great writer so you’ll have an unfair advantage when the next major trend comes. This current wave isn’t dead either. Harder? Hell yeah. Dead? No.

“But the competition!” You say. Trust me, just do the work while 99 percent of your contemporaries quit like they inevitably will.

The competition will cease to exist.

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