Follow This Guide If You Want to Start Writing Online in 2024

This is for you if you want to make money writing on the internet.

Photo by Anna Shvets

Over the past four years, my writing has attracted millions of readers and helped me build a multi-six-figure creator business.

But if I had to start from scratch, I’d start differently.

When I published my first piece in 2018, I had no idea what I was doing.

I had never considered a career in writing. I only got into it because it seemed so simple to publish my ideas online without having to set up a website or build a large audience first.

It took me 1.5 years of publishing to figure out that I wanted to write for a living, but it doesn’t have to take that long for you.

With social networks and writing platforms, it’s now easier than ever to share your thoughts, experiences, expertise, and ideas with the world.

And people do so for various reasons:

• Building or growing your business

• Enhancing your career

• Clarifying your thinking

• Sharing your message with the world

Whether your main goal is to get paid or not, the first steps I recommend are the same for anyone who wants to enter the world of digital writing.

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#1. Get clear on what you want

Your goals can change over time, but when you start to publish your work, you want to be clear about what you want.

If you’re a 70-year-old retiree who writes for pure pleasure, your approach will be different from someone who wants to make money as quickly as possible.

If you want to write for a living, you’ll have to treat your writing as a job. This seems to be a big surprise for most beginners.

Getting paid for your writing is easier than ever before, but it’s not easy.

Millions of people would love to get paid to write, but very few ever get there because most of them aren’t willing to invest enough time into their craft.

Depending on your goals, you’ll decide what you write about, how much you write, where you publish, and how you present yourself.

If you want to get paid for your work, you have to think of yourself as a brand. Not in an annoying, preachy way, but as a writer, you’ll often gain readers because your message and unique point of view resonate with them.

If you don’t know how you want to show up and who you want to be, you won’t be able to clearly communicate why readers should pay attention to you.

In the age of AI, most writing isn’t unique unless it’s personal.

Lots of people are writing online, but nobody is you.

If you’re serious about growing your credibility and a loyal audience, you’ll have to lead by sharing your:

• experience

• opinion

• stories

• and unique point of view

Today’s most successful writers are those with raving fans. This doesn’t only apply to digital writers but also to authors in various genres.

J.K. Rowling wouldn’t be a billionaire without millions of hardcore Harry Potter fans.

Similarly, Colleen Hoover or Emily Henry wouldn’t be selling millions of books without thousands of readers sharing their colorful book covers on social media.

In the digital world, lots of writers sound similar, which means you have two options:

#1. You can compete by playing the quantity game, being louder, and showing up more often.

#2. You can lead with your personality and attract an audience that likes your work because it’s yours.

If your readers are invested in your personality, experiences, and unique perspective, they’ll stick around for longer and might even share your work.

According to my dear friend Michael Thompson, sharing your unique human experience creates your honest story. And the easiest way to do that is by collecting and sharing the defining moments of your life.

In a workshop for my private mastermind group Write • Build • Scale, Michael guided us through an exercise to create a timeline of your life.

He suggests setting a 30-minute timer and writing down all events that had an impact on your life since your birth.

The beauty of this exercise is that it’s ongoing — each day is an opportunity to add a new story to your life.

Another option is to create “micro timelines” for specific themes in your life.

You could, for instance, create a timeline for defining career moments or your most important relationships.

Depending on your message, niche, target audience, and goals, certain timelines will be more interesting to explore than others.

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#2. Choose your path

If you want to avoid exhaustion and overwhelm as a writer, you need to make certain key decisions that will shape your journey in the long run.

And again, you have some room to experiment here: You don’t need to get it right on your first try. But if you find yourself second-guessing for too long, you might eventually lose the motivation to keep going.

Let’s say your goal is to write for a living. Now it’s time to decide on:

• Your key message

• The right platform(s)

• Your UWP (Unique Writing Proposition)

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Your key message

Your message is the foundation of your writing career because it’s the main reason readers will be attracted to you.

Luckily, you don’t have to decide on one message and stick to it forever, but for the sake of simplicity, I’d recommend staying with a handful of key topics and messages that you want to share with your audience.

Ask yourself:

• What do I want to share with the world?

• What’s my unique perspective?

Your key messages should be clear and consistent. It’s okay to occasionally change your opinion when you evolve and grow as a person, but you don’t want to constantly contradict yourself by chasing trends and shiny objects.

Longevity as a digital writer includes sticking to your message to attract an audience that shares your beliefs.

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The right platform(s)

The beauty of writing on the internet in 2024 is that you can tap into existing audiences by publishing on trusted platforms.

The challenge is that you have to pick your platform so you don’t waste too much time trying to be present everywhere.

If you want to write blog posts or articles, Medium would be my go-to choice for a few reasons:

• With hundreds of millions of monthly readers, Medium is a place for those who genuinely love to read and discover new voices. When you publish on Medium, you’re speaking to an audience of avid readers, not social media users.

• By working with publications, you can get your work in front of a relevant audience that’s interested in your topics and message — even if they don’t know you yet.

• The cherry on top is that you can monetize your writing through the Partner Program while growing your audience, credibility, and authority.

Lots of people compare Substack to Medium, claiming that it’s a better alternative because you can keep a higher percentage of your reader’s subscription fee, which is true.

The problem they usually don’t address is that you have to attract subscribers in the first place. Compared to Substack, Medium enables brand-new writers to get discovered through publications, tags, and Boosting.

If you want to grow a subscription-based newsletter on Substack, you have to sell subscriptions to your audience. If you don’t have an existing audience, you won’t be able to make money selling subscriptions.

I’m not saying Substack is bad, but the truth is that most comparisons are meaningless because they ignore key differences between the platforms.

If you want to write short-ish form content, you can explore Substack Notes, Twitter/X, Threads, or Linkedin. Compared to Medium, these are social networks, which means speed and interactions matter a lot more.

While writers on social networks usually publish several times per day, my goal on Medium is to publish a piece per week. It’s also what I recommend to my students at Medium Writing Academy because I’d rather rely on quality than quantity.

Again, I’m not saying one is better than the other — they’re fundamentally different platforms, and your choice should depend on your preferences and long-term goals.

Last but not least, you can also choose to write on your own blog or website.

While this means that you make the rules and can choose how your content is displayed and discovered, it also means that you have to ensure it gets seen in the first place. You can either rely on search engines or drive traffic through social media or platforms like Pinterest.

At this point, you know:

• Why you want to write online, and what you want to achieve

• What your key messages are

• Where you want to publish your writing

So let’s move on..

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#3. Create your ideal schedule

There are a million productivity tips, tricks, and tools for writers, but ultimately, it all comes down to sitting down and doing the work — as often as possible and for as long as possible.

While tools and technology can indeed help you work more productively, they won’t matter if you don’t take enough time to write.

What matters is that you create time and space to actually get the work done.

I won’t say that you should wake up at 5 a.m. to write first thing in the morning because I genuinely believe every body works differently.

Plus, I don’t know what else you have to take care of, so who am I to tell you when to do what?!

What I will say is that consistency matters. Not just because showing up and publishing consistently helps you build a relationship with your audience and because most platforms reward consistency but also because it’s easier to create when you’re always creating.

Even after hundreds of published articles and millions of views on my content, it takes me a lot of effort to get back to a regular writing schedule after a long pause. Starting from scratch is always harder than just continuing to do what you’ve been doing anyway.

Sometimes, life happens, and breaks are necessary, but you want to be consistent for as long as possible to avoid having to start over.

To get the most out of your writing sessions, I recommend following these tips:

• Figure out when & where you write for maximum output. Some writers are much more productive in the early mornings, while others produce their best work late at night — you won’t know if you don’t try. Test different options to find out what works best for you.

• Make sure you start your writing sessions with zero distractions. Log out of social media, put your phone away, and close all unnecessary tabs. If you want to make money as a writer, you have to get the job done. There’s no point in spending ten hours on a piece if it can be done in five.

• Set a clear intention for each writing session BEFORE you start writing. Decide what you’ll write and how much. This will ensure that you don’t waste any time getting started. Ideally, you set those intentions on the day before so you can get straight to work when it’s time to write.

• When you fall behind, remind yourself of why you started. At Medium Writing Academy, our students complete an exercise to make promises to themselves so they‘re reminded of why they started writing in the first place.

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Bonus Step: Decide how you’ll monetize

Most writers love to write but hate to sell their writing. That’s also why they hate to think of themselves as a “brand” or as an entrepreneur.

But the truth is people won’t throw money at you for writing great stuff.

If you want to get paid for your words, you have to find a way to actually “collect money.”

Luckily, you have lots of options — here are a few of them:

• You can monetize your audience by offering (digital) products or services such as (e)books, workbooks, worksheets, audio files, video courses, coaching, and much more.

• You can write for others as a freelance or ghostwriter.

• You can write for partner programs like Medium’s.

• You can build a newsletter and monetize through ads or affiliate collaborations.

Even if you eventually monetize your work by selling products, services, or offers, your success will be shaped by the number of people who discover and enjoy your writing. This means that you’ll constantly try to keep a balance between publishing great content and building your writing business.

If this is your first year of writing on the internet (or if you’re not where you want to be yet), focus on getting the basics right:

• Share a clear message that you want to be known for.

• Aim for consistency in your schedule and your message.

• Don’t get distracted by shiny objects. Focus on a platform that matches your goals and stick to it until you achieve the results you want.