Some careers are well-defined and have a clear path to success. If you want to make partner at a prestigious law firm, for example, you need to crush the LSAT, attend law school at Yale/Harvard/Georgetown/something similar, clerk with a top firm one summer, secure an offer, spend a couple of years doing grunt work, then climb the ladder from there.
The IB analyst route to PE/HF/VC is a tried-and-true one in finance. You can get an MBA sponsored by your company after 3-4 years of consulting at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, then return to your employer and continue your climb to partner.
It’s like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. It’s not easy, but the route is well documented and known. You’ll be able to know what you are getting into if you do some research. You may not win, but at least you’ll know the rules.
The path to success in writing is not well-defined. The writer does not have a metaphorical “ladder” to success. Most writers never earn a penny from their writing. Some make good money, but many don’t. This is due in part to the fact that content creation is subjected to power laws. The top 1% creators receive 99% of revenue.
There is also another factor at play. aspirant writers do not know what they should aspire to.
It’s true that Tim Ferriss and Mark Manson have built audiences of millions through their blogs. How did they get from zero to hero status? How do the writers who are in the middle, with a smaller but still valuable audience, make a living?
In the past six months, I’ve received dozens or hundreds of questions asking two variations: 1) “What is your job?” and 2) “How exactly does it work?” I understand. It doesn’t make sense from the outside. You write, people read, and you… make money. Wut.
While updating my notes for the Newsletter Playbook, I thought, ” Damn! I should have published a blog post about this by now.“.
This is where we stand today. This article will hopefully answer all of your questions about the writing process.
Vamos.
I am a simple ad seller. I put ‘Today’s young money is sponsored by…!
All of those “sponsored” names pay money to sponsor. Pricing is affected by a number of factors:
Who are your target audience? Who is your audience? Are they a group that is engaged? Are they a niche group? Have you got a high open rate? Click-through rate? Has the advertiser ever run a similar campaign? Was it a success? Was it a success? How good are you at negotiating? Most importantly… what are the current market conditions? CPMs and CTRs are important, but what matters most is the amount of money that advertisers will spend at a given time.] For example, early in 2021, sponsors poured obscene sums of cash into different marketing campaigns. ( Had I started Young Money earlier, I would have missed out on the bull market.
Put all these variables and questions in a box. Shake it up. Then, pitch a price to your clients for ad space.
You may be wondering “How much money can I earn from ads?”. The answer is It depends and but I’ve been able fill my calendar with $1,000+ for each primary slot. I also send out two articles per week. As a reference, I am able to fill my calendar with 33,000 subscribers, a 50% opening rate, as well as a decent Twitter or Linkedin following, which drives additional page views.
This is only for the primary ads.
I have an “Jack’s Picks”, a section at the end of my posts where I promote interesting things that I’ve read or listened to in the past week. I also offer affiliate deals ( If you purchase something I link, I receive a percentage), and secondary ads. ( For the smaller ad space, I charge a discounted price.
The typical post will have one main sponsor and one affiliate, and I schedule all of this at least one month in advance to ensure that they are locked in.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Not quite. It’s more than just pasting in ads.
I write or heavily modify pre-existing ad copies to fit my tone. I must send invoices and insertion orders, as well as report engagement statistics (opens and clicks). I also have to follow up on unpaid invoices and keep in touch with potential future campaigns.
They are tedious, unglamorous tasks. These tasks are essential to the process.
Where do you get your sponsors?
Really, all over the place. Sometimes I send DMs to people on Twitter, particularly if they are a CEO, founder or marketing leader of an interesting company. If someone enjoys my content there is a good chance they will be interested in running an ad or a sponsoring campaign. Sometimes folks DM or email me after coming across my page. I use Litquidity a lot (I edit the newsletter with 230k subscribers, but more on that in a moment), and Ad Astra places some of my advertisements.
That’s basically how I earn money with this blog. A blog is worth much more than its total number of ad spaces.
The content is not the only thing that matters, but the opportunities that come from it.
Young Money wasn’t my only piece of writing, but it was the main reason I got other jobs. Litquidity also hired me to help edit and write ad copies for his daily financial newsletter, Exec Sum.
How did I land this job? I sent him a DM on Twitter and my finance blog. I also said I was willing to help him with Exec Sum, if he showed interest.
It turned out he was. Why did he give me time? I used my blog to prove that I knew what i was doing. I showed that I was disciplined and had the ability to hit “publish”.
After you’ve created 50+ pieces, you will have a library of material to draw from. When you get an opportunity to work with another person, like I did, you can use your library to help you in your pitch. We are presented with new opportunities every day, and written content gives us a competitive edge.
You don’t have to always pitch yourself. You will find opportunities if you stick around long enough.
I’ve been contacted by people via Twitter and email, and they have paid for my consulting calls. I’ve received a number of contract gigs ranging from ghostwriting to copywriting ( , more about this in the second). My reach has expanded as my articles circulated on Twitter, Linkedin, text messages and emails chains.
More people = more opportunities. If you are a great writer, people may pay a lot of money to have your help. Good writing is difficult.
Ghostwriting is back. You can build an audience of up to 100,000 followers with a strong social media presence. A large audience is priceless. It is difficult to create the content necessary to attract such a large audience. Some people will pay you top dollar to help them create that content.
Although I’ve never ghostwritten ( , yet), I know of friends who make hundreds of thousands per year ghostwriting on Twitter and Linkedin for different clients. What is the one thing that they all have in common? Their inquiries all originated from people who read and appreciated their work.
It’s often not about monetizing the writing itself ( although that’s nice), but rather leveraging your content in order to land new opportunities.
In summary, once my free blog reached a critical mass, I began selling ads. There are also other ways you can make money with content.
Tell me more
You can pay for your content on platforms such as Beehiiv , Substack and. You can earn $120,000 per annum if you have 1,000 readers who are willing to pay $10 a month to access your content. It’s not bad at all, is it?
One problem with paying subscribers is that they slow down your audience growth. I would rather have a larger audience at the cost of short-term income, but the recurring revenues from subscribers (not forgetting the time saved by not selling ads) are nice.
Companies may pay for your featured content if you have a large enough audience. Packy McCormick is one of the most well-known writers in the technology space. He receives payments from different companies 1-2 times per month to write sponsored deep dives about them for his newsletter Not Boring. They are paying him for exposure to his audience and to write a 5,000-word business breakdown.
Your content could land you a job full-time too.
Morgan Housel was a writer for the Motley Fool. The CEO of Collaborative Fund liked his writing. Morgan Housel is a Collaborative Fund partner, but his only job is to blog. Why? Many people read his articles, and that exposure can be valuable to a venture capital company that wants to raise its brand awareness.
You can win the game in many different ways.
Writing is hard. You will need to be prepared to write at least once a week for over a year without earning a penny before you can make any real progress. You have to make sure that your content is always of high quality, as you will be competing with other websites for the attention spans of readers.
It’s not easy to publish 2,000-4,000+ word per week. What if you spent months publishing 2,000-4,000 words per week and had nothing to show for it? It’s a little insane.
