By any yardstick, the outlook is alarming — journalism, already slimmed-down after two decades of digital disruption, is now being ravaged further by coronavirus-induced cuts.

At least 38,000 US news company workers were furloughed, laid off or took pay cuts between March and June alone, according to a Financial Times analysis. In the UK, Enders Analysis warns of a “total collapse” in which a third of journalism jobs could be lost. Poynter’s list of staff cuts and closures is a depressing roll-call of the unfolding state of affairs.

For an industry that has been witnessing record online traffic, that is hard to take. But it is only the latest and most profound milestone after years of decline. America lost more than a quarter of its newspapers in the 15 years before coronavirus, 300 of them in the last two years — a quarter of jobs gone in the last decade, 3,160 in 2019 alone. And these numbers overlook the sizable freelance workforce. Even digital outlets have struggled to provide the growth once expected.

For writers like me, prospects for gainfully pursuing the craft we love appear to be diminishing.

And yet, in the rubble, something new is being built. From Ghost and Substack to Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Patreon and more, a new wave of publishing platforms and newsletter tools is empowering creators to launch their own vehicle — to write and directly distribute their valuable content to loyal audiences; crucially, with the ability to make money from subscriptions.

Whether it's big-hitters like Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, analyst Benedict Evans and Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, or the burgeoning number of small and medium sized digital publications, we are seeing a growing number of writers go solo.

So, what do the experiences of journalism’s “solopreneurs” tell us about succeeding without a salary in the new world?

1. Solo success has pedigree

In 2020, we are seeing plenty of hype about this avenue. But going it alone is not a new or faddish prospect dreamed up to brighten journalism’s darkening outlook. It's a decades-long trend with real evidence of success behind it. “Journopreneurs” (not a new term) have been spinning-out and starting-up online for years.

Their poster boy is Rafat Ali. Laid off following the dot.com crash in 2002 by Silicon Alley Reporter, a now-defunct magazine covering the digital economy, Ali tried and failed to get another full-time job. So he made his own — paidContent, a blog and newsletter covering the digital media business that soon became the sector’s go-to source. Within a year, Ali was making $80,000 from paidContent, leading him to hire his own staff (disclosure: I was his senior editor, international) and, by 2008, he was able to sell the site to Guardian News & Media for between $10 and $15 million.

“Out of necessity is born this,” Ali, who remains a respected media commentator and is now building his second publication in New York, told me. “You’ve no choice but to reinvent yourself. In 10 or 20 years time, jobs there may not exist — at least you can be in control of your destiny.”

2. Autonomy for the people

That sense of control is a key motivator, both for reporters that have had joblessness thrust upon them and for those who want to make themselves more resilient.

When coronavirus cancelled matches and a regular client pulled work in-house, Chloe Beresford, a freelance soccer journalist in Stockport, England, found her commissions dried up. After using lockdown to reassess her goals, this June she formally started Curva e Calcio, a subscription newsletter and podcast on Italian soccer that she had previously experimented with. Already, Beresford has 115 paid subscribers, earning her around £800 per month and counting. But it is the freedom she values.

“The aim was to avoid being at the mercy of each outlet's budget, to write what I want to write and to invest the time I would've spent pitching articles into building a quality resource,” Beresford told me. “There are lots of plus points. I have flexibility in my life.”

Whilst Curva e Calcio’s earnings are not yet a full-time salary, they are an important and dependable bedrock, allowing Beresford to follow other pursuits like consulting and meditation, as well as ongoing freelance work.

3. You need your niche

In an ever more cluttered media environment, the publications that stand out are the ones that cover a specific topic and serve a defined audience. There’s nothing new about that — any media venture has to be about something. In other words, although specialists may serve a smaller audience, they are best placed to succeed.

That is why we are seeing increasingly tightly-defined publications and communities emerging, on previously low-key topics like ethnic-minority diversity in PR, women’s NBA basketball, the climate crisis and the future of work.

Local news reporters, amongst the hardest-hit by layoffs, can be assured that their locality is, indeed, a niche ripe for coverage, especially if it is underserved. Everyone should focus on a specialised topic with a built-in audience of some kind.

4. Bring an audience to the party, or don’t

Imagine launching a new magazine but not having anyone to tell about it. For individual journalists, leaving the publication whose audience they have helped build and serve may seem like entering the wilderness. But those who have managed to build their own audience, through other means, have an advantage when starting their own thing.

When Jon Ostrower was laid off as CNN’s aviation editor, amongst 50 cuts in 2018, he considered a job offer to return to mainstream media — but rejected it to launch The Air Current, a $249-a-year subscription aviation newsletter and website, around the same time his second child was born.

Although he initially lacked the confidence of his friends that he could fly solo, the facts were staring Ostrower in the face — after a career spent covering his specialist topic for major outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Flightglobal, Ostrower had cultivated tens of thousands of social media followers, industry respect and a contacts book galore — a ready made bridge to his next horizon.

“Knowing my audience came with me was huge,” he told me. “I don’t know if this would have worked if I had to start from zero — it would have made it much harder.”

But not impossible. Ostrower, Ali and Beresford all agree there is ample room for writers who have not yet cultivated a following to succeed.

“It’s not essential,” says paidContent founder Ali, who built his site through toil and long hours in the days before social media. “You can do it by sheer quality of work, though it is a longer route.”

According to Ostrower, who, like Ali, first built his name by writing a free blog that was later acquired by a major publisher: “If you have something to say that’s worthwhile, valuable or isn’t being done by someone else, you can do it.”

5. Work with your tribe

Having an audience isn’t enough. Knowing the audience you want to serve is essential for writers and editors who want to build a profitable following. Media enterprises of any size are about that relationship — but none more so than at the smaller scale of start-up self-publishing.

“It only works if you are willing to engage with readers,” says Curva e Calcio’s Chloe Beresford. “You can’t afford to be aloof. I like to interact with the people who read my stuff. I can ask them what they want in their newsletter. They hit ‘reply’, say what they have liked and not liked.”

But this cycle of community connection doesn’t just inform editorial, it also defines what, for many in this new wave of writers, is also a business. Ostrower, for example, knew his information was valuable and his audience had means to pay, pointing him clearly toward an annual subscription model.

6. Time it right

When is the best time to launch? As more reporters and writers announce their own layoff through social media, we often witness an outpouring from loyal readers and followers — not just of sympathy, but anger at their former employer and a yearning to continue reading them somewhere else.

In the days immediately following layoff, there may be a window of opportunity when out-of-work writers can capitalise on the spotlight being shone upon them.

Even so, the most successful launches happen when a plan has already been formulated. When Ostrower announced his lay-off in 2018, hundreds of Twitter followers lamented “CNN’s loss” of “the coolest aviation reporter” — but it took him three months to launch The Air Current, an idea which had already been percolating for a while before that.

If possible, the optimum time to build the bridge is before you need to. Side gigs are more accepted as inevitable by employers today than in the past. Those who, whilst still in employment, can build an audience for a publication of their own are stood in good stead. They can begin to do so by framing their site as a live portfolio, a notebook for potential story ideas or an unrelated interest entirely.

7. Use the tools of the trade

The first wave of journopreneurs could only have dreamed of the ease with which writers today can create their own publishing platform.

When Rafat Ali started paidContent in 2002, he knew just enough PHP to install and host some blog software, then bolt on a rudimentary mailing list downloaded from a script repository. His hardware was an internet cable run from an east London cybercafe to his leaky apartment above, where a reclaimed desktop PC from a local market sat on an old desk. That is a technical feat for most writers. And, despite his site’s name, the absence of plug-and-play content payment systems at the time meant advertising was the only business model initially available to him.

“It’s not like I had a choice,” he says. “Micropayments were around, but they weren’t available for small publishers. Now, 20 years later, it all exists. It’s much easier, with platforms for publishing, payment and distribution.” It all comes together to make the opportunity far more effortless.

And that’s something Ali, now CEO of his own travel insight company Skift, is considering again, as he contemplates his third act in publishing — possibly a small-scale, personal travel newsletter in what would be a return to his grassroots.

Next time, however, he says he would want more control than is offered by some solutions. “I’m proficient enough on the technology, I would want to own the whole thing, particularly if it's open-source if that means it has a lot of plugins. That's the challenge — Medium just dropped publishers like a hot potato. I hope that doesn't happen with Substack.”

8. Learn how to wear all the hats

Memo to journopreneurs — you’re not just a writer anymore. In bidding your old editors goodbye, you also lose a valuable quality-control and direction-setting function. Beresford admits to “sometimes second-guessing yourself” and advises seeking feedback from friends and colleagues. But, she says, in a close community, readers can make the best editors, a natural check on coverage.

More than that, though, solo writers are also business owners and product marketers. Beresford has successfully used her close reader connections to articulate a clear product offering, including her publishing cycle, pricing model and subscriber-only features, ensuring the expectations of paying readers are transparent from the outset.

“When no-one gives you a job description for starting your own publication, you have to be really focused on what you want it to be,” says The Air Current’s Ostrower. “My first year was spent trying to figure out what was the best use of my time — you are a business owner, a beat reporter, feature writer, trying to break news, do long-form, trying to use social media. You have to understand what your audience wants, how they consume their media, how you fit into their routine. I’m constantly playing chess.”

He advises new soloists erect a “firewall” by allocating disciplined, ring-fenced time that separates out the two key roles — editorial and business operations.

9. Go for growth?

That second imperative, business, may become more important. As more self-publishers start up, some will find themselves making insufficient revenue progress, others will find themselves wanting to focus more on the product.

Either way, hard work will be required. Ali toiled “24/7” to build paidContent’s reputation. Like others, he fears the biggest risk in self-publishing may be burn-out, as struggling writers bust a gut to continue serving an expectant, paying audience.

“I could sink or swim based on what I could write,” he says. “I once boasted, ‘I’ll blog anyone to death’ — the volume of posts was very high.” Curva e Calcio’s Beresford says writers can plan for time off by scheduling features to run in advance, but her number-one aim is still to acquire a large number of subscribers as soon as possible.

And, if the new generation of self-starter is going to become as big as the opportunity suggests, the work that goes with growth is going to be required.

“You have to be thinking three, four, five moves into the future for how you’d like to evolve,” says The Air Current’s Ostrower. And Ali adds: “Human instinct is to grow — one-person newsletters will become two-, three- or five-person publications. You may see an initial revenue up curve, but you may plateau and have no sense of how long it might be. If you have a choice, be fully into it. No startup investor will invest in you if you are not 100% invested.”

Slow and steady to the future of media

Today, the emerging crop of solopreneur writers has incredible opportunities available, right at the time when troubled journalists need them most.

At a time when the old guard of media is vanishing, it is likely that some of these new, direct-to-audience upstarts will become the next major publishing enterprises of the future. Some of them will look nothing like journalism as we have come to know it.

But execution is one of the factors that will determine which of them realise that goal. Do the new self-publishers want to toil tirelessly to claim their place at the top of publishing? Or are they simply seeking autonomy, self-sufficiency?

Some are now beginning to recognise the importance of balance — of making an impact on the world, certainly, but in a calm manner that doesn’t cause the opportunity to over-heat before it has really got going. Today’s more-capable tech stack makes that more likely than before.

But the growing digital content diet of many readers also means writers may comfortably afford to produce a lower volume than they might expect. The Air Current publishes only two or three, albeit-meaty articles per week, because its editor knows his readers are time-pressed. “There is so much noise on the internet, I want The Air Current to be a quiet place for our readers,” Ostrower says.

Different audiences and topics may have different demands but, as Ostrower says: “Put yourself out there. You will never know if you don’t try.”

There’s a good reason why creators and entrepreneurs want to start a membership business. It generates predictable recurring revenue and presents the opportunity to stake one’s work on a sustainable business model.

This trend is everywhere. Brands, publications, communities, and individuals are adopting premium membership models in one form or another, including:

• Massive publications like Business Insider put their premium content behind a paywall.
• Online communities like Keto Connect help their members optimise their lifestyles according to the ketogenic diet.
• Creators like Evan Puschack (of The Nerdwriter fame) make at least $3K per video using Patreon.

However, there’s one thing that deters other people from starting their own membership business. Overwhelm.

Making a membership site can feel like a tall order — and it is — which is strange, because gaining success on your membership business doesn’t require you to have a massive following. For as long as you have the curiosity, the innate stubbornness to push through, and a couple hundred ‘true fans,’ you have everything you need to start a successful paid membership business.

A less stressful approach to your membership business

Membership businesses make money from members. Naturally, you’d want as many members to sign up as possible. More members mean more revenue, right?

To get more members, you need more traffic. To get more traffic, you need a bigger audience. However, there’s a better, far less stressful way.

Finding your 1,000 true fans

According to Wired’s executive editor Kevin Kelly, you don’t need millions of dollars or millions of followers to become successful. To make a living as a creator, you only need 1,000 true fans. And in a lot of cases, even less.

True fans are fans who buy whatever product you produce. They hold onto your every word. They consider you their ride-or-die and regard you with a tonne of respect and trust. They pay for your course, your e-book, and your newsletter.

By honing in on your ‘superfans’ and their wants, you’re eliminating the need to capture more people who are less likely to sign up. When you serve your true fans, your membership business becomes more informed and fun, too. You’re no longer serving mere statistics and demographics, but actual people who support you and your work.

Remember, you only need to find a thousand — or in many cases — far less.

Making your membership unique and more intimate

Starting with a small audience is an advantage. You’re able to tailor a more intimate experience for your members, something that you’re unable to do at the scale of 10,000–100,000 members.

Take your time to build a unique experience for your members. Reach out to your new members, send them a personal note, or get them on a phone call with you — anything and everything that will make your true fans’ membership experience that much more special.

It’s worth noting that your true fans will do sales and marketing for you. Keeping strong relations is just one of the many ways that can keep your members happy.

Lessen your members’ overwhelm (and yours!)

Having a paid audience is a great motivator to produce great work. However, it can be easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on quantity over quality, which can overwhelm your audience.

There’s an excellent reason why services like Instaread and Blinkist are popular. They deliver value swiftly and straightforwardly, and the same should be the case for your membership site. Think strategically about how a specific piece of content will help your members.

Take after membership sites like The Listener. With a clear value proposition of curated podcast episodes, they streamline the content they provide their members with daily emails that deliver a simple promise.

What success looks like for membership sites

The concept of 1,000 true fans posits that you don’t need a massive audience to gain momentum with your membership business. You just need a small tribe of people who will support you, come hell or high water.

That said, you don’t need to stop at 1,000. Many successful membership businesses started with a small audience — if they even had one in the beginning.

Faye Cornhill propelled her membership business forward

Business coach and strategist Faye Cornhill soft-launched to a meager sample of 77 creative business owners, ten of whom bought lifetime access to her membership (priced at $500 each, totaling $5,000 at launch). The revenue from this early win helped her propel her membership forth to some sweet returns.

The Correspondent ‘unbreaks’ the news to more than 50,000 members

The Correspondent funds its journalism by its members. Following a “choose what you pay” model, the site builds immediate trust with readers and unmoors itself from the clickbait-y nature of reporting its peers had adhere to. As of writing, they have more than 50,000 members who pay varying monthly rates.

The Listener shares interesting podcast episodes to paid members

The Listener sends hand-curated podcast episodes to members’ emails every single day. If the offer sounds simple, it’s because it is. Caroline Crampton, the one-woman team behind this wildly successful newsletter, sends three podcast episode recommendations directly to your inbox. Priced at $5/month, The Listener impressively attracts a passionate community to rally behind the paid newsletter.

How the membership business model works

Memberships give creators and brands alike the unique opportunity to make a sustainable income. Your membership site’s success depends on the value your members get when they sign up.

Many membership sites find success regardless of their offer — be that blog content, an email newsletter, podcast episodes, courses, videos, the whole nine yards. Still, it all boils down to how much value is there waiting for members when they jump over the paywall.

Content is what makes or breaks membership sites. For a while, creators and entrepreneurs try to find what works for others and replicate their results. That doesn’t fly as well when building a successful membership business.

You’ve got to ride on what makes your community stand out, what makes your offer something only you can offer. That’s the very start of the membership lifecycle, which you can see pictured above.

It’s what will help you build a small but mighty audience (a.k.a. Your 1,000 ‘true fans’), compel them to join your membership, and foster a long-lasting relationship.

Pro tip: Our extensive guide shows how creators can set themselves up for success in building their membership site. Read it here.

Many platforms help get your membership business up the ground, including Ghost. It’s crucial to stake yours on one that has essential features, such as:

• Elegant editor for pleasant content creation
• Easy-to-use backend to manage membership
• SEO, email newsletter, and social media support
• Custom themes and custom domain support
• App integrations to automate workflows

Click here to see how Ghost stacks up against other membership platforms.

The exact steps to launch a thriving membership business (with only a small audience)

Understanding that having a small audience is no deterrent for your membership business’ success is one thing. Making it happen is another.

It will look different for different membership sites, but the five steps listed below are consistent in every process.

Step 1: Validating the offer

The first step is also the most crucial. Determine whether there’s a demand for what you offer. Validate with data and real-world evidence that people want what’s inside your membership.

The simplest way to do this is to find any other companies or individuals that offer something similar to your membership. But remember, you still need to determine what makes your offering unique and play to that.

Another way to validate your offer is through Google search. Use tools like Ahrefs (paid) or Ubersuggest (free) to find out if enough people search for it on Google. The more people searching for that keyword, the bigger the demand. You can apply the same principle using social media communities, other search engines (Reddit, Quora, YouTube, etc.), and relevant forums.

If you have any size of an audience, ask them questions related to what you offer through your membership. Listen carefully to their feedback. It will inform your decisions hereafter in a significant way.

Step 2: Finding your first true fans

Once you’ve validated that people indeed want what you offer, it’s time to find people who’d rave about it — your true fans.

Determine where your true fans hang out online. If your membership is about self-publishing, you’d want to get your feet wet on communities like Goodreads or author-specific groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Are you looking for serial founders and makers? ProductHunt and AngelList are just two of the largest communities you need to tap.

Keep in mind that you’re only looking to build a small-sized audience at first. The concept of quality vs quantity applies.

Focus on building these relationships, taking extra care to garner as much trust, respect, and authority in your chosen niche. It will pay big dividends in the long run.

Step 3: Showing up in meaningful ways

There’s a false impression that membership sites become more successful by feeding its members more content. Members don’t pay solely for content or information. They pay for one or more of the following things:

• Progress — Insights essential to help your audience achieve a specific goal
• Utility — Useful information presented in a way your audience simply can’t find anywhere else
• Community — An easy way to find other people who are interested in the same niche topic as them

You don’t sign up for a weight loss membership to watch courses or read e-books. You sign up to get access to helpful tools, a supportive community, and most crucially, lose weight. Make sure that your content will help your members achieve what they seek.

Spend time to understand their needs better and wants by making your membership more interactive and participatory.

Step 4: Utilising tools to scale

Running a membership business isn’t easy. Using tools to help scale your efforts is a great way to keep the needle moving forward in your membership.

It all starts with the right platform and tools to do the job. There’s quite a lot to choose from so it's important to do your research and find the tools that are suitable for your needs. One thing to look out for is how extensible your chosen platform is. No matter what platform you choose, make sure it will allow your business to grow.

For example, Ghost is a CMS for creators and entrepreneurs that comes with built-in features that help you manage and grow your membership business, as well as integrations for extended functionality for community-building (Discourse, Slack), e-commerce (Shopify, BigCommerce), email marketing (Mailchimp, ConvertKit), and more.

Step 5: Sustaining growth

Starting with a small audience gives membership business owners the rare advantage of making the experience more intimate, personal, and unique.

But as ever with all other business models, the list of tasks you need to complete grow as your business does. Outsourcing work on smaller tasks helps much to buy you time to focus more on membership strategy growing your business.

Final thoughts

Starting a successful membership business does not require a massive audience — if you don’t have one already. Sometimes, starting small or even at zero is as much an advantage as it is a challenge. Take to heart the concept of 1,000 true fans. Knock any false beliefs that you need millions of people to be successful.

Everything we’ve covered today should help you progress into starting your own membership business. And as tools that enable subscription-based business models, it’s easier to turn a membership business idea into a reality.

Whether you’re just about to start this journey or looking for tips to make your membership better, subscribe to our email newsletter below to receive email alerts when posts like this are published.

Along with this success comes an abundance of options for those creators to take their businesses to the next level by creating a membership website that they own.

This article is going to take a look at how you can diversify your revenue as a Patreon creator, and secure a long-term sustainable business from your creative work. We'll cover the pros and cons of Patreon vs running your own membership website, as well as a few different scenarios that will guide you towards the best decision for your own membership business.

Using Patreon to run a membership business

With more than 130,ooo creators and millions in monthly payouts, Patreon gives creators of all kinds a platform for their biggest fans to pledge and support their work, either with one-off payments or recurring subscriptions.

The platform has given some of the most popular independent creatives on the internet a way to generate revenue – so let's take a look at some of the pros and cons the platform offers.

When Patreon is most useful:

• The platform allows you to create a profile relatively easily, and gives you a few different options for pricing tiers and promoting your work
• Patreon handles chargebacks and failed payments for you which takes a load off, and helps reduce churn or loss of revenue
• The network effect can be helpful when starting out – for example, Patreon account holders can search all creators when logged in, and creators can launch with special offers

Things to look out for:

• Patreon charges transaction fees which means you'll pay between 5-12% per transaction (depending on your plan level) plus Stripe's processing fees. This means somewhere between 8-15% of your revenue will never be paid to you.
• It’s a closed platform, so they can change the rules, increase the pricing, or disappear entirely, when ever they want.
• You don’t really own your brand or your content when using any platform of this nature. It can be risky to depend on a single 3rd party platform with your entire business. The same applies to publishing on Medium, or building a brand on Instagram.

Creating your own membership website

There are plenty of options to create your very own membership website alongside or instead of using a Patreon creator account. Some of these options include Ghost (that's us!), Memberful and Pico.

Using this type of software generally gives you the option to create something very similar to what you can achieve with Patreon: you sell premium content to your biggest fans. The difference with this approach is that your own website and you'll have much more control over your business.

For example, Ghost is a CMS/blogging platform with native membership functionality, so you can create a new website and get up and running in no time without needing to touch any code, or download any extra tools. Ghost charges 0% transaction fees, and since it's open source, you genuinely do have full ownership of your entire business. No one can take it away from you.

Compared to Patreon, creating your own custom membership website (using any tools, not just ours) is a much more independent & flexible option. While this might not sound important now, it's the one thing thing that troubles the most successful creators. Having all your revenue tied to a single platform you can't control is worrying for any kind of business.

Benefits of running your own membership website

• You can create a website using software of your choice, use custom domains, custom design and much more
• It's often easier to migrate your content across platforms in the future
• You still have the opportunity to offer additional perks to existing Patrons, or any other list of fans (like an email subscriber list)
• Your own website allows you to create a whole new revenue stream entirely
• Depending on what software you use, you can reduce your costs drastically

The difficult parts

Creating your own website and driving visitors to it isn't always easy. Here's some of the more difficult aspects of running your own membership site:

• Owning your own website and brand generally means you have to spend more time setting things up
• You'll need a stronger marketing plan, since you won't be relying on the Patreon platform brand to attract new members
• You can use Patreon alongside a membership website that you own (more on this shortly), but this usually requires creating more high-quality content for your fans
  

Tip: Check out our ultimate creators guide to membership websites.

Platforms vs Independent

Take a look at these examples. On the left are three popular Patreon creators, and on the right are three independent membership websites:

Patreon is like running a membership business on social media. All creators are in the same space, with very similar profiles, and tied to the features of the platform.

Having your own membership website is more like running an independent online business – it will likely require more of your time to begin with, but you benefit from being able to add some personality and create something totally unique.

Going independent for long-term success 💪🏽

Diversifying a growing business is a good strategy for long-term success and sustainability, especially if you create a new revenue stream that you own entirely.

Whether you're already a Patreon creator exploring your options, or trying to decide which is the right path to get started with, bear in mind the following:

1. You don't necessarily need any additional technical or coding skills to create your own membership website – most creators start out with something simple, and then hire a developer later on when they are making significant revenue and want to improve their brand.
2. You don't need to choose one or the other. It's entirely possible to run a Patreon creator account and a custom membership website together.
3. It's also possible to migrate all of your Patrons to a custom website that does the same thing, with less transaction fees or more flexibility.

We've investigated all of the pros and cons of using Patreon or a custom membership site to power your business in depth.

You may decide that one or the other is better for you, or that you want to utilise the power of both. Here's three scenarios of how these configurations work in reality.

Scenario #1 – Supplement Patreon with your own site

Goal: Build a secondary home for your premium content that your Patrons can access as an extra benefit.

Works best for: Creators who have a large Patreon audience and want to create a custom website, but keep taking payments via Patreon.

How it works: Automatically send new Patrons to your membership website, where they will be able to log in to access additional premium content. For example, if you you're creating a Podcast that your patrons pledge to, but also wanted to run a blog or an email newsletter, you could connect your Patreon to your website to do this.

In Ghost, this is made possible by creating member only content and turning off free member sign up completely. You can connect Patreon to your site via Zapier and the end result would be a publication that only your Patrons can access.

Scenario #2 – Branch out with your own custom memberships

Goal: Create an additional revenue stream and take payments on your own website, while continuing to use Patreon as a source of income.

Works best for: Creators who want to sell additional memberships on their own site, and promote it to existing patrons, or run independent marketing campaigns.

How it works: Create a standalone membership website using software of your choice, differentiate it's content from your Patreon content, and decide whether you want to promote it to existing Patrons or attract a new audience - or both!

This is a great way to diversify your existing Patreon revenue and make the best of both worlds. Here's some examples to get the creativity flowing:

• Put your most premium/behind the scenes content on your website, so that your most engaged Patrons will sign up for a recurring monthly subscription. This is especially useful if you're using the "Per Creation" payment model on Patreon, since it gives your biggest fans the opportunity to support your work every month to get more frequent updates.
• Try experimenting with other content formats on your website. For example, you might choose to use Patreon for short updates and community - but then offer unique content on your own website for a more premium cost.
• Create a new brand on the side! Let's say you're a popular musician and your Patrons support your creative work, but you also want to create long-form essays about the music industry. You could expand upon this using an independent members site in a slightly different niche. The benefit of this is that some of your existing supporters might be interested, but you can also treat it as a second business which has it's own target audience.

Using membership website software allows you the full freedom to create what ever you like. In Ghost, you can use the editor to write, share images, embed videos or audio and much more. Plus, you can send it all as a newsletter which is great for engagement and retention!

Scenario #3 – Migrate patrons to an independent website

Goal: Move your business to your own membership site entirely and import your existing Patrons

Works best for: Those wanting to take full ownership of their brand or avoid Patreon transaction fees. Be warned - if you already have a lot of Patrons this can be a risky move, especially if your paying members are loyal to the Patreon platform and familiar with your content there. Consider the previous two scenarios as stepping stones towards an independent business first and foremost.

How it works: Choose your preferred software to run your membership website, and migrate/import your patrons. Let them know that you'll be continuing to provide content to them in a new location. You'd need to make sure the software you use allows you to import members, and that it supports all of the functionality you require.

Final thoughts

There we go! We've covered the pros and cons of using Patreon vs an independent solution to power your memberships. The simple truth is, there's no right or wrong answer. What we do know is that while Patreon has become a powerful tool for creators of all kinds, it's also worth considering diversifying your business, which gives you more opportunities to grow and customise what you offer to your members.

If you're already using Patreon, have you started thinking about layering in your own membership website yet? Do you have any questions for us? Drop them below!

The recurring revenue business model that has sustained the software industry for many years has now been unlocked for creators, who can harness this model using a membership website to manage their business.

A membership site gives you the ability to publish gated content, and charge a recurring fee, so your most loyal readers and fans can support your work.

Creators, writers and journalists using memberships and subscriptions are generating $thousands+ in predictable revenue per month! It's the same principle used by creators on Patreon as well as many other independent publishers, such as Stratechery and The Information.

Who are membership websites for?

Anyone who wants to build a business around their content or creative work can benefit from a membership website. Including but not limited to: writers, bloggers, journalists, podcasters, video creators and newsletter authors.

What ever you're creating – if it provides enough value to persuade people to pay for a subscription to access it, then running a membership site that you own is the most effective, long-term solution for your business.

It's also an attractive option for existing creators who are finding it difficult to generate reliable revenue using alternative methods like advertising and affiliates.

What are the benefits?

There are many ways to monetise a website or blog, but selling memberships online has many unique benefits that you won't find elsewhere:

• Your revenue is predictable and sustainable
• You control everything, without needing to rely on other brands or ads
• You don't need a large, broad audience to succeed
• Your members belong to a specific niche, make the choice to subscribe, and are genuinely invested in your work
• You can build trust and form a relationship with your members

These benefits can't be applied to other models, such as advertising, brand deals or niche affiliate marketing.

How much money can be made?

Let's start with a realistic statement: In order to make money with a membership site, you need to produce something unique that provides value to people. We'll discuss this in more depth later.

Once you've figured out how to provide genuinely valuable content that people want, there really are no limits. You could create a media empire that is entirely powered by member subscriptions, or you could run a small community as a side-project.

Just take a look at stats on Graphtreon, which showcases estimated earnings of Patreon creators, or at some of the example newsletters in our recent post about premium newsletter businesses.

Contrary to other business models mentioned above, you don't need a huge audience to find success. Many membership websites that exist today only need to convert a small percentage of their readers in order to start generating revenue each month. Use the calculator on our members page to see for yourself.

Choosing the right tools

As with any type of online business, you're going to need to rely on some tools. At the very minimum you need a platform or piece of software that will allow you to share content, protect content behind a login and take payments from your members.

Find a platform that can do everything you need

In reality you're probably going to want a whole lot more functionality than this, such as:

• A nice environment to create and edit content
• Robust membership management tools
• Email newsletters
• Custom domains
• Custom theme/website
• SEO functionality
• Integrations or features to support a wide range of additional requirements, such as analytics, social, community & referral programs

Factor in the cost

Other important considerations are how much all of your tools are going to cost each month, and importantly, whether your chosen payment solution takes a percentage of your revenue, and if so, how much!

Do your research

There are a growing number of platforms available to build and manage a membership website, including Ghost. By the time you have finished reading this article you'll probably have a better idea of exactly what features you need, at which point the research process will be much easier. Until then, let's zoom out and explore how to find a niche, build a strategy and launch a membership website.

Ghost compared: find out how Ghost stacks up compared to other membership site platforms.

The importance of uniqueness

Common objections to launching a membership site are usually along the lines of: "I'm not sure if people would pay for my content". It's a valid concern because the truth is, unless you have a unique value proposition, it will indeed be hard to build a business with your content.

Not every article about this subject will tell you this because it sounds too much like hard work, but we like to think of it as a creative challenge that applies to all business owners. The silver lining is that there are literally thousands of niches out there, and each one holds opportunity for creators like you.

Before starting out, spend some time researching how you're going to provide premium content that a specific group of people want to pay for. Here's 3 examples of real membership sites, and a glance at how they're offering something genuinely unique.

The Browser curates reading materials on every imaginable topic

This publisher scours the internet/world for the best and most interesting things to read so you don't have to (saving you time). As they say on their about page, The Browser ensures you "always have something to read on the train and interesting things to share with your friends". They have thousands of subscribers from this very unique approach to curation, entertainment and information sharing.

Hot Pod is the most influential publication about Podcasting

Publisher Nick Quah created Hot Pod to provide analysis and insight about the growing podcast industry, taking advantage of a relatively new niche and providing high-quality information that people within this industry couldn't easily access elsewhere.

Stratechery became the go-to resource for analytical tech industry blog posts

Ben Thompson created Stratechery to provide deep analysis of the strategy and business side of tech & media, and it's impact on society. This unique approach combines a very specific aspect of this niche (strategy + business) with some of the highest quality content available, and has gone on to be one of the most successful examples of a membership business.

Ideas for your own unique offering

There are plenty of examples out there. Most of them fall into one of the following categories:

1. Offering the best analysis, information and research
2. Helping people to make better decisions about things like business or politics
3. Curating content which save time for the reader
4. Provides entertainment

This list is definitely not exhaustive. How will you differentiate your content?

To go against a lot of advice on the internet – we're not advocating you copy existing membership businesses, you need a unique offering entirely. Even if someone is already doing memberships in your specific niche, you need a new angle that provides your audience with something they simply can't miss out on!

Tip: searching forums, Quora and Reddit is a great way to find out what people in your niche are really asking for!

Membership models & pricing

There's a lot of flexibility with a membership site to provide a variety of content formats and benefits to members. In fact, most membership businesses offer some sort of hybrid approach where paid members have access to several different things.

This can include email newsletters, blog content, reports, videos, podcast episodes, courses, community, open office hours, long-form essays, interviews, music, art, photography... the list goes on!

Using Ghost, creators can combine all kinds of content formats using the editor and rich embeds. Add images, galleries, videos, audio, social cards and much more directly to a post, and then turn it into a member-only post or email it to your subscribers in a few clicks!

Adopting a hybrid approach gives you the opportunity to provide more value to your members, or even test out something new. It also allows you to consider pricing tiers that offer different benefits. However, we advise to keep pricing as simple as possible, as adding too many tiers can confuse people and drive them away. Decision paralysis is a real thing.

Having the clearest possible value proposition is crucial, especially when getting started, which is why Ghost offers two plan options for monthly and yearly subscriptions by default.

A few other considerations for your membership model pricing:

• Pricing is not a set it and forget it thing. Running a business that relies on recurring revenue requires a lot of trial and error. Starting out with early adopter pricing and slowly increasing your prices is a great way to start this process early on.
• Most content creators undervalue their work, or suspect that no one will pay for it, which leads to pricing models that are unsustainable. Patreon discourages creators from setting pricing below $5/month.
• Figure out how much value you are offering from the get go. Ask your friends or existing readers how much they would pay. Compare the value of your work against what people would be able to access for free. This is actually a great way to iron out your uniqueness. If your conclusion is "people can get this exact content for free", then it's probably time to go back to the drawing board.
• Know your audience! This report suggests that the majority of membership businesses charge somewhere between $25-49 per month, and B2B membership businesses are more likely to price over $50 than B2C businesses.

Try working this out backwards. How much do you want to make?

Let's say your goal is $5,000 per month – you'd need 500 members paying $10 a month, or 250 members paying $20 a month. Using this perspective, you start to understand how much value you need to provide and how many members you would require to start hitting your goals.

Launching, marketing and retention

Creating unique content is step 1. Once you have figured that out and picked a platform to power your membership site, you're ready to start putting actions in place to attract a loyal audience. After that, you should start to think about building relationships and retaining your subscribers.

Launching a membership website

By far the most common option is to launch to an existing audience by inviting or importing your subscribers from another website, email subscription list or anywhere else. In addition to this (or if you don't have an existing audience) you can use some combination of the following:

• Social media – this works best if you have an existing account with followers
• Communities – be careful with self-promotion, but if you're active in relevant communities, you can share your new membership site here
• Press outreach – are there existing outlets that might give you coverage?
• Crowdfunding – some publishers like The Correspondent use this method to raise funds and run a fully-fledged marketing campaign prior to launching
• Early adopter pricing – most membership sites start out with cheaper pricing for their founding members, which is a great way to get started when you haven't yet built a reputation

Especially starting out, it's important to make sure your membership site promotes your content clearly and concisely. Ideally you need a home or an about page and some existing content previews, alongside a very strong call-to-action.

Ghost Members has a purpose-built theme called Lyra which allows you to do all of this in as few steps as creating a site, uploading a theme and configuring your membership & pricing settings.

Case study: Rediverge

Rediverge.com was built with Ghost and has a custom homepage to deliver the message of what subscribers will benefit from, with very prominent buttons to subscribe. It was predominantly launched to an existing audience on Twitter, and used early adopter pricing to attract it's first 250 subscribers within a month.

Attracting new members

After the initial launch, you're going to need some tactics to continue to grow a loyal audience. There's several ways to market your membership business, here's some of the most common approaches that you can use.

SEO + public content

Gated premium content is not really designed to perform well in the search engines, since it's secured behind a login. However, not all of your content has to be behind a paywall. This means you can still create SEO content to target relevant keywords and build a reliable source of organic traffic over time.

This is not something that can happen overnight, so it's good to start investing your time in this early on to reap the benefits in the future.

With Ghost you can choose from Public, Members only or Paid-member only content in a single click from each post. Additionally, the platform comes with comprehensive search engine optimisation features, without the need for additional downloads or plugins. All you need to do is bring the content and apply custom meta data!

Remember, each public post also serves as a marketing opportunity for your premium content, so make sure there are clear paths for people to convert from every single piece of content you create.

Tip: If you're new to SEO or want to brush up your knowledge, we highly recommend checking out the Moz beginner's guide, AHREFs blog, and Detailed.

Email

Another option you have available to you with a membership site is to have both free and paid members. Many publishers use this method to convert their website visitors into leads by offering a free email newsletter which is generally sent less frequently than the paid newsletter.

For example, access levels to content in Ghost can be used to achieve this, and email newsletters can be sent directly to the selected access level in a couple of clicks.

As with the SEO tactic mentioned above, you should always retain your best and most unique content for paid members. You can also use that content to persuade free members to upgrade to a paid subscription.

The New York Times is one of the most famous news media outlets to use subscriptions on their website, and they use this strategy to great effect. Here's one of their emails to a free member, which is an unapologetic invitation to subscribe.

Other ways to promote premium plans to free members is to provide a teaser of what they could access if they subscribed. Let your best content do the talking!

Social

Creating a social account for your membership product, or using a personal account to promote your work is a great way to get noticed, especially if you have an existing audience. If you don't, this is also something to begin spending time on as soon as possible so that you can increase your reach.

Tip: Depending on your niche, you might find that a specific social platform is better suited for you. Find out where your audience hangs out, and make sure you research what other people are doing on social!

Ads

We generally wouldn't recommend using something like Google PPC ads when you're starting out, as they can be very expensive and competitive. Advertising on social media however, can be a good way to build awareness of your membership site with a very specific and targeted group of people. It generally tends to be more cost-effective too!

You can either run ads, or use sponsored posts with public articles on your site. Again, pick the right platform for your niche. Where ever your audience spends the most time is the strongest indicator!

Word of mouth

Your existing members spreading the word about your membership site is probably the most powerful tool you have to market your business. While you can't force them to do this, you can definitely foster this behaviour by asking your biggest fans to share your work, by running a referral program, and by reiterating the value your members are receiving from their subscription in emails.

A great benefit of creating unique content for a very specific audience who are interested in a niche topic is that they often talk to each other naturally. Providing your content is worthy, word of mouth will occur naturally.

Building relationships

Now you've launched a membership site and have started actively marketing your content to attract members, the final part of the cycle is to put plans into place to retain them.

Preventing churn is a huge topic to cover, so we've distilled some of the key considerations here:

1. The number one thing to focus on at all times is to continue to provide value with ongoing unique content or any other benefits. This should always be the number one focus. If your members can get everything they need by paying one single monthly fee, and aren't consistently receiving new content, they're going to churn out.
2. Don't be a stranger. Make sure you are sending new content to your members via email with adequate frequency. You can also consider using an onboarding sequence to welcome new members and ensure they stick around. For example, using Ghost, you can easily integrate with an onboarding email tool via Zapier.
3. Always provide a way for members to contact you and provide feedback or start a conversation – many membership businesses like De Correspondent have found that transparency and allowing members to have a say is a very positive retention technique.
4. Remind your members of the value they are getting in your communications. This is especially useful if someone tries to cancel. Many companies like Amazon and most software companies (like us) use some sort of messaging along the lines of: "Are you sure you want to lose access to X".
5. Use a tool like ChartMogul or ProfitWell to keep track of your subscription business growth. Tools like this help you to identify if and when you have churn issues and give you insights about the health of your membership driven business at a glance.

Final thoughts

We've covered what membership websites are and who they are useful for - as well as outlining how to find the right platform, the importance of making your content truly unique, and everything from setting your pricing, to launching and marketing.

Along with an increasing number of tools supporting subscription based technology, membership websites have become the most exciting way to build a real independent business as a creator or publisher of any kind. We're really excited to see what you'll do next.

While this article is in-depth, there's so much more we could expand on in future. Make sure to subscribe below & receive an email when new posts are published! 📬

A premium newsletter is a subscription business that generates sustainable recurring revenue by sending unique content to its members via email.

A growing number of online publishers are relying on email newsletters to build an audience of paying subscribers which can generate thousands or even millions in annual revenue.

In this article we’ll look at some successful examples of newsletter subscription businesses - and then we’ll explore everything you need to know to start your own.

Case studies: Successful premium newsletters

There are plenty of interesting examples of premium newsletters in a variety of niches that are already paving the way, which helps to highlight some of the key factors that make them so successful. Here’s 11 examples to provide further insight and inspiration.

Stratechery pioneered the daily premium newsletter

Ben Thompson is one of the early adopters of the premium newsletter model. Members can enjoy the analytical tech industry blog posts and daily newsletter by subscribing for a monthly or annual membership. While some of the content on the site is free, thousands of people have subscribed to support Ben’s work and access the daily email newsletter.

The Browser has over 10,000 subscribers

This newsletter curates 5 recommended articles from a variety of topics every day for its subscribers, and is entirely ran by two editors, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton. Monthly subscriptions start at $5, with annual subscriptions starting at $48. Read more about The Browser’s story in this interview.

Side-project Normcore Tech generated $4k in the first few months

Tech writer Vicki Boykis started a newsletter as a side project and quickly began attracting subscribers and revenue within the first 5 months.

“From my personal perspective, it’s more than I’ve ever made writing in a year consistently, and I keep getting new subscribers, so I’m pretty happy with it.”

De Correspondent generate millions with a successful hyperlocal newsletter

96% of the Dutch publishers revenue comes from paying members who sign up for the daily newsletter. Memberships are €7/month or €70/year, but they also receive nominated donations and additional support from members who can afford it.

They’re well known for being transparent about their revenue with members, which helps to foster engagement and retention.

Sinocism now has more than 50,000 subscribers

This informative newsletter by Bill Bishop is about business, political and social relationships between China and the U.S. With over 50k subscribers in total and premium members are paying $15/month.

Larger media organisations like Business Insider are moving towards premium subscriptions

Business Insider was acquired by large media company Axel Springer in 2015, and has been selling premium newsletter subscriptions for several years. BI Prime and BI Intelligence subscriptions have $1 “free” trials, annual membership and even enterprise options.  

Rediverge sold out of limited early adopter spots in 24 hours

This independent publication about remote work, world travel and building a different kind of life was launched by Ghost’s founder John O’Nolan in November 2019. Rediverge is now a few months into building a growing community of more than 250 subscribers who receive the private newsletter in their inbox.

Off the chain provides a daily newsletter to investors and early access to podcast episodes

Anthony Pompliano’s cryptocurrency newsletter sends both free and premium issues, with a “daily letter” for paid members. It already has more than 40,000 subscribers (free and paid) and plans are $100/year or $10/month.

Jessica Lessin founded The Information with subscriptions as the only revenue stream in 2013

Since then the publication has gone on to become very successful, with a free weekly newsletter, and daily news analysis for paid members. The Information members also get access to a whole host of other member benefits like exclusive articles and access to a Slack community. The Information has a $399 annual plan which thousands of subscribers pay for!

Advisorator generated more than $12k within the first year

Freelance journalist Jared Newman ran a free newsletter for two years, and noticed there was a demand for something more focused on tech advice. So Advisorator was born, which has $5/month and $50/year subscriptions, and attracted 200 subscribers in the first year.

“Nothing compares to the freedom of running your own publication, in which people have invested specifically in hearing what you have to say” - Jared Newman

Explorers Club gained over 15,000 subscribers in the first year

Craig Mod runs two newsletters, Roden and Ridgeline, alongside a membership business that boasts other benefits like longform essays, office hours and podcast content.

These examples include solo creators, smaller independent publishers and larger publications with a team behind it. But what is interesting is that the size of the organisation doesn’t necessarily correlate with its success. It’s entirely possible to generate large amounts of sustainable revenue and run a full membership business as a writer, creator or solo founder. Equally, this business model works well for publishing teams at scale.

Why use email and not something else?

Trends come and go, but email is never going away. It consistently performs above all other mediums and has done for a long time.

With over 3.9 billion email accounts worldwide and 293 billion emails sent per day (Radicati Group), average open rates for email are between 20%-30% and click-through rates are around 3%. This might not sound that great, but compared to other channels like social media, where average reach is 6% or less and click-through is 0.5%, it actually stacks up pretty well (Source).

Not only that, premium newsletters are far more likely to exceed the averages since they're not cold marketing emails being sent to a large audience, but targeted emails being sent to a niche audience.

Our free newsletter Publisher Weekly consistently gets open rates over 50% and click rates over 40%, by offering valuable weekly content to a niche audience.

Social media networks are saturated, advertising models are broken and the internet is full of spam, bots and tracking. Consumers are getting tired of this, and increasingly searching for alternative ways to discover the best content that serves their needs. This is where your premium newsletter comes in!

Niches are becoming big business

Creating a premium newsletter gives you the opportunity to cut through the noise. You can find a niche and attract a very specific audience. Your audience is made up of people who make the choice to sign up for your newsletter. They actually want to hear from you, and hopefully in some cases will be willing to pay for that benefit. Email is the most effective and direct way to share your work with these people.

You can still use other formats, too

A newsletter is a vehicle for communication that works well. But you can also combine or coincide a newsletter with a blog, a community, a podcast, a video channel, essays, photography, music… or anything else you can think of. Many of the case studies above do exactly this!

How to create a newsletter

Now we know what a premium newsletter looks like and have seen examples of what success looks like, let’s dive into how to create a newsletter for yourself. We’re going to start with some initial tips for finding your niche, the technical specifics of getting setup, and methods for attracting your first subscribers.

Finding your niche & being unique

Picking your niche is a question only you can answer. But let’s preface this with the most important thing to bear in mind at all times:

For any kind of premium content to work, it needs to be genuinely unique.

You can ask yourself some questions such as “what am I interested in?” or “what am I an expert in?” - and that’s a good start. But what you really want to spend your time figuring out is: how you are going to offer something that people want or need, and simply can’t find elsewhere? The more specific you can be about this, the better.

Creating content that is the same but better than others might get you so far. Content that is the same but worse than others probably won’t get you far at all. To stand a chance at success you need to create a newsletter that is both different, and better, than the rest.

Uniqueness can take many forms, here’s some examples:

Provide value

For example, a curated newsletter saves time, an analytical one teaches readers something, a business tips newsletter enables readers to make better business decisions. In a lot of these cases, the newsletter also helps people to make money which is usually the most convincing justification of a subscription.

Fill a content gap

When there are simply no good outlets providing curation or information to those who want it the most you have a prime opportunity to create something of unique value. These are rare to find!

Provide a unique perspective

Creating a newsletter that provides your own perspective on a niche topic that is already saturated can work, but it usually requires having an existing audience to work with.

Provides entertainment

Arguably the most difficult space to be in, since entertainment is relatively subjective which makes it more difficult to set yourself apart. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible - there are many popular YouTubers for example, whose main value proposition is pure entertainment.

What is your value proposition?

Remember, you’re expecting people to pay for your newsletter. Providing unique value is something that all successful businesses have to figure out. People selling physical products or software have to overcome the exact same hurdles!

The good news is – many of the successful newsletter authors featured earlier in this article didn’t start out as well-known names within their niche. They’ve built a personal brand using their newsletter to become well-known. They did this because they figured out a genuinely unique approach within a specific niche and created exceptionally good content. That’s what you need to do!

Technical stuff: Creating a newsletter

Once you’ve got your strategy in place, you’re going to need a subscription commerce platform to host your premium newsletter. The bare minimum you’ll need to get started is:

1. A page where people can subscribe
2. A way to take payments
3. A method of sending email newsletters to your subscribers

Creating a premium newsletter website

You're going to need to create a home for your newsletter that serves as a marketing website to attract new subscribers and showcase your work. There are plenty of options available to you, including ours! The choice is yours, so make sure you do some research and experiment with some platforms to get an idea of what will work for you.

Newsletter authors can get started with Ghost by spinning up a publication in the space of 3 clicks, which immediately gives you a website that you control, as well as full premium newsletter features such as sign up and sign in forms, plans and payments via Stripe and member management.

Creating subscriptions & taking payments

Once your premium newsletter has a home, it also needs to accept payments from your subscribers. The most common way to do this is to have a sign up page featuring your paid plans, which allows your readers to subscribe with a credit card.

Any good subscription commerce platform handles this for you using an integration with a payment gateway. The thing you want to research here is whether there are any additional fees or percentages taken out of your revenue, as this varies depending on your chosen platform.

This works in Ghost by connecting a Stripe account (which takes a few minutes), and using a theme on your site that includes a sign up page. That's all you need to start taking payments! Once a new member has subscribed, they'll be added to your member dashboard and they'll receive all future emails that you send to paid-members.

Sending newsletter content

You may decide to use a platform that has email newsletters built-in, like Ghost or Substack, or use something like Memberful that manages your memberships, but requires an additional tool for emails. Either way, you need to choose a reliable mechanism for sending newsletter content to your subscribers.

Any post created in the Ghost editor can be sent to your subscribers in a few clicks and it's possible to send your emails to both free and/or paid subscribers based on post access level. For example, you might choose to send daily newsletters to paid members, and weekly issues to free members who you’re trying to convert.

Doing more than the basics

Beyond that, you’re probably going to want some additional functionality, including but not limited to:

• Custom domains
• A custom branded website
• Member-protected content
• Member management dashboard
• Integrations with third-party tools
• Content embeds for video and audio

It's always a good idea to plan for the future when deciding what technology to use to power your business. All of the successful case studies earlier in this article have built something completely custom and are offering a variety of perks and content types to their members.

Ghost leaves you with open avenues to customise, scale and personalise your business down the line. You can build almost any kind of publication around a premium newsletter business – and many publishers choose to start simple and then do the customisation work once their proof of concept is working and they're generating some predictable revenue.

Running costs 💸

Craig Mod covered the ongoing costs to run this type of business in his article about running a membership program. It gives you an idea of the kind of things you need to consider, such as hosting, domains, email and membership software:

With a Ghost publication, you pay a single monthly fee which covers everything from hosting to member management and emails. Ghost never takes a percentage of your revenue, so the only extra fees you’d pay are for payment processing (Stripe charges 2.9% +$0.30). This makes it fairly easy to plan and budget for your outgoings!

Get started in a few hours or less with Ghost by signing up for a free trial and using our members guide!

Attracting paid subscribers

Launching your premium newsletter also needs some form of strategy behind it. From studying the examples earlier in this post, we noticed a few common methods for launching which will help you to determine how to start attracting your own subscribers.

Launch to an existing audience

This won’t always be applicable, but when it is it can be a great strategy to step out into the world of memberships and find out how many of your existing readers would be willing to pay. Ghost allows you to import existing subscribers from anywhere, if you'd like to give your existing readers immediate access.

Use content access levels to your advantage

Experimenting with free and paid content can be a great way to build an audience and drive awareness about your newsletter content.

• Run a free newsletter (less frequent, less unique content) to attract new subscribers into the top of your marketing funnel, and periodically promote upgrades to paid plans to access the best content.
• Share snippets of content on your website, and only unlock the full post with a paid subscription, using content-protection.
• Run a public blog alongside your premium newsletter to attract organic search traffic, or to run sponsored posts to targeted groups with Facebook ads.

Early adopter pricing

Many of the examples we looked at used the launching phase as a time to experiment with pricing strategies. Rather than waiting to launch, it's common to start out with lower prices for your first paying subscribers when you're still adding content and ironing out the finer details.

One way to do this is to offer a limited number of memberships at a certain price, and then increase it once they have all sold out:

Make sure you’re working towards a pricing model that's sustainable for your business. Many creators undervalue their work which can lead to economically unsustainable business models. Platforms like Patreon discourage all of their creators from setting pricing anywhere below $5/month for this reason.

Crowdfunding campaigns

Running a crowdfunding campaign is another way to launch, which not only generates initial funding to support you in the early days, but also functions as a marketing campaign for your launch. De Correspondent famously did this to launch an English-speaking version, raising $2.5 million, a lots of attention, and thousands of founding members.  

Word of mouth

No matter what your strategy - you’re also going to be relying on word of mouth to some degree. The great thing about specific niches is that they contain groups of people who talk to each other. You can also foster word of mouth by asking your members to share your work, or even offer a referral program.

We've now learnt what a premium newsletter is and what successful examples look like, as well as how to create your own by establishing a unique offering, setting up a publication and building your first subscribers.

Many publishers running premium newsletters often comment that their biggest regret is not starting sooner - because the sooner you start the sooner you can build a sustainable business around your work. The benefit of a premium newsletter is that you can start small and iterate with relative ease, and although it takes a large investment of your time, the amount of financial investment is minimal.

There are countless ways to monetise a blog, each with its own merits. We're going to focus on one method which unlocks the opportunity to generate predictable recurring revenue from your blog.

In the same way Netflix run their subscription service and thousands of Patreon creators are generating $12.9million in payouts per month – we're going explore how to transform a blog into a membership business, where your audience support your work with subscriptions.

If you’re interested in running an independent, sustainable online business where you have ultimate control, this is the guide you’ve been waiting for 💪

What is a membership business and how much money can I make?

In this context, we’re talking specifically about generating revenue from publishing content. A growing number of creators in a similar position to you are making money from blogs, newsletters, music and videos by offering premium memberships to their audience. Here's some real examples:

• Premium newsletters such as The Dish and Stratechery pull in $millions/year
• Philip DeFranco’s daily news show is estimated to make up to $38k/month
• Successful podcast Chapo Trap House generates $158,000 per month
• News publishers like The Information and De Correspondent both generate several $millions annually
• La Vagabonde’s sailing YouTube channel brings in an estimated $25k per episode
• Technology newsletter Normcore Tech generated $4,000 in the first 5 months, as a side project

The rest of this article is going to explore how you can do the same thing!

Are memberships the right thing for my blog?

The single most important aspect that will determine the success or failure of your membership publication is unique, quality content. All of the examples above are providing content their readers and fans can't find anywhere else. That's where this business model thrives.

Provided you’re already on board with the amount of work that will take - turning your blog into a membership business, or building one from scratch, is absolutely an option for anyone who wants to generate revenue from their content.

“But who would pay for my content?”

Times are changing. We’re entering a new era where independent publishers have a unique opportunity. It’s no longer the case that you need to appeal to a mass audience to find success online. Niche markets are larger than ever, and can become a surprisingly big business. You only need to look at some of the top creators on Patreon for proof of this.

Some quick napkin math helps to illustrate further. With 500 members at $10/mo, you’ve got annual revenue of $60,000. This doubles to $120,000 when you hit the magical 1,000 true fans.

We’ll dive into how to tackle pricing later. For now, it’s important to know that while you certainly won’t make this kind of revenue without putting in a lot of time and dedication - it is possible - and we believe it’s the most sustainable and future-proof option there is to make money from a blog.

Affiliates & ads no longer work the way they used to

Social media platforms are saturated, everyone is tired of clickbait and advertising models that rely on large audiences no longer work. Publishers were left to fight for the remaining ad dollars, eventually looking for a better way. Meanwhile, consumers are consistently asking for more privacy causing big platforms like Google to tighten up on third-party tracking.

With advertising, you're forced to rely on others and your audience get no choice in the matter. Advertising is at odds with the principles of creating good content: it requires a broad audience with a smaller, less manageable return.

The sustainable alternative

The membership model is an increasingly popular option for publishers of all kinds, and here's why:

• Your income is stable and entirely predictable
• You control your destiny - you don’t need to rely on other brands, ad platforms or any one else
• You don’t need a huge audience to be successful

It’s a great model for your audience, too:

• They make a choice to sign up
• They get to have a say and provide feedback
• There’s an opportunity to form a relationship and build trust

This doesn’t mean other models of making money from a blog aren't valid. It’s just not our area of expertise, so we’re not focussing on that (and we think memberships & subscriptions are a better long-term solution 😉).

How to start a membership business

The hardest part is always getting started. If you have an existing audience in a particular niche then you’re already one step ahead, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do some research to discover more about your potential customers. Similarly, if you’re starting from square one, it’s time to put your research sweatpants on.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself to get started:

1. What niche topics or areas of interest are you genuinely an expert in?
2. What content can you create in that niche that people can't find anywhere else? How can you add value, or create something new?
3. What format suits your content best? Written content, videos, a podcast or some combination?
4. Competitive analysis: Who are the top ranking websites in your niche? Are there any existing membership businesses in operation?
5. Have you had a real conversation or done some stalking of your potential members? Customer research really helps to identify what people value, what they’re looking for and how much they might be willing to pay for it.

Membership blogs can fall into any niche category you can think of, the key point is how you differentiate your content from the rest.

Here’s some of the tools we like to use during the research phase:

• AHREFs - Our favourite tool for keyword research, competitor research and a whole lot more
• Google Trends - Find out how your niche is trending over time
• Reddit, Quora, Forums - all great places to lurk and find out what people are talking about in particular niches
• SimilarWeb - Enter any website to discover how it performs, from traffic to engagement

Make sure you have an idea of what your niche is, how you’re going to set yourself apart from the rest, who your ideal customers are and finally, who your competition are. Write it all down somewhere.

Tools for creating a membership website

To run this type of business, you'll need a subscription commerce platform. It used to be quite complicated to set up a publication with subscriptions, but more recently companies (like ours) have built the tools required to make the process much easier.

Ghost allows you to create a truly independent membership business, and unlike many other platforms, we never take a percentage of your revenue. Everything you earn is yours to keep.

Ghost is open source and extremely flexible - meaning you always own the keys to your blogging business, and it won’t suddenly disappear if the platform does. It also means you can create entirely custom publications like Rediverge and Publisher Weekly.

There are other platforms you can choose from including: Patreon, Substack and WordPress plugins like Memberful.

If you want to learn more about Ghost vs other platforms, you can check out our handy comparisons. Ultimately - the choice is yours. So be sure to do some research and figure out what suits your business. Once you've done that, take the first leap to get your membership website created.

Get started in a few hours or less with Ghost by signing up for a free trial and using our members guide!

How much to charge: Pricing strategies

Software companies like ours have been using recurring subscriptions as a model for many years. We’ve made some mistakes, had plenty of successes and learnt a thing or two 😅. Ultimately pricing is important and in order to get it “right” - you have to experiment.

There’s no one-size-fits-all set of advice, since pricing strategies can vary depending on your market or niche, on who you customers are and lots of other factors. However, one word of advice is that most creators tend to undervalue their work, which can lead to economically unsustainable business models or even failure. Patreon actively discourage their users from setting pricing below $5/mo for this very reason.

So here’s some questions & ideas to help you get started with your first pricing experiment:

• Think about how much value your content truly has for your members
• Speak to would-be members and your existing audience if you have one
• Figure out what your ambitions are! How many members do you actually want? How much do you want to earn? Use the calculator on our members page.
• Find out what your competitors are charging - or look at similar niches
• Consider using early adopter pricing when you get started with a view to increasing it as your product evolves (this is a great way to test pricing on an ongoing basis)

This report suggests that the majority of membership businesses charge somewhere between $25-49 per month, and B2B membership businesses are more likely to price over $50 than B2C businesses.

Deciding how to price your membership content is important. But it can also be adjusted and tested in the future. So spend some time on this now, and then understand that it will be an ongoing thing to experiment with as you grow.

Invite your existing audience or fans

If you’re already blogging in your niche, or if you have a relevant email list from another project – a great way to get your first customers is to invite everyone who is already familiar with your work. They become your early adopters. If you don’t have an existing audience yet, don't panic – skip to the next section.

Invite everyone on your email subscriber list to join your new membership website by sending them an email, or consider importing some of your biggest fans to your membership site so they have immediate access to free content and can help promote you by word of mouth.

In Ghost you can import any list from other tools such as Mailchimp, Substack or Patreon – and you can even import paid members if you have existing supporters on other platforms.

Working with content access-levels

Running any kind of independent business means having to wear several hats and a membership business is no exception. The good news is that having premium content gives you the opportunity to adopt a number of strategies to promote your work to a new audience. Firstly, you can decide whether some or all of your content will exist behind a member log in screen.

• Teaser content – Add an excerpt of your writing, podcast or video to attract interest, and unlock the full content for premium members only
• Free content – Publish some of your content publicly to use across your marketing efforts

As with pricing, you can always experiment with this to find out what works best. For example, Business Insider manage free vs paid content by assuming that not all content is created equal, and only placing the most exclusive or unique stuff behind a subscription.

Attracting new members

Once you've got an idea of the access-level your content will have, you can utilise well-known strategies to get people to discover your work:

• Email – build an audience of free subscribers and get them into your marketing funnel, then use email to convert some of those free subscribers to paid subscribers.
• SEO – Optimise some of your public content for relevant keywords to attract free traffic to your membership content.
• Ads – See, we don’t totally hate on ads. Facebook can be a great place to reach a targeted niche audience with promoted posts, at a relatively low cost.
• Communities – Reach out to relevant communities about your content, maybe offer an incentive, but be careful not to self-promote too much in communities you’re not already an active member of.
• Partnerships – Partner with brands or businesses and provide each other with some reciprocal promotion, backlinks or sponsorships.

Ghost has easy to use access-levels for public, free and paid content, as well as native email newsletters and a full library of integrations. This means you can implement any of these marketing strategies in any combination, without any additional plugins or downloads. Here's an example of what "teaser content" looks like on a Ghost publication:

We could write an entirely separate post about each of these and more - subscribe to our newsletter to find out when new posts are available.

The membership lifecycle

We’ve now covered what a membership business looks like and explained how it can help you to make money from a blog. We’ve also taken a look at how to get started, from the initial research to setting up a website and finding your first subscribers. What comes next?

You can think of this process as a cycle. You add unique content at the top, which attracts a loyal audience. Eventually they realise they can’t live without your unique content and sign up.

The next step is to build relationships, form trust, and reduce what's known in the subscription world as "churn". Keeping your paid members around for as long as possible is one of the most cost effective ways to run a membership business. But this post is long enough, so we’ll cover that separately.

In the meantime, spend some time using the tips in this article to get started. That’s the first outcome to success.

There are many strategies to grow a successful online business, but the first step is to get the wheel spinning. The great thing about this method of making money from your online work is that it can suit almost any type of creator or publisher, at any scale.

Whether it’s something you want to do on the side as a hobby to generate some extra money, or perhaps your ambition to become the CEO of a startup like The Information or Stratechery. This model is completely sustainable, and provided you bring the quality content, there are no limitations on how far you can take this, or how much money you can generate.

What do I have to say that's important enough to be worth publishing? Will anyone even care? This isn't working. I'll try again tomorrow.

We've all been there.

It's terrifying, at times, pushing fresh content out into the world. It can be unnerving wondering how your peers are going to judge your words. Is what you've written good? Will it be received well, or will it create a negative response? Or worse... no response at all?

This thinking often forces us to repress ideas and throw them into the "not worth publishing" bucket. It's a shame, because it stifles creativity. This is why we're often left staring at computer screens knowing that we should publish something, but unable to decide on exactly what.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

To combat this: Today we're going to look at some tried and tested techniques for coming up with blog post ideas even when you feel like you've got no creativity left to give. These tips can be used by any type of blogger or publisher, whether you're creating for a public blog, a weekly newsletter or a membership website!

#1 – Keep an ideas file

The most important thing about inspiration is that you can't predict when it's going to strike. When the sun is shining, you need to be ready to make hay. To a degree that simply involves basic preparation.

Keep a file - a document or a spreadsheet - with a list of all your blog post ideas. Keep this file in a place where you can access it at all times: a Google doc, a Todoist list or maybe an Airtable. What ever works for you.

When you have an idea that might make an interesting blog post, write it down. Do this each and every time and before long you'll have a significant inventory to work from – even when you're not in the mood to be creative at all.

#2 - Steal from others

One of the best ways to come up with initial ideas for your own blog is to consistently expose yourself to blogs you want to emulate.

• Use a feed reader (we like Feedly) to subscribe to your favourite blogs and check in once a day to see what's been published.
• Sign up to the newsletters of your favourite blogs so that you never miss a post
• Put some time in the calendar every week as designated blog reading time for inspiration and ideas

Don't be afraid to steal ideas which are clearly working for other people. There's a vast amount that can be learned from the success of others (see #10 for more on this). Just don't actually steal their content. That isn't cool.

Always write it down in your ideas file. On a rainy day that might be just the bit of inspiration you need to spark a new post.

#3 - Ask your audience

You can crowdsource content ideas by reading your own comments section, checking your @replies on Twitter, and listening when people talk. Give your existing community a reason to engage in every post, or email your subscribers for feedback.

Reader participation and community driven content is a key component for many successful independent bloggers and membership business owners.

Foolish bloggers go out in search of ideas, efficient bloggers allow ideas to come to them.

Ask your readers to tell you what they would like to read more of - and then give it to them. It sounds simple, but remarkably few people actually do it. Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers shares some great tips about listening and letting ideas come to you in this podcast.

#4 - Ask the internet

Many-a-noble-blogger has been stuck for content ideas before you, and while that has been an insurmountable hurdle for some, there are many more who have conquered it and documented the process.

Here's a few in-depth articles that we enjoyed:

• 103 Blog Post Ideas That Your Readers Will LOVE - OptinMonster
• 60 Blog Post Ideas to Fill Your Content Calendar - Sumo

Beyond reading other guides filled with ideas, you can go hunting on the internet yourself. Try exploring relevant communities where your audience like to hang out. Find out what people are talking about.

Reddit, Quora and Twitter are great places to find blog post ideas based on what real people are talking about.

#5 - Expand existing content

Look through your analytics history and figure out what your most popular posts of all time are. These are your blockbusters.

Weeks, months and years after publication, they still bring in a steady stream of new visitors to discover your blog for the first time.

So you know this content works, the next question is: How could you expand on it? Could you do a follow-up? Could you refresh the content in the post with a new and improved version?

Updating posts is a great SEO tactic to catch some low-hanging fruit and get even more people reading your post. You've already done most of the hard work. Check out this in-depth guide from AHREFs about how to do a content audit and update your best posts.

#6 - Identify trends

There are lots of ways to find out what's trending online, as well as tools for discovering what people actually search for related to specific topics of interest. A great way to write a piece of content which will be read by many people is by knowing in advance what people are searching for.

• Google Trends - Figure out what topics are trending over a specific timeframe
• BuzzSumo - Enter a keyword to find out who ranks and what they're writing about
• AnswerThePublic.com - Enter any term and get a huge list of synonyms and related terms that people actually search for

#7 - Tell your story

Sometimes the best post is the one that tells the story of all the other posts. Regardless of what you blog about, you've probably been doing it for a while now.

• What have you learned in that time?
• What has changed since you started?
• If you had to go back and give yourself one piece of advice at the start of your career, what would it be?

These posts aren't just an exercise in narcissism, they can be incredibly useful for other people in your industry. Everyone has to start somewhere, and by learning from your mistakes the next generation can progress even quicker.

Give a little back, and tell your story.

#8 - Write a guide

What's the best kind of blog post? That's easy. The best kind of blog post is one that makes people read 12 more of your blog posts. Linking your existing posts together properly is a good way to capitalise on this.

Sit down and go through your old posts. Group related posts together and see if you can order them into a way which makes sense as a mini-guide, so that reading one post after another in sequence is valuable.

Add an introduction, a conclusion, and some light descriptions + links to each post. You now have a guide post which will send people off on a click-quest around your blog.

Have a look at this wonderful guide to creating "hub and spoke" content by Jimmy Daly to learn more about how this works:

How to Create Content That Actually Ranks in Search Results

Content strategy tends to be either overcomplicated or vague. And often both. There’s plenty of ways to approach it, but here’s a simple template that can be repurposed over and over again. Blog posts are often not strong enough to survive on their own. But if they are grouped (and linked) togeth…

Jimmy DalyJimmy Daly

#9 - Borrow a brain

Is your brain tired? Borrow someone else's!

Who do you look up to in your industry who your readers might be interested in? Drop them an email and ask if you can do an interview. Your challenge is to come up with some interesting questions which will get your subject talking. After that, they do all the hard work of generating fantastic content on your behalf.

But remember: Interview quality is paramount.

The web is littered with boring "so tell us who you are and what you do" shit. Don't repeat that nonsense. Write a proper introduction for your subject rather than asking them to do it for you. Do your research and ask them something significant. That's where the magic comes from.

#10 - Do some competitor analysis

What works well for your peers and competitors might also work well for you. Do some research to find out what keywords your competitors rank for, and check out their top performing articles.

We like to use AHREFs to do this research, check out their guide on doing an effective content gap analysis.

The key here is to identify opportunities with a low enough keyword difficulty where you can create some unique content and take a slice of the pie. Could you expand on what has already been written and dramatically improve it? Do you have a new and interesting angle on the same topic? Have you got proprietary data which you can use to craft a new and interesting blog post?

Remember to write down your ideas in your spreadsheet so that you can revisit and investigate further.

#11 - Train your idea muscle

Coming up with ideas is a muscle that needs exercising. The more often you do it, the stronger that muscle becomes. Come up with blog post ideas every, single, day, and you'll soon start to notice it become more natural.

One of the greatest bloggers on this subject is James Altucher. Go and read his Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine post right now. It doesn't just apply to blog posts.

A) WHAT DO YOU MEAN – “IDEA MACHINE”?

Every situation you are in, you will have a ton of ideas. Any question you are asked, you will know the response. Every meeting you are at, you will take the meeting so far out of the box you’ll be on another  planet, if you are stuck on a desert highway – you will figure the way  out, if you need to make money you’ll come up with 50 ideas to make  money, and so on.

After I started exercising the idea muscle, it was like a magic power had unleashed inside of me.

- James Altucher

What to do next

Everyone has ideas for blog posts. The first step to success is organising them in a way that you can act on. Hopefully this post has given you some ideas for where to start.

Now get yourself going:

1. Start your ideas file as a Google Doc or spreadsheet. Add to it every day. Refer to it when you're stuck.
2. Figure out what other people in your industry are writing about. Hijack and expand upon their ideas.
3. Don't be afraid of the publish button. Some posts are going to be better than others, but some-posts is still better than no-posts.

Do you have any other rock-solid techniques for coming up with blog post idea when you're really stuck? Let us know in the comments.

Post updated 6th January 2020.

It took me a long time to understand that writing is a task best undertaken alone.

And I don't just mean in solitude, I mean as an individual errand. One of the biggest mistakes writers make is combining research (input) and writing (output) into a single session.

Tim Ferriss, author of three bestselling books, turned me onto the idea of collecting as much source material as possible before writing a word. He refers to output as "synthesis," since it's a time for combining source material with your own ideas.

Here's Tim on his creative process from a 99U interview:

I will do the gathering of interviews and research throughout the day. I’ll get all my notes and materials together and then I’ll do the synthesis between 10 p.m. to bed, which is usually 4 or 5 a.m.

Research, concepts, interviews, quotes, charts, photos, art, etc. — it's all source material for creative work. And as any prolific writer knows, a steady stream of new source material keeps output fresh.

Once you put a process around archiving things that inspire you, you'll never run out of research for your creative work. You can riff on someone else's idea, apply an accepted principal to a new field or curate interesting tidbits you've come across.

Instead of dedicating time to information gathering, you can build small habits into the rest of your work. What used to be a silo becomes a layer. I think of it as passive research, and it's helped me create a huge bank of pre-approved ideas to draw from.

"Research as a layer" requires a few simple tools and methods. My process isn't perfect, but hopefully this will get you started.

Clip and highlight

Evernote is one of the most useful tools I've come across, specifically the Web Clipper. Like me, you probably come across a lot of cool stuff in your Internet travels. It's time to get in the habit of saving it all.

Anytime something piques your interest, clip it with Evernote's browser extension and tag it. It will come in handy at some point, you just don't know when.

Say you're reading an article or tweet, watching a video or listening to a podcast. From that page, just click the browser extension or use the keyboard shortcut ` (it's the little tick above the Tab key). Set your default notebook — I call mine "Swipe File" — in the browser extension settings, and select "Bookmark."

This is fast, but you won't have any context when you see the article later. You can highlight a snippet that stands out, add a comment and tag it.

Click the browser extension, select "Simplified article" and highlight any text that stands out.

Then add some context. Why did this inspire you? How do you plan to use or share it? You can also use tags for categorization.

You can do this on your phone too. Just highlight text, then open the sharing menu and select Evernote. It'll save the article title and the selected text in the notebook of your choice.

Once you get the process (and the keyboard shortcuts) down, this takes less than 10 seconds. If you get in the habit of clipping everything that gets you excited, you're going to have an impressive, contextual bank of topic ideas and reference points.

There is one other way to enhance it too. If you use Instapaper to save articles for later, you can add highlights and notes there as well.

Using IFTTT, you can automatically send highlights and comments directly to Evernote, ensuring that all your inspiration ends up in one place.

Go to the source

Finding new things to read and derive inspiration from always seems to be challenging. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are so heavily filtered — "If you like [this], you might also like [this]" — that it's easy to get trapped in a bubble. Discovery tools like Nuzzel help, but you're still limited to content shared by your network, categorized by topic.

Maria Popova, the prolific writer behind Brain Pickings described her process for discovering new and interesting works on an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast.

As she reads physical books, she collects recurring themes and interesting ideas in her index (explained here) marks all external quotes with the letter "F" as a remind to check out the source later. These annotations are like links that connect ideas and themes.

Around 43 minutes into the podcast, she explains the joy of following one reference to another to dig deeper into topics you're already interested in.

Literature is the original Internet. All of those references and citations and illusions even — they are essentially hyperlinks that the author placed to another work. If you follow those, you go into this magnificent rabbit hole where you start out with something you're already enjoying and liking, but follow these tangential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across directly.

It's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very incremental way. I think that's kind of a beautiful practice.

It's even easier to follow annotations, i.e. links, on the web. When reading something interesting, open all links in the background.

In Chrome, Firefox and Safari, use the keyboard shortcut Command + Click. It will open links in a new tab without interrupting your concentration. When you're done reading, skim each of the new tabs and repeat the process. As you find good stuff, use the first strategy to collect inspiration in Evernote.

This is one of those small tactics that can reap large rewards. It's the best way I've found to consistently discover new and cool ideas that lead to source material later on.

Commit your thoughts to paper

Apps like Evernote are great for collecting and archiving your research, but nothing beats a pen and paper for jotting down thoughts and sketching out ideas.

Most creatives will tell you to carry a notebook wherever you go. The thinking goes that you need to be ready when a big idea strikes. But the truth is that most great ideas are combinations of many smaller ideas. Instead of waiting for one big idea, write down every idea. Write down your tasks, people you meet, books you read. Common threads begin to emerge from independent thoughts.

Those ideas will begin to synthesize and lead to new ideas. As an added benefit, the more you write down, the more clearly you'll think says Professor Alan Jacobs:

I have always kept a notebook around for jotting down the occasional idea, but in the past year I have learned to rely on paper for sketching and drafting almost all of my writing, and for managing my tasks. This change is another one I wish I had made years ago: my thinking is clearer, my writing stronger and more precise.

Thoughts that used to look like this:

Become ideas that look like this:

Images via Jason Fried's How an idea comes together for me.

If this is new for you, I recommend investing in a quality notebook. Sure, you can pick one up at a convenience store for 99 cents, but you won't be excited to use it. Once you're in the habit of writing things down, use any old notebook. But start with a nice one.

I'm a huge fan of Rhodia's Unlimited Pocket Notebooks since they actually fit in my pocket. Field Notes and Moleskine also make great pocket-size notebooks.

For more thoughts on writing, productivity and the business of publishing, subscribe to our weekly newseletter. And if you have any thoughts to add to this post, just drop a note in the comments.

I'm not using dashes or asterisks or anything to censor the words. This is a grown-up piece talking about words we all know and use, so I'm being a grown-up and saying them. If swear words offend you, close this tab now.

I haven't met anybody who's truly shocked at swearing, really. They're only shocked on behalf of other people.

Or they say it's not necessary. As if that should stop one doing it. It's not necessary to have coloured socks. It's not necessary for this cushion to be here. But is anyone going to write in and say, "I was shocked to see that cushion there. It really wasn't necessary"? No. Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting. — Stephen Fry

I'm not big on swearing, personally. I feel embarrassed when I say "shit", and try to keep the conversation moving, hoping nobody will notice. I want to be able to calmly drop a fuck or dick into conversation like most Australians can, but it just doesn't come naturally to me.

I remember as a teenager when I decided I was ready to start swearing. I'd been tossing around softer words like "crap" (that one'll barely raise an eyebrow with most people) but when I was fourteen I decided it was time to get used to saying "shit".

I have a vivid memory of sitting on my mum's bed after coming home from work—a part-time job in fast food with plenty of other teenagers around to influence my vocabulary. I don't know what we were talking about, but I remember throwing "shit" into a sentence and carefully assessing her reaction.

She didn't bat an eye.

This could be for two reasons: one, she was a fairly lax parent at the time. Two, she also swore a lot herself. Her catchphrase was "fuck a duck".

It wasn't long after that particular day that I went to Oklahoma as an exchange student for a year. Spending twelve months in the Bible Belt of the U.S.A. left me purged of any desire to say "shit"—I even stopped saying "sucks" (as in, "that sucks") and "damn", after getting in trouble for use each of those "cuss" words.

When I came back to Australia having just turned sixteen I was alienated from my former friends. I no longer spent time with people who drank every weekend and used swear words in every conceivable part of a sentence. So I guess you could say I never had an initiation into swearing.

These days I'm not opposed to swearing, but I've never managed to feel comfortable doing it myself.

I've also never really understood the nuances of swearing. From place to place which words are considered "swear words" differs—and these can even change over time. But where do these words come from, and what makes them offensive?

Why is it that singing along with a country song that included the word "damn" led to a friend from Oklahoma admonishing me, yet my mother didn't bat an eye when I said "shit" in conversation with her a year earlier? And why do French children have their own special swear word but English children don't?

What is it, in essence, that makes swear words so special?

Caca boudin is a French "swear word" specifically for children. It literally translates to "poo pudding", but kids use it as a general obscenity the way we might use "crap" or "shit". Although kids enjoy showing their assertiveness by using it, "caca boudin" is considered fairly innocuous by adults. It's even popularised in a story book for kids.

In a well-known stand-up comedy routine^[1], George Carlin explains why there are seven words you can't say on TV. Carlin points out that this is simply a list of words "that we've decided...not to use all the time."

Carlin's words are as follows:

• shit
• piss
• cunt
• fuck
• cocksucker
• motherfucker
• tits

Carlin also points out that we have more ways to describe these words (dirty, obscene, profane, rude, bad, blue, and so on) than we have "unsayable" words themselves.

So what is it about swearing that makes that particular group of words so shocking? Why are some words okay in some contexts, but not in others? And some words aren't okay ever?

According to cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, it's the fact that swear words affect us emotionally^[2]. Swear words have a particular power that other words don't.

In Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, author Melissa Mohr says swear words "induce greater skin conductance responses than do other words, even emotionally evocative words such as death or cancer"^[3].

Swear words can affect us strongly whether we're reading them, listening to them, or saying them ourselves. Swearing can be cathartic, which can help us cope with "intolerable periods of inner conflict, repression and readjustment"^[4].

Swearing can also help us deal with physical pain, believe it or not. One study^[5] tested how long participants could hold their hand in a bucket of icy water. In the first round, participants were allowed to say a neutral word. In the second round, they repeated a swear word instead. The study found that swearing helped:

Swearing increased pain tolerance, increased heart rate and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing. However, swearing did not increase pain tolerance in males with a tendency to catastrophise.

MythBusters replicated the experiment (you can see a video of it here), and found a 30% increase in pain tolerance (time spent with the hand in ice water) when the participants were allowed to swear.

Although the original study mentioned that men who exaggerate the pain don't get the extra boost from swearing, I wanted to know how someone who doesn't normally swear would fare. Would the swear word be extra useful for pain tolerance, or less so?

I gave the experiment a go myself, using "cheese" as my neutral word. I didn't quite get the water as cool as it needed to be, but after 9 minutes with my hand in cold water using a neutral word, I abandoned the whole experiment. Mythbusters stopped at 3 minutes for safety reasons, so 9 minutes seemed plenty long enough to prove that I didn't need to swear to handle the pain. (The experiment is also surprisingly boring, so I couldn't convince myself to do it again with colder water.)

Swearing affects us so strongly that we can't help reacting. According to Steven Pinker, we can't help but register the meaning of swear words (and other taboo words)—they're processed involuntarily. This is illustrated well in a common psychology experiment called the Stroop test. You've probably seen it before—it's presented as a list of colour names that are printed in different colours to the ones they say.

The test asks you to say the colour the word is printed in, not the one it actually says. So from the example above, the correct answers for the top line, left-to-right, would be red, blue, green.

When the colour names and their ink colours are different (as in the image above), we're much slower at naming the colour of each word than if they matched. This is because our brain naturally reads the word, and we want to say it. We have to stop ourselves and take the time to look at the ink colour instead.

When swear words are used instead of colour names, it slows us down as well. In fact, taboo words used in a Stroop test have been shown to slow us down more than just using neutral words^[6]—that involuntary processing of the taboo meaning of a swear word really trips us up.

And because all this processing is involuntary, it gives someone saying a swear word a lot of power over whoever's listening.

This emotional effect is more than skin deep. According to Pinker, we use a different area of our brains to store and process swear words than we do for other language. This explains why sometimes patients who lose their language abilities can still use swear words.

In fact, we tend to use areas of our brain associated with negative emotions when we say or hear swear words. Producing swear words is related to the basal ganglia region of the brain, which is also responsible for our inhibition. And when we perceive a swear word produced by someone else, our amygdala runs the show, which is the brain area that responds to threats.

Forgotten swear words

Fartleberries are "excrement hanging to the hairs about the anus, [genitals], of a man or woman".

Kekir and bobrelle are likely forgotten words for the clitoris.

Tit referred to a young girl from the 17th to 19th centuries. It picked up its modern meaning in the early 20th century.

Before "fuck", slang words meaning sexual intercourse included screw, roger, and "have your greens".

To bagpipe was defined in Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785 as "a lascivious practice too indecent for explanation". Turns out it's just the Victorian equivalent of the term "blow job". Another word for this was "gamahuche", which derives from French. This one actually means "mouth on genitals", and thus can be used to mean either fellatio or cunnilingus.

To tip the velvet was defined by Francis Grose in the 18th century as "tongueing a woman". This could mean French kissing, which seems to have been considered deviant at the time, but a later definition defines the phrase as cunnilingus. Whether the word's meaning evolved over time, its meaning was ambiguous to start with, or "tongueing a woman" referred to cunnilingus is unknown.

There's also something particular about the words we consider "swear words" and why they're so much more than ordinary words: they're almost all "connotation"—that is, the emotional baggage that comes with a word. Very little of a swear word's power comes from its literal definition, unlike the rest of our words which derive almost all power from their literal meanings. When "fuck" was introduced in English, for instance, it referred to the sexual act and nothing else. It was indecent, but it wasn't considered a swear word^[7]. It had very little connotation at this time, apart from being something you wouldn't use in polite conversation. It wasn't until it was used in forms like "fuck you" and "don't fuck with me", where the purpose was to shock and offend through the extra emotional baggage imbued in "fuck", that it became a swear word.

What constitutes a swear word changes over time. Just as the rest of our language changes based on the way we use it every day, swear words come and go, and they gain or lose intensity. As Ruth Wajnryb says in Expletive Deleted, "As one word goes, another replaces it. The taboo shifts a little, but the magic is enduring"^[8].

Although swearing as a verb (i.e. "stop swearing so much") usually refers to "foul language", swearing comes in another form: the kind you'd see in a court or parliament. To swear an oath is generally taken quite seriously in these cases, and used to be taken seriously in everyday life.

Conversely, swearing a false, or "vain", oath was incredibly bad in the Middle Ages. The most emotional, obscene language you could use during this period was to take the Lord's name in vain. "Bad" oath swearing was thought to hurt God's reputation, or even physically harm him. False swearing was so bad, it was almost equivalent to murder.

Steven Pinker says each type of swearing taps into a different human emotion. After all, the reason swearing is so shocking is that it arouses our emotions. In the case of oaths, that emotion is twofold: awe and fear.

The fact that people tend to feel less awe and fear around religious figures or ideas these days explains why these words have lost some of the impact they once had. After the rise of Protestantism, people started thinking differently about their relationship with God, and swear words relating to body parts and bodily functions became more offensive.

This change has proven to be an issue for artists. A perfect example is Deadwood, an HBO series set in South Dakota in the 1870's. While the show's creator David Milch wanted to create a truthful representation of this time period, the language of the time proved to be an issue. The characters in Deadwood, many of whom are real historical figures, were known to swear like sailors—only what was incredibly shocking and offensive at the time would sound laughable—or at the very least, completely innocuous—to us today.

In particular, religion held enough sway over people for religious words like "damn" and "hell" to be the most offensive. Milch opted to swap out these words for modern equivalents (in terms of offensiveness) like "cocksucker". Although the verisimilitude of the language is lost, the impact for the viewer is maintained.

When it comes to modern swear words, we tend to deal with obscenities most often. There are two main types of obscene swear words: those that deal with sexuality (e.g. "fucking" as a verb, "cock"), and those that deal with bodily functions and effluvia (e.g. "shit", "piss").

Expletives were originally words or phrases that didn’t add anything to the meaning of a sentence or a poem but merely served to fill up space.

The term expletive came to refer to swearwords because they likewise often contribute little literal meaning to a sentence, though they can add a big emotional punch.

According to Steven Pinker, body-related obscenities tap into the emotion of disgust. Sexual-related obscenities tap into revulsion at depravity.

Pinker makes a good point regarding sexuality—of course there are lots of good things about sex, and one might wonder why we necessarily feel revulsion when confronted with obscenities relating to sexuality. Pinker says this is due to the huge number of uncomfortable areas within sexuality such as rape, harassment, incest, jealousy, and infidelity.

He also points out that we often use sexual-related swear words to insult others by insinuating they consistently engage in a practice which others may find depraved. For instance:

• incest: "motherfucker"
• fellatio: "cocksucker"
• sodomy: "bugger"
• masturbation: "jerk" or "wanker"

While it's debated whether fuck is our most shocking swear word (racial slurs have started taking over as the most shocking category of offensive language), it's easily our most flexible. As this educational video explains, "fuck" can be used as almost any part of speech in an English sentence:

An episode of The Wire also showed the flexibility of the word, by using nothing but variations of "fuck" for an entire scene.

So where did these modern swear words come from, before they overtook the more religious swearing people people were used to?

According to Jesse Sheidlower, author of The F-Word, the word "fuck" is related to words in other Germanic languages, including Dutch, German, and Swedish, though no one knows for sure which language it came from[^13]. Its relatives in other languages have similar sexual meanings, or meanings such as "to strike" or "to move back and forth".

Some of the earliest instances of fuck, like many other words, appear in the names of people and places. In 1290 the name Simon Fuckebotere was recorded. In 1286/7, Henry Fuckebeggar was noted. Each of these relates to the earlier meaning "to strike" or "to hit". It was common in England around this time to use trades, identifying features, and personality traits as fodder for names[^14]. So, Simon Fuckebotere was likely known for hitting butter, while Henry Fuckebeggar may have spent his time hitting the poor.

A man had just been told that his best friend had an affair with his wife. He got drunk that night and in the pub said, "I’ll fucking kill the fucker. How dare that fucking bastard have sexual intercourse with my fucking wife?"

The earliest known appearance of "fuck" as we know it today is around 1475, when it was written in a cipher. This could indicate that it was in use much earlier, but was such a bad word that it couldn't be written down. In Middle English, the equivalent of "fuck" was "swive". Swive was a vulgar word used for sexual intercourse, which may have been replaced by fuck, when that became more popular.

As with "fuck", we first find a reference to the word "cunt" in English as part of a name—several names, in fact. A street in London is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, dated 1230, as Gropecuntelane. This street name was so common, in fact, that there was one in Oxford as well.

Far from being derogatory, however, this street name was simply descriptive. Each Gropecuntelane was a red light district, but the fact that it was a public street name implies there was no shame in the word during this period.

It wasn't uncommon for people to have "cunt" in their names, either—as proven by recorded references to such names as Godwin Clawcuncte, Robert Clevecunt, and (I love this one) Bele Wydecunthe.

In Expletive Deleted, Ruth Wajnryb points out that prior to the Middle Ages, "parts of the body and bodily functions were accepted as commonplace and referred to quite freely". During this period, religious oaths were the "bad language" of the day. Wajnryb quotes an example from medical writing in the early fifteenth century to support this idea: "In women the neck of the bladder is short and is made fast to the cunte".

So cunt always referred to female genitals, but it simply wasn't used the way it is today, in phrases such as "don't be a cunt". As Kate Wiles points out at New Republic, cunt is perhaps "more feminist" than "vagina", which relies on the penis for its definition[^15]. Vagina comes from Latin with the meaning "sheath" or "scabbard". Even worse: it was originally "a crude metaphor for the anus".

In time, "cunt" took on more of an obscene role in language and lost its public acceptance. Geoffrey Hughes, a professor of the History of the English Language, believes the use of a variant of cunt, "queynte" in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and The Wife of Bath shows that this process had already begun when these books were first published.

Shakespeare was also careful not to use the word "cunt" directly, though he alluded to it with various puns—for instance, the phrase "country matters" in Hamlet, Act III, scene ii, which is followed by a crack about what "lie between maids' legs".

A common swear word that doesn't have much of a shock factor today is "bloody". In fact, it's so common in Australia that it's sometimes called "the great Australian adjective".

Bloody may have come from either the obvious "covered in blood" adjective, or the late-seventeenth-century term "bloods" to mean "aristocratic rabble-rousers". In the second case, bloody would mean to be like "a blood"—"bloody drunk", for instance, meaning "as drunk as a blood".

Around the time these "bloods" were getting drunk, bloody wasn't considered very offensive. It was included in plays seen by respectable audiences, and in printed versions of those plays with no problem. Around the start of the nineteenth century bloody began to be printed with dashes, like "b--" or "b--y". At this point the word had become more offensive and was declining in use among polite society.

By the time George Bernard Shaw included "bloody" in his play Pygmalion in 1914, audiences were shocked at first, before laughing hysterically for "at least a minute and a quarter". By this time bloody was still considered a "bad" word, but no longer caused as much offence as it did in earlier centuries.

Even by the 1860s, swearing probably sounded quite similar to how we speak today. Religious words would still have been employed frequently but were already having less of an effect. In the mid- to late-19th century, "fuck" was already being used in lots of the forms we employ today, such as "go fuck yourself", "I don't give a fuck", and "he fucked me over".

More recently the "most shocking" title has been moving from obscene words for body parts and sexual acts to racial slurs. According to Jesse Sheidlower in The F-Word, "one prominent professor told U.S. News & World Report in 1994 that if she used fuck in class, no one would bat an eye, but that she would never dare to use any racial epithet in any context".

When we compare words from time periods that are far apart we see more clearly the changes that have occurred. For instance, in the Middle Ages, "cunt" was not obscene, and neither was "bollocks". Yet in 2000 a ranking of the top ten swear words in Britain ranked "bollocks" at number eight.

As words change in offensiveness over time, they also tend to be applied differently. "Bugger", for instance, used as an obscene term for anal sex, was used against men and women equally in the 19th century. Today "bugger" is almost exclusively applied to men.

This is actually contrary to the general trend. Usually swear words move from being applied to a single gender to being applied to everyone equally, over time. "Bitch" and "cunt", for instance, can be applied to both men and women. "Shit" is also applied to both genders, though it was originally a "term of contempt, applied to men only".

Psychology professor Timothy Jay says pretty much everyone swears[^16]. On average, around 0.3% to 0.7% of our speech is made up of swear words (compare that to personal pronouns like "I" and "you", which make up around 1% of our speech). People who are more extraverted are more likely to swear, but Jay says we all do it to some degree, and we start young—around the age of two[^17].

More than a fascinating topic worth curious exploration, swearing is a big part of how we communicate on a daily basis. Swear words affect us more strongly than other language. They hold a particular power over us because of their ability to shock us emotionally. They also have a unique ability to help us deal with pain, stress, and uncertainty.

Whether you swear a lot, or not at all (though that seems unlikely), next time you ​casually​ utter a "fuck" or "bugger", ​remember just​ how much history there is behind each of these words.

Image credits: Caca boudin via Lait Fraise. Tweet via @therealelp. Deadwood GIF via Blerg. The Thick of It GIF via Remy. Stroop effect via mercercognitivepsychology. Stephen Fry GIFs via Imgur 1 and 2. Colin Firth GIF via movie gif sets. IT Crowd GIF via The Galaxial Word.

http://www.amazon.com/Holy-Sh-Brief-History-Swearing-ebook/dp/B00BQBZ840/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me= ↩︎

http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/george_carlin_performs_his_seven_dirty_words_routine.html ↩︎

http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/steven_pinker_explains_the_neuroscience_of_swearing.html ↩︎

http://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Abstract/2009/08050/Swearing_as_a_response_to_pain.4.aspx ↩︎

http://www.academia.edu/820224/Behavioural_and_physiological_responses_to_the_emotional_and_taboo_Stroop_tasks_in_native_and_non-native_speakers_of_English ↩︎

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCKAZI/ref=r_soa_w_d ↩︎

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116713/swear-word-history-where-your-favorite-curses-came ↩︎

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/familyhistory/get_started/surnames_01.shtml ↩︎

But of course, that's the crux: do you really want to write more? If you like having excuses for why you can't publish as much as everyone else, the answer is no (and that's okay—writing more is hard and time-consuming, so don't do it unless you actually want to).

But if the answer is yes, you just need to overcome whatever's holding you back. (If I haven't covered what's holding you back below, leave a comment and let me know. I'll do my best to follow up with a post that addresses whatever I missed here.)

The vast majority of the world cannot do what you can do, and of those who can, most are sitting around consuming. — Sean McCabe

Time

Time is one of the most common hurdles I've heard people complain about. You don't have enough time to write, right? You're too busy. You have so much else to do that has to take priority. You can't find the time to write even if you try.

The tough thing about feeling like you don't have time is being able to admit that if you really, really wanted to, you could make time. Acknowledging that you choose to prioritise other things is a huge step closer to fitting in writing, or anything else you want to do.

In my case, I write all the time. Every day, I write for hours. But there are more things I want to write. I've been working on a writing course off and on for months now. I wish I had more time to work on it. I'd like to write a book—I've even started planning it. And my personal blog has languished since I went back to working full-time.

I say I don't have time for all these things, and I believe it. But if I really, truly wanted to, I could make time for them. It might mean not eating well or exercising, not reading as much, or even not putting 100% into my work at Ghost. Those things aren't negotiable for me, but it's important that I admit I'm choosing to prioritise those and make everything else negotiable.

This is a huge step because I'm taking responsibility for my time and how I spend it. It's much easier to act like I have no control and simply complain about all the things I'd do if I had more time. Taking responsibility means nobody can change the situation but me, so I can either change it or stop complaining.

Overcome it

Once you've admitted you're in control of how you spend your time, you can start overcoming the time problem and writing more.

First, you'll need to make writing a priority. As I alluded to earlier, whatever you prioritise will take up your time. You need to make writing a priority if you really want to do it. It doesn't have to be your top priority, but it needs to come before some things.

Maybe that's TV time, reading, cooking, or some other hobby you enjoy. Maybe it's a side project you've been working on. Maybe it's just time that you spend relaxing. You need to figure out what you're willing to give up to write more and what you're not. If there's nothing in your schedule you're willing to throw out to fit in writing time, that's okay! So long as you know you're making the call that other things are more important.

If you can squeeze in some time for writing, try to make it the same time every day. Carve out a particular period of time that suits you and stick to it as often as you can. It's much easier to let go of a commitment you do whenever you can fit it in, as opposed to something that's scheduled into your regular routine.

When you develop a habit of writing, it becomes easy to do often, and harder to not do. These days, I don't go a day without writing something. Even when I'm not at work, I'm constantly writing notes to myself, hashing out ideas on paper, or writing blog posts for myself or my own company. It's such a part of what I do that I would have to try hard not to write every day.

With patience and practice, you too can build that strong a habit.

Finally, plan what you'll write before you do it. It's one thing to say you're going to write every day at 7am for half an hour. It's another to sit in the chair and spend that half hour productively.

If you're trying to build a habit of writing that becomes part of your regular schedule, the last thing you want is to feel like you wasted your half hour when it's up.

You can avoid this feeling by planning ahead. Choose a topic you've been thinking about. Pick something you've been meaning to write for work. Whatever it is, define it as best you can, so you can start writing as soon as you sit down. That half hour isn't for planning or thinking, it's for getting words on the page.

If you have trouble coming up with ideas, we've written a few posts in the past that might help you out:

How To Come up with Great Ideas for Blog Posts, Every Single Time

One of the best ways to find new content ideas: write what you want to read

Dig deeper: how to find new ideas in old content

And you can always find all our posts about coming up with new ideas in our Inspiration category.

Permission

This hurdle is not one I hear people mention often. It seems to be more of a subconscious hurdle than something we openly grapple with.

When we try something new, especially something as public as blogging, we often get held back by the idea that we're not good enough. Seeing examples of others who are successful in a field we want to explore can be inspiring, but also intimidating.

It's not crazy to want someone to have confidence in you before you start something. It's scary to take risks, so the more certainty we can get before doing so, the easier it can be to jump in.

Overcome it

Nobody will give you permission but you. Sorry to break it to you.

If they haven't already, nobody's going to encourage you to write until you take the leap and start doing it. Nobody else has time to keep egging you on until you finally get around to doing something.

I didn't realise consciously that I was waiting for permission to be an actor until my most recent acting class. My acting teacher was tough, and didn't dole out praise for the sake of it. For the entire first term, I was disappointed with everything I did. Classmates would praise me, and we'd collectively applaud our group effort after a performance, but still I'd be frustrated that I hadn't performed better.

Eventually my acting teacher gave it to me straight. "Nobody's going to give you permission to do this," he said. "You're already good at it, but you have to realise that for yourself before you can get any better." On reflection I realised what he was getting at. I'd been waiting for his praise, his approval, after everything I did. I wasn't willing to take the risks needed to give my best performance because I spent the whole term waiting for permission.

If only I'd realised I'd had it in me all along... cue Disney music

No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. — Martha Graham

Don't make the same mistake as me. I wasted a term of acting class waiting for permission when I could have been improving my skills. Give yourself permission to start writing, and stop worrying about what other people will think.

Thousands of people start new blogs every day. They give themselves permission and go for it, and nobody bats an eye. Trust in the fact (even though it might be really hard to believe) that nobody's holding you back but yourself.

And if you still think you're not ready, do it anyway. You won't be successful if you're forever waiting for go time.

Skill

A hurdle that's closely related to permission is thinking you don't have the skills required. So you're not a good writer, and that's holding you back. Fair enough! Why write if you're no good at it?

Only that's not actually fair enough.

Here's why: you can't get better at writing unless you do it.

And you know what's really scary? You can't get really good at writing unless you let other people read and criticise your work.

I know. It's super scary. The last thing you want is criticism, right?

But getting really good at something is hard. And to get there you have to do things that are scary.

It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. — Martha Graham

Overcome it

This is another area where you need to start before you feel ready.

You can't build the skill without practice. And you can't practise if you never start.

Austin Kleon suggests sharing your inspiration if you're not ready to share your work. Then you can build up to sharing bits of your process—your tools and techniques, and maybe snapshots of your work-in-progress.

Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do. — Austin Kleon

These approaches can help you get more comfortable with the act of sharing while you hone your skills. And eventually you'll be able to share your finished work with more confidence.

Austin also has some advice when it comes to accepting criticism about your work. The more people see your work, the more criticism you'll get, but that can often be what makes you improve, so you need to learn to take it on without letting it cripple you.

The way to be able to take a punch is to practice getting hit a lot. Put out a lot of work. Let people take their best shot at it. Then make even more work and keep putting it out there. The more criticism you take, the more you realize it can’t hurt you.

Inspiration

Of course you can't write if you're not inspired! Who can?

Well... pretty much all professional writers. You kinda have to learn to do that when you're making art on a deadline.

But hey, I get it. It's hard. I hate writing when I'm not into what I'm working on (that's why I always have a couple of pieces on the go at once, so I can switch between them).

Maybe you don't know what to write about until you get a jolt of inspiration. Or maybe you have a huge list of ideas withering away while you hunt around for some motivation to get started.

Overcome it

Trust me, you're inspired all the time. Even if it doesn't seem like it.

The problem is, you miss these moments. We're all missing moments of inspiration because they come so frequently. The more you read, create, talk, think, and go outside and do stuff, the more potential moments for inspiration you can run into.

The remedy? Take more notes. Get a notebook, diary, journal, scrapbook, or photo album. Save stuff. Think more about what you see, read, and experience. Write about what it made you feel, what connections it encouraged in your mind, what you thought was missing.

You don't have to have a writing session every time you come up with an idea or notice something interesting. But taking note of these moments will help you recognise inspiration and tap into it. If you've got a list of ideas to write about whenever you sit at your computer, it'll be much easier to get started.

Most importantly—having a trove of ideas and notes that have inspired you already will help you get into the right frame of mind to write on cue.

Writing can be an intense process, but it doesn't have to be. If you're struggling to write more often, try to figure out which hurdle is holding you back the most so you can start overcoming it.

And if I didn't mention your biggest struggle, let me know in the comments so I can cover it in the future.

Whenever someone asks me (or asks all of Quora) what they should do to drive traffic/build their blog/grow an audience as a beginner in content marketing, I suggest guest posting. I often suggest other things too, but guest posting is one that I can't stop coming back to.

Guest posting is something lots of bloggers do, but I still think it's underestimated. It's an achievable way to tap into an audience already created by someone else. If you can find an audience that overlaps heavily with your own target market, and you can reach them without putting in the time and effort to gather them around your own brand first, why wouldn't you?

Guest posting: leveraging an audience someone else has built

Guest posting usually means you're creating original content for someone else's blog. You might be paid for it, or you might not. Guest posting can refer to either situation, so make sure you check your assumptions before getting started!

While guest posting kind of means you're doing someone else's job for them, you get a lot in return. Even if you don't get paid, posting on a blog with an established audience of people you want to reach is priceless.

It takes a long time to build a blog. Guest posting can speed that process up somewhat, since some of the readers from each guest post will become part of your own audience.

Groove CEO Alex Turnbull used guest posting when he wanted to grow the Groove blog audience. He made the same argument as I've just done—guest posting let him reach a far larger audience than he'd built so far himself:

We have just over 10,000 subscribers to the Groove blog.

In sum, our partners have more than 1 million subscribers.

And reaching those subscribers costs no more than the resources it takes to write a great blog post.

The results of guest posting have been so powerful for Groove that Alex recommends it as a strategy as much as I do:

I’d encourage everyone to do this. It’s easily one of the best and fastest ways to build an audience for your content (and leads for your business).

I've done this to help build up my own company's audience, too. Each time I choose a topic that's focused on what works best for that blog's audience, but I also make sure it's relevant to me as a writer.

Guest blogging on various sites has helped me identify which audiences are a good match for my product. Some sites drove very little traffic back to my product's site, even though the guest post was received well. Others have been surprisingly helpful in sending high-quality traffic. This helps me improve the efficiency of my guest posting efforts in the future by focusing on the blogs that provide the biggest returns.

As Alex said, "Your audience is almost certainly different than ours, and the blogs that are best for you are probably different, too." But tailoring your approach can make guest posting work for you just as well as it has for others.

Putting it into action

When you're starting out, it can be hard to get press or lots of attention. Try reaching out to blogs in your niche that have already built a following. The more guest posts you do, the better you'll get at writing and pitching them, and the more you'll grow your own audience.

Pitching guest posts: understand the audience and give them something useful

Starting out with guest posting can seem overwhelming. Take it easy by starting small.

The best starting point is people you already know. Anyone who's writing a successful blog in your niche is a good target. If you don't have many of these contacts, try asking people you do know if they have contacts who write blogs for your target audience. Getting a warm intro is almost as good as knowing someone already.

If you've exhausted this supply, or you don't know anyone who can give you a warm intro, start with some research before reaching out cold. Many blogs talk about guest posting on their site and even include submission details. For instance, here are guest posting guidelines for HubSpot, VentureBeat, and KISSmetrics.

You'll often have better luck guest posting on a blog that includes multiple authors than a solo personal blog, but double check anyway if there's a solo blog that fits your needs perfectly. Jeff Goins, for instance, runs a popular writing blog on his own that often features guest posts.

Once you've done your homework to see if guest posting is feasible (if it's not mentioned, don't be afraid to ask—just don't ask questions that have already been answered), start working on your pitch.

The best guest post submissions I've created have always included a specific pitch aimed at the blog I'm reaching out to. You should know the blog well already if it's in your niche, but if you don't, get reading. Take in as much as you can of what they write. Get a feel for the topics they cover, the style and structure of the content, and the tone they use. Is it friendly, personable, and informal? Is it full of technical tutorials? Your pitch should reflect what the blog already publishes.

Len Markidan, who runs marketing at Groove, has a clever suggestion for figuring out what topics work best for a particular blog. Len uses Buzzsumo to see which posts are the most shared on each blog he guest posts for. This helps him craft a pitch that he knows will resonate well with the blog's readers.

When you've got a handle on the style of content that would suit the blog best, come up with a few topics. I like to pitch one, but keep a couple as backups in case the first pitch doesn't receive a warm reception. You might find more luck with pitching multiple options at once—especially if you're new to the game and haven't proven yourself yet.

When sending your pitch, include dot points of what you'll cover. Dot points are usually easier and faster to read than a paragraph or two. I always add a couple of sentences to explain the topic idea and why it's a good fit for this blog's readers, too.

Depending on how big a risk you are, you might need to add more detail to your pitch. If you're reaching out to someone you know, for instance, or you're already known for creating high-quality content around the topic you're pitching, a few dot points might be enough to get the go-ahead. If you're completely unknown, however, you might need to go into more detail about what you'll cover. If you're unsure, try adding subheadings and more dot points about what each section of your post will cover and what the takeaways will be for the reader.

On the Groove blog Alex shared an email pitch he used, which covers the topic he's writing about briefly, and some social proof of his previous content efforts:

For a guest post I wrote on the Groove support blog a few months ago, my pitch was much more detailed. I started by reaching out to Alex on Twitter. Once I'd established that he was familiar with my work and would be happy to have me guest post on the Groove support blog, I only needed to focus my pitch on the post itself. I sent Len, Groove's marketing manager, an outline of what I'd write, including the takeaways for Groove's readers.

That email turned into this post.

Here's another pitch I sent, where I shared four different ideas I'd been thinking about:

Putting it into action

Spend time on your pitch. Don't knock it together in five minutes and hope for the best. This is your first, and perhaps only, chance to impress someone who holds the keys to an audience you want to reach. Show them you've thought through the pitch and crafted it to match their blog.

Know the audience. A popular blogger will protect their audience. They've worked hard for a long time to build up that audience and form a respectful relationship with them. Remember this. They'll want to see that you understand the audience and you're offering something they'll get value out of.

Start with people you know. If you don't know someone whose blog you can guest post on, try to get a warm intro to a friend of a friend.

Pre-guest posting: what to do if you're just not ready

So what do you do if you're not having any luck with guest posting? Or maybe you haven't even tried yet, but you're worried because you don't know anyone to reach out to for help, and nobody knows who you are yet.

One of the biggest reasons you might pose a risk to bloggers (and therefore be turned down) when offering guest posts is that you're unproven. If you don't have much work to point to, they have no way to judge whether your writing is high quality. They don't want to risk wasting their time and letting down their audience by accepting a guest post that's low quality or irrelevant to their blog.

Luckily, this is fixable.

Let me explain with an example. When Buffer was still brand new, co-founder Leo Widrich was having trouble finding anyone who would write about Buffer. He couldn't get the press to accept his pitches, and he couldn't get popular blogs to write about his product. So he wrote about it himself.

Pitch after pitch I emailed got no reply or a short "no". Not a single tech blog was interested in covering us. And I couldn’t blame them.

It led to a simple conclusion in my head: If no one wants to write about us, at least we can write ourselves.

The start of Buffer's journey to becoming famous for content marketing was Leo deciding to write about tips for Twitter users (and using Buffer itself) on the Buffer blog because nobody else would.

Eventually, Leo had enough content that he could point to it as examples of the style and quality of his work. This helped Leo land guest posts on more and more popular blogs, and more people started hearing about Buffer. Soon the press started to write about his product. And still Leo wrote more.

Eventually, the Buffer team stopped writing guest posts to focus on their own blog. These days, other sites republish Buffer content, which helps them get more traffic without putting in the extra work to create original guest posts.

But this all started with Leo writing more and more for his own blog.

Putting it into action

Write for your own blog first. This will help you get better at writing, learn from your mistakes, and build up an archive of top-quality work you can point to. Use your best pieces as examples of your work when pitching guest posts.

Get involved in the community. While you're building up your archive of published work, get to know other bloggers. Once you're ready to guest post, you'll have both examples of your work and connections to help you get started.

Start small. When you start guest posting, aim for blogs that are a bit more popular than yours. As your audience grows and more people get to know who you are, aim a little higher. Start small and work your way up, and you'll have more luck getting to the top-tier blogs.

I hope I've convinced you by now that guest posting is worthwhile. Not just that, but it's also completely achievable. This is why I recommend it to everyone starting out with content marketing.

You can start from nothing and use a mixture of blogging on your own site and guest posting to grow a sizable audience—if you do it right.

Image credits: Email screenshot via Groove.

So what can you do if you need to edit your own work? Just wanting to improve your work doesn't give you the tools you need to do so.

I'm going to give you specific ways to approach the editing stage of your work so you know exactly what to look for and you can attack your work with confidence.

But before we go on, let's talk briefly about reading. You've probably heard the advice before that you should read a lot if you want to be a better writer (I've even suggested this myself). Although this advice is repeated often, it's worth mentioning again because it really does help. Reading and writing use similar cognitive processes, and therefore tend to affect each other.

Unlike talking to someone or listening to an audiobook, reading a writer's work whom you admire puts the words in front of you. You can visually explore the way the writer shapes sentences and the words they choose. Visualising is a huge part of making memories (after all, over half our brain power is used up by our vision) so you can't beat reading for taking in and remembering interesting ways of writing.

And the more you read, the more you'll keep coming across the same new words until they become familiar and you can use them yourself. The more options you have—vocabulary, rhythm, style, and tone—in your arsenal, the less often you'll get stuck and the more confident you'll be in your writing.

One last note before we move on:

Since I want this piece to be relatable and actionable for you, let's address a couple of words I just used that can often be hard to pin down and understand practically: rhythm, style, and tone.

Rhythm is the beat, or the cadence that underpins your writing. If you use long, flowing sentences full of soft words and lots of adjectives, you'll have a particular rhythm to your writing—probably a slow, gentle one. If you use lots of short, staccato sentences and harsh punctuation like full stops and exclamation points, you'll get a faster, more forceful rhythm in your work.

As author Jack Hamann points out, one of the best ways to discover the rhythm of your writing is to read it aloud. Although not all writing is created to be read aloud, this approach can help you find dull or awkward sections in your work. It can also make it obvious where you need to slow down or speed up your rhythm by changing the length of your sentences.

We all know what tone is, but it's hard to describe exactly. It's a bit like learning your native language—you learn to understand tone innately, and then it's hard to ever understand how to actively focus on tone or change it. Tone comes through in word choice—for instance, if I use "we" and "us" and "our" I can achieve a more inclusive tone. Using "I" and "me" and "in my experience" will give my work a more personal tone. I could use "you" and "them" with other gentle words to point something out, or with harsh words like "should" and "absolutely" and "unbearable" to produce a more dictatory tone.

It helps to think about your audience and what you want them to get from your writing when you're choosing your tone.

Mine tends to appear naturally, so if I want to adjust it I need to consciously focus on it. For instance, I write with a very personable tone naturally—using lots of personal stories, and mentioning myself often. Many times as I'm editing I'll adjust my writing to focus more on "us" and "we" to achieve a more inclusive tone in order to make my writing more friendly and approachable.

Style comes from a mixture of all of the above: vocabulary, rhythm, and tone. It can also be influenced by the type of writing (an academic paper or a blog post), the context (written for children or adults), and the timing (written today or 100 years ago).

The best advice I've ever read about style is to not force it, and to not look for it.

You already have a style. You only have to let it out. And the more you write, the more it will evolve naturally. (If you don't believe me, read something you wrote two years ago—I expect you'll notice a big difference.)

If you do want to affect your style, my advice would be to focus on the pieces that make it up: improve your vocabulary, adjust your tone by changing your word choices, and try different rhythms by shortening or lengthening your sentences and using different punctuation.

If you come across an author whose work you love, read as much of it as you can. It's quite amazing how much you can imbue from another writer's style if you spend long enough with it.

Have you ever binge-watched a TV show where everyone has a different accent to you, and then noticed you're talking or thinking in that accent? The same thing happens with reading. The more different a style is from yours, the more obvious the effect seems to be (for me, at least).

Aim for succinctness

There's a general custom for writers when it comes to grammar rules: first adhere to them, then you can break them.

Many writers "break" grammatical rules, but most do so with a knowledge of those rules. They do this on purpose, for stylistic effect. This is what separates their work from writers that are simply ignorant or forgetful of rules, whose work generally suffers. These maverick writers are communicating effectively by working around the rules. Writers who don't know the rules communicate ineffectively because their intentions are to write within the rules but they're not doing so.

Succinctness is a classic example. If you've ever read a Cormac McCarthy book you'll know what I mean about writers who break the rules. If you haven't, The New Yorker's James Wood sums up the experience like this:

To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration... His sentences are comma-less convoys, articulated only by the Biblical "and": "They’d had their hair cut with sheepshears by an esquilador at the ranch and the backs of their necks above their collars were white as scars and they wore their hats cocked forward on their heads and they looked from side to side as they jogged along as if to challenge the countryside or anything it might hold."

(Though James also says "McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer".)

Succinctness isn't the only way to improve your writing or communicate effectively with your reader. But if you're unsure where to start when editing your work, cutting extraneous words and sentences is an easy way to start improving.

Start by drafting without any editing in mind. Write as quickly as you can, and don't worry about how much you're writing.

I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft — I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. — Stephen King

Remember that word count does not affect the quality of your work. Getting your point across and helping your reader in some way is the most important goal for your content.

So when it comes time for editing, cut, cut, cut. Be as ruthless as you can muster (that probably won't be very ruthless initially, but you'll get better at it). You want to look first for any unnecessary words. Adverbs are a common culprit—those are the "ly" words like "completely", "quietly", and "mostly". A lot of the time you don't need them, but we tend to put them in anyway.

Another common culprit for me is the word "that". Often I take "that" out of my sentences and they read more clearly and get to the point more quickly.

Next, try looking for whole sentences you don't need. If you're repeating yourself with different words, pick one sentence and remove the other. Sometimes it feels like you need to really ram home your point (I know, believe me) but repeating yourself is just boring.

Finally, look for any long sentences. See if you can split these up into two (or more) shorter sentences. For me, this is still really hard. I tend to write medium-long sentences naturally and I feel awkward writing short ones. But the more you make yourself do it, the easier it becomes.

Shorter sentences can make your point more clear and direct. I tend to write long sentences because I fill them up with phrases like "I think" and "in my experience". I fluff up my sentences to avoid coming across as too arrogant, and to back up everything I say with examples (or just more adjectives).

Writing short, direct sentences takes guts.

See? I could have written that sentence like this:

*In my experience, it can take a lot of guts to write sentences that are short and direct.

Yuck! I definitely need more practice, but hopefully you can see in that one example how big a difference it can make when you pare back your writing to just what's necessary.

Summarise

This is a more high-level technique for ensuring your writing makes sense overall, the paragraphs flow into each other, and your points are clear.

Grab a pen and a piece of paper. Work through your draft from top to bottom, and for each paragraph write a one-line summary on the paper.

When you're done you'll be able to see a birds-eye-view of your draft and how it all fits together.

Cut your piece of paper into strips—one for each one-line summary—so you can move them around. This is an easy way to work out the best flow for your piece and discover sections you might not need.

If you don't want to cut up your paper, number each of the summaries. Then you can play with different arrangements without rewriting each summary over and over.

When you're happy with the structure of your piece, read your introduction and your conclusion. Don't read anything in-between these. Now think about whether reading those makes you want to find out what happened in-between. Are you curious enough to read more? Do you get the point without needing to read the rest of the piece? And do your intro and conclusion tie-in together to make a cohesive wrapper around your writing?

Taking these two parts out of context can help you see ways to improve them that aren't obvious when they're supported by the rest of your content.

Improve your first line

The first line is your chance to grab the reader and draw them in. As Brian Clark says in a Copyblogger post, the job of each sentence is to get the reader to read the next sentence. This starts with your first line and continues through the entire piece.

An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this. — Stephen King

Like any part of your writing, introductions get easier (and better) with practice. But there are a few tips you can rely on to help you improve your first line:

Don't start your piece with a question.

According to editor Kas Thomas, this approach is overdone. You don't want your readers to think the rest of your writing is lacking originality, so don't start this way.

Cut your first paragraph.

Writer James Altucher suggests writing whatever you like in your introduction, before cutting the first paragraph entirely. I've relied too heavily on this approach in the past, which can lead to each piece abruptly jumping into the action. If used occasionally, however, (or if to-the-point is the style you're going for) skipping the normal "niceties" of an intro can be a powerful way to drawn a reader in.

Orient the reader.

Although it's a fiction technique, this tip from Stephen King can be used to create a powerful first sentence for a blog post or article, too. King points out that great first sentences in fiction often help the reader understand the time and place of the story, and give them information about the main character.

For instance, this sentence from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice:

They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

"Nobody's riding on the hay truck because they bought a ticket", King says.

He's a basically a drifter, someone on the outskirts, someone who's going to steal and filch to get by. So you know a lot about him from the beginning, more than maybe registers in your conscious mind, and you start to get curious.

As this post by Joe Bunting shows, well-written first lines are memorable. Joe uses examples like "Call me Ishmael." from Moby Dick, and "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." from Pride and Prejudice.

They can be incredibly hard to get right, but with a job as important as hooking your reader before they bounce to another page, it's worth spending time to perfect your first line.

Review with a beginner's eye

According to cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, a phenomenon called "the curse of knowledge" could be hurting your writing. This curse is a problem we all have: we can't unlearn things we've learned.

Once you know something, you can't help but assume other people know it too.

To get around this, Pinker says the best option is to ask someone else to read your work. Although you can try reading with a beginner's eye, "we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us."

So you might think you know how your readers will respond to your writing, but you'll probably be surprised by the truth.

If you don't have someone else nearby to read through your work, write yourself a note to keep nearby as a reminder of this curse. Ask yourself what your audience knows or doesn't know as you read each piece of writing you work on. You might not get it spot on, but asking yourself these questions might help you avoid some of the assumptions you'd make otherwise.

Another good way to test how much the curse has got hold of your work is to take notice of comments. If your readers are responding to your work with questions you didn't expect, take note of what they don't know. This can give you a better idea of what you need to explain more that might have seemed obvious to you.

Tools

You're not alone when it comes to improving your writing. These tools can help you pick up things you might have missed otherwise and get an idea of how your editing is improving your work.

Editing checklist

Hemingway App is a web and desktop app that points out options for simplifying your writing and making it easier to read. It cover four main areas for improvement:

• Readability (categorised into "hard to read" and "very hard to read" sentences)
• Words with simpler alternatives available
• Adverbs that can be removed (for instance, "helpfully")
• Uses of passive voice that can be coverted to active voice

Remember how I said great writers learn the rules before ignoring them? Hemingway is useful for that first step. I tend to ignore a lot of what it suggests to me for stylistic reasons (eg: passive voice might be "technically" bad but sometimes I choose to use it anyway). But I still find it useful for pointing out my long sentences.

If you're still developing your style, or you know you need to improve in one of the areas Hemingway focuses on, give it a try with your next draft.

How readable is your writing

Have you ever wished there was a score to tell you exactly how good your writing is? Well there isn't, really, but there is a score for readability. That is, how easy to read your work is.

There are actually a few tests around to score the readability of a piece of writing. These three are used often:

• Gunning fog index estimates number of years of formal schooling needed to read and understand a piece of writing.
• Flesch–Kincaid grade level estimates the minimum US grade level required to read and understand the writing.
• Flesch reading ease produces a score out of 100 for how easy a piece of writing is to read. 100 is the easiest reading.

According to Wikipedia, the scores of the Flesch reading ease test work out like this:

90–100: easily understood by an average 11-year-old student

60–70: easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students

0–30: best understood by university graduates

Of course an objective score can only go so far in determining true readability. As Gabe Habash points out in this post for Publishers Weekly, a book like Finnegans Wake, which includes many made up words, can score as more readable than something full of longer English words.

But as a starting point, a readability score can be helpful. It can give you an idea of whether you're going overboard with too many long sentences, and makes a good reminder to simplify your word usage.

There are plenty of free online tools to help you test your readability score.

Readability-score.com

Readability-score.com lets you paste in your text to test for a variety of scores including all three mentioned above. It also gives you stats like word count, words per sentence, and syllables per word.

Readability-score.com also offers a bookmarklet, so you can easily run the tests on any webpage. Or you can paste in any URL instead of copying the full text. Premium members can get extra features for $10/year, including uploading files and setting up readability monitoring on your site, with automatic alerts if your readability levels gets too high.

Readability Test Tool

The Readability Test Tool is very similar to Readability-score.com. It runs a variety of tests on your writing and uses traffic light colours to make your scores easy to understand.

The Readability Test Tool also explains the formulas used by each test it runs so you can see how to improve your scores.

The Writer's Readability test tool

The Writer's Readability test tool is a very simple option. It only lets you paste in text, and runs only three tests on your writing.

The results are also very simple, but that can be helpful if you're looking for a quick way to get a rough idea of your work's readability.

Here are my results from The Writer for my draft of this blog post:

Your score is 67

Well done. We reckon most business writing should aim for a score of 65. And your grade is about eight, which is at the same reading level as transcripts of many of Obama's speeches.

If you're curious about how your work compares, you can also explore this Readability Catalog of Project Gutenberg eBooks to see what ratings classic books get.

Which words are you overusing

Something I definitely need help with is not using the same words too often. I find my writing tends to feel repetitive when I use the same words throughout a blog post over and over.

These tools can help you figure out which words you're using the most.

WordCounter

WordCounter lets you paste in some text and pulls out a list of the most frequent words used. You can choose to omit small words like "it" and "the", and you can decide how many words you want it to list—from 25 to 200.

These are the top ten most-used words for my draft of this blog post, according to the WordCounter tool:

• write: 35 uses
• word: 24
• work: 22
• read: 20
• sentence: 16
• how: 14
• use: 14
• tone: 14
• test: 12
• writer: 12

The word frequency counter

The word frequency counter from WriteWords is very similar to WordCounter, without the options of list length and excluding small words. However, WriteWords also has a phrase frequency counter that lets you choose how many words to count as a phrase (from 2 to 10) and gives you a list of the most common phrases you've used.

Here are my top ten three-word phrases from this draft, all used three times:

• you paste in
• to read and
• to improve your
• to be a
• that can be
• so you can
• can help you
• be a better
• as you can
• and you can

Looks like I'm really overusing the word "can"!

Editing can be really tough. I often find it even harder than drafting a new piece. But I try to keep in mind this great quote from fantasy writer Patricia Fuller when I'm struggle to get through some editing:

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

Not having a professional editor doesn't have to relegate you to waltzing around in your literary underwear. Keep these techniques and tools handy during your editing process, and don't forget to read a lot.

One last thing: if you need some editing practice, try this 10-minute editing exercise. It helps you spot ways to improve by editing someone else's work so your emotional attachment doesn't get in the way.

Freelance writer Jeremey Duvall said this after trying the exercise:

When I’m reading someone else’s writing, I can be a bit more critical, which trains my eyes to find these same mistakes the next time I’m proofing my own post.

If you have any other handy tips for editing your own writing, share them in the comments. It never hurts to have more techniques than you need!

Most great writers agree there are two main ways to become a better writer: write a lot, and read a lot.

I could talk about both of these things all day, but today I'll focus on writing.

The more often you write, the more you train your writing "muscle". Knowing this, I wondered whether I could find short exercises to keep me writing in-between working on blog posts like this one. On my days off I like to read a lot and not write much, but if an extra 10 minutes of writing every day could improve my work I'd be happy to put in that little bit of effort.

I searched online for writing exercises to try but I found they all seemed to relate to creative writing and fiction. I didn't want to write about a time I felt sad, or one of my hobbies, or a family member. Those exercises make me feel like I'm in school (most of them are designed for creative writing classes).

I wanted ways to improve my own style of non-fiction, research-based blogging, but nobody seems to be focusing on that. So I came up with some of my own exercises and tried them out over the past couple of weeks to see how well they worked. I kept the exercises to 10 minutes max so I could easily fit one in every morning if I wanted to make them part of my daily routine.

I also sent them out to some of my favourite content writers to see how they fared. I asked each writer to pick as many exercises as they liked, test them out (adjusting the instructions if needed), and let me know what their experience was like.

At the bottom of this post I've included links to some writing prompt collections (writing prompts are things like "where are you from?" and "write about your favourite food") and random word generators. I'll mention in the exercise instructions when I think one of these tools will be particularly handy.

1. Free writing: improve your ability to write on demand

There's a concept called Morning Pages heralded by Julia Cameron that suggests you write 750 words (roughly three sheets of paper) every morning. The idea is that you write without stopping—a stream-of-consciousness about whatever's on your mind. There's even a web app to help you stick to this goal called 750 Words.

But 750 words takes a lot longer than 10 minutes for most of us. That doesn't mean you shouldn't aim for 750 words, but you might want to start with a 10-minute exercise if you're short on time.

Still, the idea of free writing can be beneficial. Personally, I'm not a fan of spending time writing when I know I'll throw away the results. I've learned to maximise the efficiency of the time I spend writing, and to treasure every word I squeeze out.

If you're like me, and you think it's a waste of time—even for 10 minutes—to waffle on about your breakfast (see what I did there?) in a journal every morning, here's what free writing could do for you that you're missing:

It teaches you to write on cue.

If you're a writer, you know how useful this could be. How many times have you sat, staring at a blank page, willing the words to come? Often it's not for lack of inspiration that I can't write—I just can't find the right mood to get me going.

Wouldn't you give up 10 minutes a day to stop wasting hours staring at a blank page?

See, writing works like a muscle. The more you work it, the better you get at it. And the cool thing is, you can train it to work how you want. So if you sit down at the same time every day for 10 minutes to write, it'll start coming more easily as your brain gets used to that schedule. You're training yourself to be able to write on cue.

I've actually done this in the past without focusing specifically on free writing. For a few months I made myself write (drafting only, no editing) from 6-7am every morning. Once it became a routine I got used to being able to pour out the words on cue and my output increased due to all the early morning drafting.

Instructions

Choose a time when you can write for 10 minutes every day, uninterrupted. Set an alarm to remind you, and sit down to write about whatever's on your mind when the alarm goes off—no matter what. I like to use the Sessions iOS app to time my writing and let me know when I've put in my 10 minutes.

Bonus points

To make it even more useful, try writing in the same place with the same tools every day. This will help when you've got blank page syndrome at some time other than when you're used to hearing your alarm go off, since the rest of your setup will still be familiar enough to trigger your writing muscle into action.

Tip: a writing prompt would work well for this exercise. You want to focus on putting words on the page, not thinking about what to write.

You could also relate this exercise to your work by writing about marketing opportunities for your business, for instance, or challenging yourself to write about your company's ideal customer. When I was writing every morning at 6am, I would always choose a topic to work on the night before so all I had to do in the morning was write.

Reactions

Matt Guay, marketer at Zapier

The Zapier team works remotely, so Matt uses his morning to catch up on what his teammates have been doing. Instead of free writing first thing in the morning, he tried using this exercise later in the workday when he was ready to work on projects and "sometimes it's hard to switch gears and focus".

Here's what he had to say:

I'd do one for a few minutes before digging into an article or review, and it actually seemed to help me jumpstart my creativity... just having some randomly different creative thing to write for no good reason first, and making myself just keep typing before switching gears to work seemed to help.

2. Editing: improve your writing by editing someone else's

If you're doing great at getting words on the page but you think your finished product could be tightened up more, you might want to practise editing rather than free-writing style exercises.

One way I've found to get better at editing my own work is to edit other people's work. Sometimes it's hard to step back from your own writing and see how it's changed over time and where you can improve. Getting feedback is always useful, but seeing concrete examples of how to improve writing that's not so emotionally connected to you can also work wonders.

Here's an exercise I developed to help me structure this process:

Instructions

Find a blog post in your RSS or Twitter feed. It doesn't matter what the post is about, or what style it's in, though you might want to avoid any authors you know well or feel intimidated by, as that could skew your learning. I found the less I knew about the author, the easier it was to focus on the editing process.

Read through the post once. Then go back through the post and look for as many ways to improve it as you can. Keep an eye out for the following:

• spelling or grammatical errors
• unnecessary words ("that" or "the" can often be removed without ruining a sentence)
• long sentences that can be split up or shortened
• confusing or vague points
• anywhere you can add formatting to improve clarity (e.g. bold, italics)
• anywhere an image could aid the reader's understanding
• anywhere an example could add clarity

It might help to copy the text of the post and paste it into your text editor so you can adjust the post as you go. When your 10 minutes are up, throw your edits away (you don't want to confuse them with your own work in the future).

Don't forget to notice what the author's done well as you're editing, too. If they have a style you particularly like, or they've made an especially good choice of words, take note of that so you can learn from it.

Reactions

Jimmy Daly, freelance content marketer

Jimmy chose a post from a blog he knows well: Priceonomics. He said he'd always felt as a reader that Priceonomics' content was "interesting but long-winded". He tried a hand at editing one of their posts to see if he was right.

It turns out that my intuition was right.

Here's a perfect example. There are eight colons or semicolons in the article. Instead of using them for emphasis, the writer used them to extend sentences, creating several run-on sentences.

I ended up removing several sentences altogether and tightened up a few others. I cut out adjectives and removed as many colons as I could.

Jimmy's takeaway was an interesting one: although he found opportunities for making the content more succinct, he noted that the Priceonomics blog is widely read regardless of how he thinks the content could be improved.

That was my biggest takeaway from this exercise. Perhaps fretting over the little details is less important than sharing interesting ideas on a regular basis year after year.

Len Markidan, head of marketing at Groove

Len found editing writing he was unfamiliar with to be a challenge at first. His experience with this exercise brought up some really interesting lessons about understanding other writers and different styles:

...at first, I tended to try and rewrite things the way I would normally write them myself. What surprised me was how quickly I found myself repeating the same things over and over again: sentence structure, vocabulary, etc...

When I stepped back and tried to edit it as a reader rather than a writer (e.g., "how can I make this article more useful for me?", versus "how can I make this article sound more like me?"), I began to focus on edits that truly improved clarity and effectiveness, and that's where I began to get real value from the exercise. I didn't just get practice finding weak spots and improving them, but I began to pick up on strong spots and internalize different ways that other writers make strong points. Later, I found myself incorporating some of those techniques in my own writing.

Len pointed out that although reading can help you pick up style and technique to include in your own work, this exercise did the same thing on a more interactive level:

Unlike the way I normally read, I found myself absorbing style and technique far more than the actual message of the content ... It's an exercise that I'm definitely going to continue doing.

Jeremey Duvall, freelance content writer

Jeremey found that the piece he used for this exercise was mostly free of errors, making him dig harder to find ways to improve it.

I still found some of the same mistakes I make in my own writing like:

• Unnecessary words like “For many of us…” and “Most of us…”
• Qualifiers like “Regardless of xyz…”
• Weak words like “Usually”
• Longer, convoluted sentences instead of short, snappy ones

Jeremey also pointed out how this exercise can be useful in training us to be better editors of our own work:

One of my least favorite activities is reading my own writing. I absolutely hate it, but I know it’s necessary. When I’m reading someone else’s writing, I can be a bit more critical, which trains my eyes to find these same mistakes the next time I’m proofing my own post.

3. Extend and advance: improve your storytelling

There's an improvisation game I played in an acting class once that's equal parts hard and hilarious. We called it "extend and advance". It's a storytelling game that requires one person to tell a story based on a prompt like "holidays" or "camping" either verbally or through mime. Their partner tells them to extend when they want more detail on a particular point, or advance when they want the storyteller to move on to something new.

Both actions are tricky for the storyteller, who has to maintain a coherent narrative while advancing to new aspects of their story every time they're asked to. They also have to find enough off-the-cuff material to extend on any point when asked.

This can be a little easier when you're working with a partner who suggests when to expand and when to advance, but you can set up a solo version of this exercise to help you improve your storytelling skills.

Here's an example of how I'd structure it:

Instructions

Plan your intervals like this, and keep track with a timer or by watching the clock:

• 30 secs: Free writing to get the story going.
• 1 min: Extend on whatever point you're up to when the timer beeps.
• 1 min: Advance the story to a new point.
• 1 min: Extend on whatever point you're up to when the timer beeps.
• 1 min: Advance the story to a new point.
• 30 secs: Wrap it up.

You don't have to use this for fiction, even though it's a story-based exercise. If you'd rather, write about something happening in your own life, or a topic you're interested in.

Tip: Try a random word generator to get you started for this one.

Reactions:

Belle

The 1-minute intervals went more quickly than I expected. I looked at a clock rather than setting up a timer, which worked fine.

I chose the word "pronunciation" at random from the homepage of dictionary.com. I would choose something I have more of a connection next time, as I struggled to come up with anything to write throughout the exercise. Then again, that's part of the challenge.

Switching between extending on a point and advancing to something new was tricky, but fun. I found advancing the hardest part, since it came after a minute of extending, regardless of where I was up to so I often had to find a quick way to finish up my thought and think of a way to advance to a new point.

As the exercise went on, I found ways to choose points to advance to that I knew I could extend on. I don't think this defeats the purpose of the exercise, because as my brain warmed up to what I was doing, I actually started thinking faster than required and thinking further ahead than just the current task. This helped me pull my writing together into a more smooth flow between points.

Definitely a task I'd try again, and I think it could be useful in longer stretches, too.

4. Rewriting: improve your creativity

A big part of editing and improving your writing work is rewriting. How many times do you delete and rewrite the same sentence? Or reword it in your head? I do this all the time, constantly looking for a better phrase or word to get my point across.

I try to always leave at least a day in-between drafting and editing a piece. Mostly this comes from my boredom of working on the same piece for too long—my brain likes to have a break and think about something else for a while. But it's actually good for my work. Leaving enough time that I can do other things, and have a full night's sleep before coming back to my draft means my subconscious can continue thinking about the topic while I'm not aware of it. When I come back fresh the next day, I can easily think of better ways to reword my points, or see mistakes I missed the first time round.

John Cleese says the same thing happens for him. He can often easily see a solution to a problem in his writing after sleeping on it.

In the video above, John tells a story that illustrates this process perfectly (it starts at 2:30). He wrote a script one day that he really liked, but ended up losing the script later. Since he couldn't find it anywhere but was so happy with the original, he forced himself to write it out again from memory. Yep, a total rewrite from scratch.

Later on, John found the original and was curious enough to compare the two. He found that the second version was actually noticeably better than the original. Somehow, John's subconscious had continued to work on his ideas without him realising, so when he wrote the script the second time he did a better job.

The extra time (and sleep) in-between drafting and rewriting is key here. This is when your brain gets to work on the ideas subconsciously so you can improve your writing the next day.

So here's an exercise to help you practise rewriting in short bursts:

Instructions

Tip: Try a writing prompt to give this piece some structure. This can make it easier to rewrite.

Reactions

Belle

Interestingly, I found myself thinking about how I'd rewrite this piece while I was writing it.

The next day I spent 5 minutes rewriting this piece from scratch. I'd written the prompt word, "simplicity" on a new page yesterday so I wouldn't be tempted to read my original draft before I rewrote it.

When I finished the rewrite I wasn't convinced I'd done any better than yesterday, but I read through both to compare. What I noticed most was today's version was more succinct—as if it was an edited version of yesterday's draft. This doesn't surprise me too much. I tend to be a verbose drafter, and often cut a lot when I'm editing.

I counted this exercise as a win, because it definitely helped me express myself more clearly and succinctly the second time around. I'm not sure I'd ever want to rewrite an entire blog post from scratch, though.

5. Combining: improve your ability to create new connections

A big part of creativity—and in particular, having new ideas—is finding new ways to connect old things. As the saying goes, everything is a remix.

So it pays to improve your ability to see new connections between existing ideas. Here's an exercise to give your connecting brain a workout:

Instructions

Create a big list on paper of suggestions you can use in these categories:

• People (e.g. grandmother, teacher, baby, pilot)
• Places (e.g. hospital, Paris, farm, high school)
• Things (e.g. ice cream, bicycle, puppy, measles)
• Themes (e.g. grief, laughter, inequality, meaning of life)

Tear up all the suggestions so they're on separate pieces of paper and throw them into a bucket or hat.

Or for easier setup, just use a random word generator. Keep generating words until you have two that come from different categories above.

Each time you do this exercise, grab two pieces of paper from the bucket and write for 10 minutes on how they could be connected. You can write a story that incorporates the two, relate a memory or some information you know about an example connection from real life, or simply write down your musings about how these two ideas could be connected.

You might be surprised by how many ideas you get from this exercise—after all, it's forcing the process of idea creation that we all go through naturally, so it's great practice.

Reactions

Belle

I used a random word generator for this one and clicked through until I had two words from different categories. I ended up with "lost" (theme) and "tail" (thing).

I wrote about my tail bone, and the idea of humans having tails at some point. It turned into mostly a musing full of questions, because I barely know any of the science around that idea.

It did encourage me to read up about human evolution and how tails fit in, which I count as a win.

6. Headlining: improve your ability to come up with new topics

Coming up with new topic ideas is one of the hardest parts of my job. And although it's not writing per se, it's a big part of the writing process. After all, I need a good idea before I can start a draft.

Sometimes I need to force a short period of thinking with a pen and paper to come up with new topic ideas. I might come up with a lot of junk, but often there'll be one or two gems that come from an exercise like this. And what's 7 minutes a day if it makes my job easier?

So here's the exercise:

Instructions

Choose 10 headlines from your RSS or Twitter feed to riff off. Write them on a sheet of paper and step away from your computer and your phone.

Spend the next 5 minutes coming up with as many topic ideas as you can. If you have multiple blogs you can think of ideas for any of them—don't limit yourself to one.

The 10 headlines you start with are just to give your brain something to chew on. If you find your mind wandering into other areas, let it go. If you don't need 10 headlines to help you get started, try the exercise with just a blank sheet of paper.

But as hard as it is, don't look at your computer or your phone. You can, however, stare into space and daydream as much as you want. These things are good for us, and this 5-minute exercise is as much about training your brain to be more creative as it is coming up with concrete topic ideas.

Reactions

Belle

I was surprised at how few headlines I came up with in 5 minutes. I thought of just 8, even though I was already getting some vague ideas as I wrote down my 10 inspiration headlines. This might work better with only 5 headlines to use as inspiration next time.

Jeremey Duvall

Jeremey found the same thing I did: he came up with fewer headlines than he'd expected—just seven.

I thought somewhere in the range of 10-15 (at least two a minute). There were two roadblocks that prevented me from coming up with more. First, I kept on coming back to pitches I already had in Todoist, or I would think of posts I had just recently read or tweeted out. I found it hard to break fro the mold and come up with something new.

Second, the critical side of my brain kept kicking on and evaluating the viability of topics before they even got on the paper. If I could have ignored that part of my brain, I would have finished with more ideas, but many of them would have been deleted in the end.

I didn't evaluate my ideas as carefully as Jeremey did while doing this exercise, so I ended up with a page of headlines I mostly didn't want to use.

Jory MacKay, editor at Crew

Jory found the process of using other headlines to spark new ideas a bit confusing:

I was a little confused reading through these instructions at first. Do I read 10 headlines and then step away and write similar ones? Are the 10 headlines supposed to directly influence what I write, or are they just their to get me inspired?

His confusion prompted an interesting idea that could make this exercise work better:

This might be easier if you use a theme prompt and focus the exercise on coming up with unique angles to take with your writing. So much of blogging and writing is showing your unique take on a subject, and I think that would be beneficial for anyone trying to get into this line of work!

Writing prompts and word generators

To help you kick off your writing for each exercises, you might find some of these sites useful:

• Randomlists.com (generates lists of random words)
• watchout4snakes (random word generator)
• Daily Teaching Tools (writing prompts)
• @writingprompt (writing prompt tweets)
• Easy Street Prompts (writing prompts)

If you have any writing exercises that I should know about, please leave a comment. I'd love to have more options up my sleeve for improving my writing.

And let me know if you try any of these yourself—it's fascinating to see how different writers react to the exercises.

Image credits: 750 Words screenshot via Paperback Writer

One of the biggest struggles I've had in the past few weeks is finding focus. When I know I need to knuckle down and get some work done, I get myself all pumped up, then sit down at my computer and fall into a pit of distraction.

It's not always bad distraction, like wasting time in Slack or browsing Product Hunt. Often it's that most nefarious of distraction types: productive procrastination. I get caught up in things that are ostensibly necessary and useful for my job, but they take my attention away from my most important task: writing.

Whether it's the appeal of variety that comes from doing different tasks, or simply a way to avoid work that stretches me beyond my comfort zone, distraction has become the bane of my productivity score lately.

Always one for experimenting and self improvement, I've been looking into ways to ameliorate this situation and get my focus back.

If you're in the same situation as me, may these techniques help you get more of the important work done and waste less of your time. Or, you know, just boost your productivity score if that's what you're into.

Step 1: Figure out why you're distracted

Your problem with focus probably isn't the distractions themselves.

One of the most empowering approaches to improving focus is to realise that there's likely an underlying cause to why you keep getting distracted. Figuring out this cause and fixing it is a more sustainable approach than using willpower or forced focus tools to keep your mind from wandering.

One problem could be motivation. If you're not interested in what you're doing, it's easier to get distracted. In fact, you might want to be distracted without realising it. You're susceptible to distractions because you don't actually want to focus on what you should be doing.

As Chris Guillebeau, author of The Art of Non-Conformity says, forcing yourself to focus when you're not interested in your work isn't a sustainable approach:

It’s very hard to be productive in the long-term when trying to do things for which you aren't motivated. You might have to "suck it up" once in a while to complete a certain task, but for the "big rocks" it's much easier to construct your work around things you’re excited about.

The useful part of recognising that your lack of focus comes from some underlying cause is that it's usually something internal. Whether that's a lack of motivation, a feeling of frustration or fatigue, or excitement about something else you'd rather be working on, those reasons for being distracted come from within.

Which means it's unnecessary to put lots of time and effort into blocking out every distracting website you can, or chaining yourself to your desk.

Oliver Burkeman explained this well in a piece for 99u:

Why Are We so Distracted All the Time?

Seeking out a mid-task distraction is our subtle way of avoiding life’s more vexing questions.

Behance, Inc.Adobe 99U

When we think in terms of temptations and interruptions, we’re defining the problem as coming from the outside—so it makes sense to try to shut them out with website blockers and noise-cancelling headphones, by snapping at bothersome colleagues, or by escaping to a cabin in the mountains. But there’s a reason such methods never seem to work very well, or for long. The real culprit isn’t external irritations, but rather an internal urge to be distracted, to avoid focusing on what matters most. The calls are coming from inside the house.

Oliver also points out that we don't need to be motivated in order to get our work done:

Instead, let yourself feel like you'd rather be doing something else, and at the same time, do the work: Open the laptop, make the phone call, type another sentence.

Recognise why you're distracted so you can treat the underlying cause.

If you're lacking motivation, recognise that feeling but do the work anyway. (I'll show you how to psych yourself up with a pre-game ritual below.)

If you're bored, or just not used to focusing for long periods, you can train your focus muscles. I'll show you how in step 3, below.

Step 2: Create your own pre-game ritual

Have you ever noticed how athletes tend to perform the exact same ritual, in the exact same way, before every competition or match? A pre-game ritual is a set of actions that you can repeat the same way every time to get yourself into the right mindset.

Here's a real-world example of the difference a pre-game ritual can make: suppose you have a regular morning routine that consists of walking to work at a leisurely pace, grabbing a coffee at your favourite café on the way, and stopping to buy a salad for lunch in the salad bar next to your building. By the time you get to your desk you've done some gentle exercise, been out in the fresh air, drunk your coffee, and bought your lunch. You sit down ready to get stuck into work feeling calm and organised.

Now suppose you sleep in one day and then spill your breakfast on your clothes and have to get changed. You're running late now, so you drive to work. You don't have time to stop for a coffee or a salad, so you're de-caffeinated and you don't have lunch prepared when you get to the office. Because you're late, your emails are already piling up and you've only got a couple of minutes at your desk before your first meeting of the day.

See how your mindset would be thrown off just because your routine was different? You've developed a relaxing, organised ritual that gets you to work refreshed and ready to concentrate. Without it, you're late, scattered, stressed, and unorganised.

Developing a ritual will give you a go-to tool to get you in the mood for work every time. It also helps you to overcome the distractions that stop you from starting. Your ritual will help you get stuck into your work, and before you know it you'll be off-and-running, just because you found a way to get started in the first place.

Another important note about a pre-work ritual: the ritual needs to move you towards starting work, but you don't have to think about work while you do the ritual. You only need to think about the ritual itself. On the way to work you're thinking about walking, navigating traffic, enjoying your coffee, what kind of salad you'll have for lunch. You don't need to think about what you'll do when you get to work. Just focus on the ritual itself, and if you design it well, it'll get you into the right mindset for work by the time you've finished it.

James Clear uses pre-game rituals to get himself in the mood for working after realising how much they improved his baseball game. James says that eventually your ritual should become so tied to your performance that just by doing it you'll be primed to perform. He also suggests a few tips for building the perfect pre-game routine:

• Make it so easy you can't so no. "You shouldn’t need motivation to start your pre–game routine," he says.
• Include physical movement. According to James, "It's hard to think yourself into getting motivated." Physical movement is hard to fight, though.
• Follow the same pattern every time. The more you do it, the better it works.

Step 3: Train your focus muscles

If you really can't focus for long (enough) periods even when you're motivated to get your work done, your focus muscles might need some training. Luckily it is possible to increase the amount of time you can focus on one thing for. It just takes some practice.

The important difference here is that you're not forcing yourself to ignore distractions, which isn't sustainable, but rather training yourself to be able to focus on one thing for longer periods.

Author Cal Newport says most of us have a grace period of maybe 20 or 30 minutes to work on anything that requires demanding thinking before our focus starts to drift. He likens this feeling to "a weight descending inside your skull":

Your energy fades and you begin to experience a desperate craving for novel stimulation. Nothing in the world seems more tempting than to go seek such stimulation — to check your e-mail, or sift through your Facebook feed like a hyper-extroverted gold prospector.

Cal quotes novelist Haruki Murakami, who believes in training to write for several hours at a time just like you might train to run a marathon. Murakami's suggestion, according to Cal, is to "sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point."

Just like a runner would build up their endurance to run a long distance race, Murakami says it's possible to build up focus endurance. Each day, he says, you need to push yourself a little further outside your comfort zone. Stretch your focus muscles a little more every day, and over time your threshold will increase.

Exceptional things — be it ideas, writing, mathematics, or art — require hard work. This, in turn, requires boring stretches during which you ignore a mind pleading with you to seek novel stimuli — "Maybe there's an e-mail waiting that holds some exciting news! Go check!". — Cal Newport

What to do next

1. Figure out why you're getting distracted. Are you craving distraction? Why would you rather be doing something else besides what you need to do right now?
2. Create a pre-game ritual to get you in the mindset for work. Repeat this ritual every day before you sit down to work. Help your brain make the connection between your ritual and what comes next, so the ritual itself starts getting you psyched up to work hard.
3. Train your focus muscles. If you're struggling to focus for long stretches even when you're motivated to work, push yourself to focus for just a little longer than is comfortable each day.

I love what writer Austin Kleon has to say about the effort required to create great work:

Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).

Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting than just wanting the noun.

Doing the verb isn't glamorous, but it's necessary. And with a little effort and a lot of practice you can build up the ability to focus on hard work without letting boredom, frustration, or outside influences distract you.

I'm constantly looking for new content ideas. When you create a lot, you need a lot of new ideas. Especially since the more you create, the more you tend to throw out in the process, too.

One way I've found useful for coming up with new content ideas is to use existing content (this can be your own or someone else's) as a jumping-off point for creating something new. I do this by digging deeper. That is, I take a short, or fairly superficial piece of content and approach the same topic anew with an aim to go deeper, not wider. Sometimes this means finding a new angle, sometimes choosing one aspect from a well-rounded piece to focus on.

I've used this approach to turn a 15-minute podcast interview into a 2,500-word blog post, a year-old PDF into a 4,500-word blog post, and previously, that same PDF came out of a blog post I'd written 6 months earlier. This is basically strategic recycling of ideas. The reason I can get away with it is because I always dig a little deeper in some way.

Here's the process I use for identifying content I can dig deeper into and expanding those ideas into new content of my own.

Identifying an opportunity to go deep

The first stage of this process is poring through existing content. This can come from your own archives or from other blogs you read. I tend to read through my RSS feeds, the Ghost blog archives, my own bookmarks of things I've written on other blogs, and even the archives of blogs I admire.

I don't usually do this as an active ideation process. I work the following steps into my normal reading routine.

Usually an idea jumps out at me while I'm reading through a few steps:

1. I notice a headline that interests me.
2. I start reading, because this is something I'd like to learn about.
3. I finish the piece feeling dissatisfied.

I'm often dissatisfied for one of these three reasons:

1. My specific question didn't get answered
2. I didn't take away any actionable ideas
3. I just want to know more

For this approach, being dissatisfied with the content already available on a topic is incredibly useful. That feeling tells me there's a gap to fill here. I have a problem (I didn't get what I wanted from the content I read) and I can fix it (by writing the content I want to read).

Figuring out why I'm dissatisfied helps me work out which approach to take when digging deeper.

If I had a specific question I can focus on that aspect of the topic and research what I want to know. If I didn't get enough actionable advice I can look for ways to make the same topic more actionable for others. Or if I just want to know more I can explore the topic further until I find an interesting angle to focus on in my own content.

Creating a new piece from something old

Choosing a piece to work from is just one part of the puzzle. The other part is finding a way to dig deeper and create something new.

When I'm looking for opportunities to dig into a topic, I like to ask myself these questions about the original piece of content:

What does it make me wonder about?

What points does this content bring up that I want to know more about? What does it make me curious about? What related topics does it remind me of that I'm connecting in my mind?

This last question can be really helpful in working out how to make the topic more useful for readers. If I can think of one or two other topics or points that I've read about which are related to this topic in some way, the chances of my readers having that exact same knowledge is unlikely. I can provide more value to them by sharing what this piece of content has to say and showing them how it's connected to other ideas.

Who's missing from this piece?

This question can come in a variety of formats. One is to look for whose opinion, point of view, or experience is relevant to this topic but missing from the original content. Maybe I wrote about something a few months ago and I've since met some of the experts in that field. I could write a new piece that explores their opinions and experience.

You could also look at who the writer of the original piece aimed it at, and whether that audience has been well served. For instance, if it's a piece aimed at beginners, is the topic explained clearly? Is any jargon explained? Is the piece simple enough for beginners to understand or does it assume more knowledge than a beginner would have?

If any of these things are overlooked, I could write a new piece that's very clearly aimed at that same audience but ensure that I'm serving them better than the original piece did.

And finally, I use this question to ask who this topic is relevant to who's not served in the original. If it's a piece aimed at beginners, I could write a piece focusing on an intermediate or expert audience, going deeper into the more complicated aspects of the topic that would serve those readers better.

Could it be easier to understand or implement?

Great journalists know that sharing the news isn't served by using the fanciest words they know. Journalists use the most simple language they can to express their points so everyone can easily read and understand the news. And in fact, trying to sound smart actually makes us sound dumb anyway.

Writing content that aims to impart knowledge works the same way. To get the majority of your audience understanding it and implementing anything actionable you've included, you should be trying to make it more simple, not more complex. If an original piece of content seems unnecessary complex, there's an opportunity to go deeper into simplifying the research, making the concepts easy to understand and making the actionable points clear.

I often ask myself if more screenshots, diagrams or illustrations could make a piece of content easier to understand. Sometimes a lot of visuals to explain concepts can be the difference between an okay piece of content and something that really wows your readers and helps them to implement your strategies.

Examples are another area that content creators (including myself) sometimes skimp on because it takes so much effort to find or create examples for every point you make. But again, they can make a big difference when it comes to how well your audience understands and appreciates your content. If the original piece is lacking examples, that can be a good indicator as to where you can start when digging deeper.

Putting it into practice

Now that we've got an idea of the process for finding content to dig into and where to start with the deeper version, let's look at some real-world examples of where I've done this in the past.

Example 1: from a short podcast interview to a Ghost blog post

A couple of months ago I appeared on a short podcast about writing, called Rough Draft. The host, Demian Farnworth, interviewed me about content syndication. During my time at Buffer and since, I've had my work syndicated on Lifehacker, Fast Company, The Next Web, Time.com, and other sites. This process can be a bit of a mystery (kind of like getting press), so we discussed why it's useful, who should do it, and how to get started. The episode was only 20 minutes long, so we didn't go deep into the topic—which makes it a perfect candidate for digging deeper in a later piece.

That later piece came in the form of a post on the Ghost blog. I used the questions from the podcast interview to start off my blog post, with the idea of giving deeper explanations for each one.

As I write the post I realised it would be much more useful for readers to have more than one opinion on syndication (that one being mine). So I reached out to some if the editors who've republished my work before, and a couple of content writers I know who often have their work syndicated. Adding their thoughts on the process helped to fill out my own experience so readers can get a more well-rounded view from the post than they did from my initial podcast interview.

Example 2: From a free PDF to a 4,000-word blog post

For a few months last year I ran a premium newsletter about content marketing. I sent out monthly updates including 3 articles around a content marketing theme and anyone who signed up for the $20/month subscription received a free PDF to download, detailing my process for writing research based blog posts.

Although this PDF went through my process from start to finish, it didn't offer as much detail as it could have. It also left some questions unanswered—for instance, how to evaluate research and decide what's trustworthy and what's not. By asking my followers on Twitter what they'd most like to know about related to my research writing process, I realised there were some questions I hadn't answered and some I had only touched on that deserved a more in-depth look.

I took the initial PDF and worked from it as a base for a new blog post. The PDF helped me find some sections of the topic to start with and I re-used some of my original writing as a basis for my first draft. I also added a new section on evaluating research that covers some of the rules I use myself.

What was initially a few pages in a PDF became a 4,500-word post on the Ghost blog full of in-depth details and examples of my research and writing process.

That kind of content would be quite difficult to write from scratch, but working from a shorter, more superficial piece to start with gave me a framework to build on.

Finding opportunities to dig deep

Let's take a look at a few more examples of content I could dig into to give you an idea of how I find these opportunities. Since I'm picking on this content for the things it's missing, I'll focus on my own work.

Want happier customers? Manage their expectations

I wrote this post for the Crew blog a few months ago and I still believe there's an important message in it. But when I read over it again, I can see something obviously missing: it needs to be more actionable.

Although it's 1,300 words long, this post really focuses on setting up and explaining the idea of managing customer expectations. I introduce it with an example of when my expectations weren't met. I explain how it's relevant to a company selling products. And I finish up with a few vague tips on finding out what expectations your customers already have.

If I were to dig deeper into this piece I'd take the content that's already there and condense it, making the setup clear but more to-the-point. Then I'd focus on adding several clear takeaways the reader can act on immediately.

What I wish I’d known about running a startup

In this Crew blog post I focused on three main surprises I've discovered during my time as a startup founder:

1. A lot of the work of building a startup takes place via email.
2. Networking is more like a game than I expected.
3. Getting feedback is harder than I thought.

Can you figure out what's missing from this piece that I could dig deeper on?

It's other voices.

This piece is all about my experience. There's nothing wrong with that—my experience is valid and hopefully interesting. But when I'm ready to dig deeper into this topic, these three points of learning from my experience could be a great starting point for a bigger post that involves other founders.

What have other founders experienced that I haven't? What surprises have they discovered? What's surprising for a startup in a different country or industry to mine?

The more voices I can add to this topic, the more well-rounded the content can be. And hopefully that will make it useful to more readers, who'll have more opportunities to find an experience within the post that they relate to.

Write the perfect blog post: 4 tips from 24 months of content marketing

Here's a post I wrote for the Zapier blog. It's structured very simply around four basic ideas for writing great blog posts:

1. Write an outline and a working title ASAP
2. Back up everything you say with research
3. Give your readers clear, actionable takeaways
4. Focus on crafting the perfect introduction

While I've made an effort to make each of these sections easy to understand, and to back up my reasons for including each piece of advice, I could go a lot further in making them actionable.

Each section includes at least one example of the concept I'm sharing. But I doubt many readers would finish reading that post feeling more confident about implementing those ideas in their own work.

In digging deeper on this post, I would focus on including very simple, clear actions related to each section. There might be several per section—for instance, writing a great introduction (section 4) doesn't boil down to one basic tip. But offering a few concrete actions to the reader would make this post more useful.

Try thinking critically about the content you read. Write down the questions above and ask them of yourself when reading your own work, too. Can you spot anything missing? Does the content make you wonder about a related topic? Could you make this topic easier to understand or implement?

Just asking yourself these questions will help you improve the content you're already writing everyday. But more importantly it can give you a whole new way of finding ideas for new content.