How Writing on the Internet Made Me $1,000,000
The opposite of what you think. Not clickbait.
Your first million dollars is odd.
Nothing changes and you 100% don’t feel rich, even though you should. I hit this milestone years ago from writing online. That means I get emails every day from people wanting to do the same.
Here’s my blanket response for how I made $1M from writing online.
1. Write on social media
Every day. Pick a topic you are crazy about. Reply to people’s comments. Have fun. Format your writing so it can be read on a phone. Ignore hateful comments.
2. Don’t try to monetize on day one
Focus on building a small audience first. Figure out what they want. Find their problems. When you find them, look for the pain.
Create a service to solve the problem. Promote it to your tiny audience. Make some money. Consider turning that service into a digital product to create more leverage.
3. Have your life fall apart
Wake up one morning and open your computer. Sip a cup of coffee. Smile at your crypto fortune. See all the Stripe emails for product sales. Think you’re a big shot. Consider ripping out a cigar and posting a selfie of you smoking it on social media.
For fun, check your digital wallet. Notice a withdrawal of more than $1M.
Fall to the floor. Nearly have a heart attack. Contact your best friend who works in crypto. Have him say “It’s gone, mate.” Have coffee with him later that day. Explain how you now know why a person can jump in front of a train.
Go home. Face your wife. Tell her you love her, then share the bad news. Watch the dreams of her first home go up in smoke with the look she gives. See nuclear mushroom clouds in her eyes. The woman you loved. Heartbroken. Speechless.
Go back to your office. Write. Make money online. Feel like sh*t. This is the first ripple.
Because you now can’t afford a home, look around for a new house to rent. Go to the open for inspections. Have your rental applications turned down. Wait in line while hundreds of people try to rent the same property as you.
Be reminded that record-high property prices are the cause. No one can afford to buy so they rent. Be reminded how $1M was supposed to exclude you from this problem. Now you’ve gotta face it like everyone else.
Be humbled.
Eventually rent a new home under an airport flight path. Get woken up by helicopters flying overhead all day and night. Then, find out you’re going to be a parent. Be simultaneously joyful and terrified at the same time. Where will the baby sleep? How will the baby sleep?
Realize this is now the ripple effect at play and this is the second ripple.
Rush your partner to the hospital. Baby is coming fast. Nurses everywhere. It’s all going to plan. Suddenly an alarm sounds. Doctors rush in. Your daughter’s heart rate is dropping. You could lose the baby. Blood everywhere. Needles. Gas.
Your daughter is born. She’s incredible. She pisses all over your new sweater and leaves a yellow stain. You smile. You kiss her. She can do no wrong. Perfection. Joy. This is the third ripple.
Start looking for a new home (again). Go to house auctions in between writing and making money online. Lose every auction by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Be reminded again of the money that was stolen from you and what it could’ve done in this situation.
Keep trying. Try to have hope when it feels like there’s none. Finally find a house. Get excited. Make an early offer. Have the owner accept it. See the smile on your partner’s face. Move in. Feel on top of the world. Paint the walls. Get the grass redone. Install a big screen TV. Feel like you’ve made it.
One night, get woken up by loud music. Wonder what the hell is going on. Investigate. Discover you have a bad neighbor who believes they are above the law.
Get frustrated. Blow up. Go over and yell at them. Say things you wish you didn’t. Take them through the legal system. Sleepless nights. Waste a year of your life. Lose. Community organizations are above the law and have friends in local government. This is the fourth ripple.
At the end of the legal battle you feel exhausted. You realize it’s taken a toll on your marriage. Your partner is not happy with you. You’ve let them down. You’ve spent too much time away from them dealing with this issue.
Make the difficult decision to get marriage counseling.
Feel like crap. Feel like a failed parent. Feel like you’ve let your daughter down. Enter the therapist’s office and feel like you’ve time-traveled back a decade, when you faced extreme mental illness. Remember the dark times. Have them haunt you.
Show up to couple’s therapy. See someone you know in the waiting area. Feel like even more of a loser. Tell no one. Keep it a secret. Pretend you’re okay. Act like a happy couple outside of therapy.
Wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares of divorce.
Imagine raising a child in a broken family in a broken 19070s home. Visualize the look on your kid’s face. Wake up the next day and commit to work on yourself. Try to find the source of the problem that led to therapy. Realize it’s you. This is the fifth ripple.
Keep showing up to therapy. Listen. Notice the situation at home getting better. See the relief on your daughter’s face. Have the therapist make a strange comment. “Newly married couples with young children see me all the time. It’s normal. Getting therapy as a precaution is a sign of love, not a failing marriage.”
Feel relieved.
Late one afternoon you start writing a newsletter. You realize that everything in life is downstream of the ripple effect. One tiny event can trigger a series of other events. You can either make the ripples positive or negative. Making large sums of money has little to do with knowledge and more to do with what you’re putting out into the world each day.
You attract what you give. Create positive ripple effects for others and watch them reverberate back in your life.
4. Publish a weekly newsletter for a year
Build an email list so you own the distribution of your writing. Occasionally make paid offers to earn money, even if that’s just a paid newsletter.
Enough storytelling for today. Let's talk about you.
How's your online writing journey going?
Started? Stalled? Struggling?
My journey just Started and I just wrote about what led me here :) of course my strategic mind is thinking about how it will monetise one day and yet I also know the key is in letting go of the expectation and continuing to write authentically! Thank you for sharing the actual story and the different ripples that took part in you getting here. We often forget there was a whole mountain (or several) to climb before we get to a peak, and that there are more peaks ahead with valleys and avalanches and lovely cool lake swims etc etc. Thanks Tim!
You've eluded to this story before, Tim. But that train wreck you wrote about made me squirm. Really. That's the best writing I've read from you. I've been reading your posts since you began on Medium.
That's a fair body of reading, you might say.
That took Aussie guts and gritted teeth to admit.
You have a secure following and business model behind you now. Well done.
I mean it. Not so much about the money, but from making it back from the bad neighbor-helicopter hell-possible separation of your family.
That is one effing incredible victory, right there.
Congratulations, you deserve it.