Nicolas Cole - The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention

The Art and Business of Online Writing

How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention

Nicolas Cole

My articles have been read by over 100M people. Coles articles have been read more than mine, and I can personally attest this book will teach you everything you need to know to reach millions of people with your writing.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy ,

bestselling author of Personality Isnt Permanent

The Art and Business of Online Writing

Copyright 2020 Nicolas Cole

ISBN: 978-0-9982034-9-2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical , photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

The author and publisher of the book do not make any claim or guarantee for any physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or financial result. All products, services and information provided by the author are for general education and entertainment purposes only. The information provided herein is in no way a substitute for professional advice. In the event you use any of the information contained in this book for yourself, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Published by Nicolas Cole | www.nicolascole.com

This book is dedicated to anyone who

wants to become a professional writer

on their own terms.

I wish someone had gifted me this book when I was 23 years old, graduating from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in creative writing.

Enjoy.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

The Art and Business of Online Writing

Logging In (Introduction)

The Game Of Online Writing

Writing online is a game.

I first started playing the game in 2007. I was 17 years old, a junior in high school, and one of the top World of Warcraft players in North America. Long gone were the days of the internet only being used by forward-thinking entrepreneurs and computer scientists. The social digital revolution had begun: Facebook was three years old, YouTube was two, and Twitter was a newborn wailing at the top of its lungs.

Right before school let out for the summer, this new website emerged in the competitive gaming community, called GameRiot. It was a social media site for gamersbefore the term social media had even become part of the worlds vocabulary. Id heard about the site from a gaming blogger I loved reading. Every morning before school, I would wake up, make myself two eggs on toast (wheat), and read his latest blog. He was one of the few top-tier gamers who actually had his own website, so when he made a post one morning saying he was going to start writing somewhere else instead, I knew to pay attention .

While the rest of my family played in the pool in the backyard, I was upstairs in my bedroom. With freezing cold air blasting out of the air conditioner above my head, I sat at my desk hunched over my keyboard with my face three inches from my monitor, exploring GameRiot.

I was staring at one of the internets first social blogs, exclusively for gamers.

Similar to the way a Facebook or Twitter feed looked, the center of the website was an infinite scrolling feed of posts. Catering to the gamer mentality, in the upper right-hand corner there was a leaderboard of the Top 10 most popular blogs on the siteand sure enough, sitting at #1, was a recent post by my favorite gaming blogger, Ming.

I decided, right then and there, I was going to become a competitive blogger too.

The reason I didnt start a website of my own was because I didnt know how.

In the mid 2000s, there were no website templates, no easy-to-use graphic design tools, no one-click solutions. Almost everything had to be custom designed and coded. And since I had no money, I couldnt afford to hire someone to help me.

But on this new site for gamers, all of that was taken care of.

When you created your own profile, you could easily upload a photo and write a short bio. You could browse other peoples posts on the front page. You could scroll through different topics. You could comment, and other people could comment back to you. The whole website was a game, no different to me than the World of Warcraftand without thinking twice about it, I decided I was going to start writing there too.

Every night, after playing 3v3 against some of the top gamers in the world, I would close the World of Warcraft and write that nights blog post. At first, I tried to make my blog the go-to resource for high-level gameplay information, breaking down team compositions, winning strategies, and little tricks to give gamers a competitive edge. But over time, I started to realize it wasnt the informative stuff that made the front pageit was drama.

Gamers loved knowing which teams had rivalries with who, which players had lost their shit after a loss, and who had been sneaky enough to capture an audio recording of the outburst for the entire World of Warcraft community to hear. More importantly, they wanted to know what some of the best players were like in real life.

It didnt take me long to realize that readers didnt just want to learn how to be better gamers themselves.

They also wanted to be entertained.

Watching Ming execute this strategy perfectly, I began to mirror my writing style off his. Every one of his posts was a blend between informative content and controversy-inducing tangents. In one single paragraph, he would go from explaining the inner workings of the Rogue class to venting about how his Asian parents had arranged his upcoming marriage and the whole event was getting in the way of his 3v3 team making it to BlizzCons first ever Arena World Championship Tournament. The comment section of his posts would explode with gamers either curiously wanting to know more about his love life, or ridiculing him for thinking the World of Warcraft was more important than his wedding day.

This is what made Ming the #1 most-read writer on the site week after week, month after month.

Everything changed for me when I started incorporating more of my real life into my writing.

I wrote about how my parents, my teachers, even my peers at high school didnt respect video gamesbut for some reason enthusiastically supported football, basketball, and other organized sports.

I wrote about organized education, and how as long as the internet continued to develop, I continued to lose faith in there being a real need to attend college.

I even wrote about the most popular girl in school, a brunette cheerleader, and how there was one week of my high school career where a series of unfathomable events unfolded: I went to my very first high school party ever; word got out that I was one of the top World of Warcraft players in the country; the hottest girl in our school professed her love to me; we went on a date; kissed; rumors started flying we were dating; I catapulted from the bottom of the social totem pole to the absolute peak; then she started getting made fun of for liking me; she denied anything ever happened; then she made up reverse rumors about how I was obsessed with her and probably a stalker; and by the end of the week, I was right back to sitting by myself during lunchexcept this time, with threats coming from the entire baseball team that if I ever talked to her again, Id get my head bashed in with a baseball bat.

All of which was true.