The photo above is a behind-the-scenes snippet of my day on most mornings.
I wake up at 9. I roll out of bed when I’m ready. I take my time.
Sparkling water, my computer, a smiling face, and a coffee cup that is blocked by the flowers. The photo above was taken at my grandparent’s house in North Carolina, so we had the added benefit of some beautiful scenery behind us.
On the surface, it looks like a lot of fun. In reality, it is a lot of fun.
Writing is the coolest job in the world — but it’s not the easiest one.
To succeed today, it’s not enough to be a good writer. You also need to:
Have good writing systems
Use the right writing tools for you
Have a roadmap for potential buyers to follow to your best work
If you do these things right, you can become a one-person content machine.
Here’s how I push out 20+ pieces of weekly content in just an hour or two every morning.
Writing is the easy part.
Writing is like working out.
Working out is pretty easy to just do. All you have to do is show up and go through the motions.
That’s step one.
To write, all you have to do is sit down, log in, and hammer out words. It’s like a muscle — the more you train, the better you will get. Articles that used to take me 2 hours now take about 45 minutes — usually less. I generally can do 1 article every morning plus a handful of pieces of short-form content.
The hard part is actually all the stuff that happens before and after you write the actual content of the post.
The ideating. The editing. The promoting. The repurposing. The worrying about if it’s going to do well.
These are the things that will slow your ability to generate a one-person content machine, and thus slow your reach and your ability to build your online business.
That’s why my writing systems have little to do with writing and everything to do with planning to write. I know I’m going to sit down every morning and write, so I need to make sure the writing is ready for me.
Here’s my system for creating and pumping out tons of content.
The first thing that I do is that I try to surround myself with new insights and interesting experiences. I write a newsletter about Jiu-Jitsu, so I try to be consistent in my Jiu-Jitsu training, I try to remain experimental in my diet and training, and I try to be thoughtful on the mat.
That act of learning — although it has nothing to do with writing — gives me tons of things to write about.
I read daily, listen to books, listen to podcasts, and I try to use social media as more of an educational tool than a brain cell-killing tool.
From here, I ideate on things and can form content ideas using my headline generation system (I talked about this a little bit last week).
Generally, everything I write each week comes from my list of pre-created content ideas crossed over with the new things that I’m ;earning. There is very little guesswork in putting out 20-30 pieces of content per week, especially long-form content like this or my other newsletter.
Tweets and Instagram stories are usually just riffs off the dome, direct quotes from long-form pieces, or ways of promoting long-form content in my newsletter.
One thing I do is copy an entire newsletter into ChatGPT and ask it to find the best one-liners and short blurbs for Twitter. Use scheduling tools, AI, and every other tool that is relevant to what you’re building.
How this strategy paid off in 2024.
At the end of each year, I try to analyze my work and my performance in everything I’ve done.
In terms of writing, I made substantial progress in 2024. I think that if you apply the system I use, you can double your audience in a year. That’s what I did this year.
For me, The Grappler’s Diary Instagram page has doubled since January and we still have a month to go on this year. Over 1000 of those readers have found either this newsletter or The Grappler’s Diary, either via one of my free products or by directly clicking the link. The Modern Writer has gone from zero to about 600 subs despite me never promoting it on social media and taking a month off.
I’ve had the most profitable year with my content since I started doing content, and it’s not because my content is incredible. It’s because there’s so much of it that the wheel does not stop spinning. I play the game enough to see some results.
Content is a flywheel — with each rotation of the wheel, your speed accelerates and your chances of success and visibility improve.
Writing today is easier for me (and more profitable) than it was a year ago and several times easier and more profitable than 2 years ago.
We keep going.
Closing Thoughts
I’ve been writing online for nearly 5 years.
When I started, I was completely clueless. I published articles on Medium dot com, Quora, and Substack and I just hoped that people would read them. I just created things and prayed that the viral gods would give me the ability to make some money.
Since then, I’ve built:
A newsletter that reaches thousands of readers per month
Accumulated millions of views on social media
I’ve written 3 ebooks
And I’ve ghostwritten for some of the biggest names on X (formerly Twitter)
And I’m still doing new things every month in the writing space. I’m currently ghostwriting my first book.
In early 2025, I’ll be offering a small cohort of writing coaching. If you’re looking to build an audience, connect with like-minded people, and make a living with your words and personal branad, this might just be the perfect program for you.
If it is, hit reply to this email I’ll send you some more information.
Thanks for reading another edition of The Modern Writer!
If you liked this post, share it with friends! Or, give it a ❤️ so that more people can discover it on Substack :)