I’m nothing but a prostitute.
A few people have said this about me in tweets. They argue I prance around the internet, spreading my manly ideas wherever I can find a place to insert them. I ain’t mad it.
They’re right.
I do prostitute myself out as a writer for good reason. There’s a lot you can learn from it if you seek to write online and make money as a result.
Here’s the formula that earned me the naughty title
Get ready for your head to explode.
7 x tweets a day
Micro thoughts help validate ideas for longer-form writing. Tweets are the best way to do this.
They take no time at all but can produce high ROI if one pops off. If you do nothing else as a wannabe writer, try this one.
2 x tweet threads a week
Tweet threads allow you to go deeper on a topic but still force you to be concise. In the attention economy, if you can’t learn to get to the point, you won’t survive to live another day. Frustrating but true.
1 x $ubstack a week
This is where I go to think and speak freely.
Zero censorship. And a I-do-whatever-I-want mindset. A place to find new readers. But not just any readers. Readers who are pre-programmed to pay monthly subscriptions to read specific writers or publications.
This subtle shift is huge. Without paid readers you can’t have a writing career. Finding this unique breed of clientele used to be hard.
Now it’s piss-easy.
8 x long-form articles a week
One of the biggest mistakes writers make is staying trapped in the La La La Land of short-form content.
I remember one 24 year old punk blocked me on the tweet app because we were chatting about short versus long form. I told him I thought long-form converted better. The brat cracked the sh*ts and said “mate, do you know how viral my tweets have been and who I know?”
What the dropkick didn’t understand is a few viral tweets ain’t gonna get you a writing career or a book deal. And those sorts of readers definitely ain’t gonna buy anything from you.
Just ask all the 100K follower accounts stuck in struggle town.
2 x LinkedIn posts a day
That means I have to sell myself and a collection of products/services to pay for my newborn baby’s diaper bill. Selling on many writing platforms is seen as taboo.
“You can’t do that here!”
But LinkedIn is a business platform. Business people expect to be sold to. So when you ask a LinkedIn user to buy a course, book, event ticket, consulting, coaching, or mastermind they’re not angry. They expect it.
Actually, they freaking love it.
So I write on LinkedIn to find customers instead of just readers. Call me a writing hooker if you will. I gotta get paid somehow so I can buy tacos.
Helping writing students every day
I have an underground writer persona.
Most people have never seen it. I run a private paid community just for writers/creators. I write there daily and share my best tips and tricks on the creator economy, as well as side hustle ideas.
I am a servant to this community. I get on my knees and bow down to them. Some would say they are my 9–5 boss. I’m okay with that. Being a teacher is one of the greatest feelings in the world you can get as a writer.
But wait … there’s more
I’m about to add Instagram to my writing stack.
No, you won’t find pictures of me in tight g-strings or hanging out with bikini babes (my wife would have me publicly executed).
I’m going to Instagram to share writing quotes and carousels. I will use TweetPik and Zapier to automate the uploading of content.
I’m also going to hire an illustrator to visualize a few of my unique ideas, like The Permissionless Economy.
If the content creation and posting are automated, you’d be silly not to have your work appear in more places.
What this all means for you
As you can see I’m one hell of a writer prostitute.
I use a lot of platforms to string together a writing career. Some say I’m everywhere and it’s annoying. Soz.
The reason I prostitute myself out and am unromantic with platforms is so I can de-risk myself. I got burned with facebook years ago when they replaced user-generated content with a firehose of ads. Never again.
Then I got burned again when LinkedIn banned me 6 times by accident.
Being in multiple places helps me sleep at night. If one place I publish goes away then I always have another channel that’s already started to shift my focus to.
That’s how you have to think.
In the next few years, the platforms we have today will change as we know them. I don’t want to find myself posting on the equivalent of MySpace and end up back at a 9–5 job because I was careless.
Once you know you’re disposable as a writer, it changes how you think. Ego vanishes. Humility enters. And dollars follow.