How I Made $150,000 From Writing in 30 Days

And what it took to get there

Photo by Austin Poon on Unsplash

If you asked me whether I would ever make money from writing, I would have said no.

I have no special skill, gift, or even a writer to mentor me. In the last 30 days, I’ve made more than $150,000 from writing.

It was after checking my three Stripe accounts for the month that I realized, “Holy sh*t, there’s $150,000 of income because of my writing.”

So here’s the deal: If I can make money from writing, you definitely can too. The reason for this article is the most common questions I still get are:

1. How do I get started?

2. How does typing words actually make money?

So without any fluff, BS, broken promises, dreams of Lambos and selfies with Mark Zuckerberg – I’m going to tell you the answer to these two questions after doing it successfully for 5+ years.

Ready? Let’s f*cking go.

From 2014–2017

I made $0 from writing during these years.

This happened because I didn’t know what I was doing, thought people paid for reading words, and refused to invest in myself and understand how monetisation works. I was also a really sh*t writer.

You can definitely do better than me by avoiding a few of the pitfalls.

The pitfalls:

• Don’t start a website blog

• Don’t write where there are editors or publications that must approve your work

• Try a few different platforms to see which ones you like (Substack, X, LinkedIn)

• Do not ask for free help from more successful creators. They’ll ghost you.

• Do not spend a dollar on logos, paying to boost articles, or portrait photos.

• Stay away from writers who complain all the time about low earnings.

• Ignore anyone who says “making money online is a scam” or “selling products is just a pyramid scheme.” They’re too skeptical and belong in cubicle jobs.

By avoiding these pitfalls, you can build momentum quicker than I did.

From 2017-2021

(I warned you I was sh*t.)

I started making a little money selling eBooks. My big break came when Medium dot com turned on monetisation. I quickly went from a few hundred dollars to massive paydays like $70,000 a month. I thought I was king of the hill and had a big ego.

More pitfalls I learned during this time:

• Never trust curators or editors. They will often choose content based on their weird beliefs or political views.

• Never write on a platform like Medium where they have overly loud political views and hidden political agendas. They will artificially elevate the worst content and turn the community into a cesspool.

• Never fully trust employees of tech companies. They’re politicians who say nice words but will ultimately do whatever the CEO or investors tell them to do.

• Build an email list and forget the f*cking word “followers.” When I recently left Medium I lost all 326,000 followers.

• Platform money and ad-share revenue can be taken off you at any time.

• You can be banned from any platform at any time. I’ve been banned from LinkedIn something like 9 times for doing nothing wrong (their words).

• Selling information is the worst way to make money. I sold loads of courses during these years. The one-time purchases felt great but the revenue was unreliable. And getting results from information alone rarely happens.

• Thinking you know everything is a curse. Regularly get help from people ahead of you to learn monetisation faster. My income tripled when I started working with high-end coaches.

• Focus on getting customers, not followers.

Now you have an anti-playbook that’ll stop you from being broke for years and trying to sell useless info products that AI has permanently disrupted.

Getting started

I want to make this so easy that you can’t screw it up.

Write on one platform and race your way to 5000 followers

This is what I would do now if I were starting again.

(So you know I’m actually following my own advice, go look at what I just did on Threads. I raced my way to 7000 followers in a few months without outside help, hacks, commenting pyramid schemes, or ads.)

Write daily

Anything less means you’re not serious. And treating this like a hobby will force you to waste 5 years like I did.

Forget about the niche

You have no idea what the niche is at the start.

People on social media follow humans. We’re more interested in people who post about the why of a topic than the how to. If we want the how-to we’ll just go to Youtube and find it.

Being interesting, different, and sharing your world view is way more powerful than a stupid niche like “The Excel Guy.” And if you change your mind about the topic later on, it’s easy to post different content without confusing people.

Whatever you think about your target audience is wrong.

I follow a feminist writer on Threads, even though I’m not female or have an opinion about feminism. I follow her because she’s interesting and different.

Think about your paid offer on day one

What will you sell?

That question helps you know what to write about. Delaying that decision to a few years' time while you “build an audience first” means you’ll likely end up with the wrong audience – and you’ll probably just attract freebie-seekers.

The best writing ideas come from actually living life and going outside

I’m not the greatest writer.

People read my work because I do stuff. I experiment, I fail, I make babies with my wife, I lose $1.2M in a day. If you want better writing ideas go live. And most of all, go take a few risks.

Writing more fortune-cookie essays or lifeless lists of quotes helps no one. Share a story and have the guts to be vulnerable enough to tell us how you really felt.

That sort of writing is magnetic and people do weird and wonderful things when they discover it.

Use someone else’s platform to build an owned platform

Loads of writers get stuck renting attention from the big-tech overlords.

My approach was different. Use someone else’s app or social media platform, but unapologetically direct everyone to an owned platform like a newsletter.

If you don’t look after yourself, platforms will rob you blind and rip holes in your underwear while you're sleeping. Creeps. Use and abuse platforms. When Medium stopped working for me, I just deleted the app and moved on.

No “I’m leaving Medium” or goodbye posts. Just “F you, go woke, then broke, and have fun trying to sell poetry and chicken soup for the soul essays to strangers for $5 a month.” That’s the winning mindset. Look after you.

The goal is to find a place where you can write without distraction and say something useful, inspiring, or entertaining consistently.

Format your work like a pro

Insert lots of white space between your sentences. Use high-quality images and take the time to find the right photo to match with your article — remember, an image you choose is just as much a statement as the words themselves.

Making MONEY

Most writers get stuck building audiences for years without ever making a dollar.

Instead, what I’d do if I started again is start making money on day one. I’ll never forget meeting this weirdo on Twitter named Joshua. He had 200 followers, bad writing, and had been doing it 5 seconds. He made $50K a month.

The myth that followers or audience size matters is a joke. In fact, I’ve found the writers with the biggest audiences make the least money. They overcompensate for the wrong metric: followers.

Here is how you make money from writing:

A paid column

Write on Medium for royalties

Book sales

Podcast with sponsorships/ads

Youtube ad revenue share

Monetize your existing skills with a service

I’ve found writers want income streams to be s*xy.

So they buy some Kindle Entrepreneur course with a bunch of ChatGPT auto-pilot prompts and sales funnels that are supposed to make you money while you sleep.

The best way I’ve made money is selling a service. I’ve helped people build digital businesses for the last 5 years. I guess you could call it business consulting, although I hate f*cking labels more than I hate LinkedIn bios.

What I realized in 2020 is you can take a skill you developed at a job or on the weekend, and sell it one-to-many via the internet. The ROI is easy for customers to measure because you’re just directly helping them with a problem.

As demand increases for your skills, you raise prices. Getting to big income months with this approach is far easier than trying to sell 3000 x $5/month subscriptions to software or newsletters that people will probably cancel next month.

Whenever I get carried away with monetisation, I ask myself:

“How can I help people solve real problems where they get a tangible ROI that’s more than they paid me?”

This mental model will prevent you falling for passive income dreams, bad business models, and guru thirst traps designed to exploit and rape your mind.

Do a paid newsletter (not how you think)

This is pocket money only.

You probably will never make $100K a month selling words via email, even though the gurus teach this garbage.

The point of social media is to attract people to you. It’s an acquisition system. The point of a newsletter is to nurture existing relationships. A small percentage of them will eventually become customers.

I still prefer to monetize my Substack newsletter, because while it won’t make me a millionaire, it is a solid passive income stream.

The other reason I did it is to align incentives.

If I don’t help Substack make money, then why the heck would they help me promote my newsletter? They won’t.

Paid community

This is one of the hardest business models to pull off.

Why? Most communities are a firehose of unorganised content, random people, loads of channels, and noise. Just like we don’t want more emails because we’re drowning in emails… we also don’t want more traditional communities.

I’ve been lucky to build a high-quality community but it was damn hard.

Here’s why it worked:

• Less is more

• Small number of channels

• A higher price point to filter for quality

• Smaller number of people (1000s doesn’t work)

• Focus the community around an outcome (not a topic)

• Simplest community app for everyone to use

• Application forms to join

• Aggressive moderation

• Weekly interactions

The mistake people make with this one is they say “I want to help people connect.” This is the same pain in the ass mindset the average LinkedIn user has who sends out 101 “let’s jump on a call to network and pick each other’s brains.”

We’re too busy to connect. We’re too busy for off-topic conversations.

Experiential learning

Video courses are dying.

So are “growth guides” or “get a 1000 followers on Substack and buy a Lambo.” No one cares. 90% of people will never log in and do the course.

Why?

They had good intentions but got busy. And the 10% who did do the course will never take action on it. And the 1% who do take action will hit a roadblock when they start and have no way to get help, so they’ll quit or stay in beginner hell for a few years.

Experiential learning is different. It’s social learning. It’s outcome-based. There are systems, AI prompts, social elements, leaderboards, gamification, etc.

You’re trying to create an experience where people feel something instead of learn something.

Because when we feel things we’re more likely to take action. Emotion creates motion. This new category is mostly untapped. I’ve been in the space 3 years and done well from it. The nuances mean it’s hard to reverse engineer.

Help people have an experience, not get some information.

Ghostwriting

Early in my journey I’d get requests to help people with LinkedIn.

I eventually started writing posts for people because they didn’t have the time or skills to do it themselves. Every leader, business, and individual now needs content or they become invisible. Someone needs to write it.

With average writing skills that can be you.

Consulting

I also used to consult to people 1-1 on how to grow on LinkedIn.

What I learned taught me the real problems people have. The gurus crapped on about editing bios and commenting on people’s posts until you go blue in the face. By having real clients, I learned the biggest problem was:

“What if my boss sees my posts? Or HR doesn’t like what I’m posting?”

Eventually, this led me to create a wildly popular LinkedIn course. I don’t say that to brag. I tell you because it taught me a lesson:

Selling an idea as a service first teaches you what real customer pain points exist.

When I sold my LinkedIn course it was different to everyone else because it focused on pain points no one else was talking about. That’s why I found it’s better to offer as service first, then create a productized version of it later (not to start with).

My unusual path to $150K in 30 days

The bulk of the $150K in 30 days that I made came from selling services.

Solving real problems for real people makes you more money than any other type of business model. I did this through group coaching, 1-1 consulting, and mentoring.

The smaller part of the $150K came from affiliate revenue income from both software and services, paid newsletter subscriptions, paid community, and one-off digital products.

(The $150K actually turned into 3 times that through investing, but that’s a story for another day.)

Well-paid writers have lots of the following

One final bit of advice is not to forget the soft skills.

• Honesty

• Humility

• Kindness

These skills take you from earning $10,000/month, which is decent, to earning $150,000/month. No one wants to read the work of a writer who is in love with themselves and thinks their sh*t doesn’t stink.

Be yourself in all its glory.

That’s how to make $150,000 in 30 days

Now all that’s left is to ask yourself whether you would like to do the same — because you totally can.

If a skinny guy from Australia with no grammar or spelling skills can make $150,000 in 30 days, then you can too.

Remember to be helpful and enjoy the process more than the money.

Tell me in the comments section how you or people you know have made money from writing (I read every comment).

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P.S. I’ve got some huge news coming up next week…

It’s actually a personal announcement, but I’m combining it with some great news for you if your looking to start or grow a digital business.

No action needed from you now.

Just watch your inbox next week ;)