Nicolas Cole Quotes

When people read online, they don’t actually “read.” What they do is skim. Browse. Scroll. They let their eyes gloss over the words, and if something compelling catches their eye in the first two, five, maybe ten seconds (a word, a subhead, a phrase), then they’ll stop skimming and start reading. But you better believe as soon as momentum in the writing starts to slow, they’re gone. They’ll swipe back to their social media feed and be neck deep in Memeville in a millisecond.

Less worried about whether or not I was the most credible person to be answering each question, I focused all of my energy into making my answer the most relatable to whoever was experiencing (or wanted to experience) similar things in life.

The average column on a major publication receives less than 1,000 views. The articles that “go viral” only fall into three categories: They are about an insanely successful company (Apple). They provide an unexpected perspective on a controversial and trending topic. They focus on personal development/life advice.

The answers with the most engagement almost always begin at the absolute height of the story: “The first time I became a millionaire, I was living in my parents’ basement.” Boom. You’re in the story before you’ve even decided whether or not you wanted to be there in the first place.

It's not about how much you make. It's about how much you save.

The size of your audience is a direct reflection of the size of the question you are answering

This was exactly the same lesson I’d learned as a teenage gaming blogger: when I wrote about niche topics, viewership was mediocre. But when I wrote about universal life lessons, my writing went viral.

Here’s an example of the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure from my article, “8 Soft Skills You Need To Work At A High-Growth Startup.” It takes a certain type of personality to want to work at a startup — and the crucial qualities of startup employees you decide to hire. When I was 26 years old, one of my closest friends and I decided we were going to start a company. He was still in the process of finishing his MBA. I had recently taken the leap from my job as a copywriter working in advertising. And every few weeks he would fly to Chicago (where I was based), or I would fly to Atlanta (where he was based), and we’d trade off sleeping on each other’s couches while brainstorming what our first step was going to be. We called it Digital Press. I’ll never forget the day we decided to make our first hire. He was a freelance writer recommended to me by a friend — and we were in the market to start hiring writers and editors (to replace the jobs my co-founder, Drew, and I were performing ourselves). We asked him to meet us at Soho House in Chicago, ordered a bottle of red wine to share, and “interviewed” him by the pool on the roof. He was a fiction writer with a passion for fantasy and sci-fi (not business writing, which was what we needed), and we were young and inexperienced just hoping someone would trust us enough to follow our vision. We hired him — and fired him two months later. The last thing I want to point out here is that you can actually make the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure move even faster by combining the last sentence of the first section, and the first sentence of the second section, into one singular subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument. This fifth sentence is both your conclusion and the first sentence of your second section. And this s

Take this to heart: if you cannot keep your daily promise, you will never keep your lifetime promise.

You don't want to work hard. You want to work smart.

1/4/1/1 Why the 1/4/1/1 structure works so well is because now your single-sentence conclusion packs two punches instead of one. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. This fourth sentence rounds out your argument. And this fifth sentence speaks to the emotional benefit of the reader. This sixth sentence is your conclusion. And this seventh sentence is why that conclusion matters so much. If you notice, the only difference between the 1/3/1 structure and 1/4/1/1 is rhythm. One more sentence doesn’t really change the content of the introduction. But the way the sentences are separated elicits a different response in the reader. The 1/3/1 structure feels strong, but 1/4/1/1 feels stronger, and even more opinionated — there are two punchlines instead of one. In fact, just by moving a single sentence up or down in any of these paragraphs can dramatically change the rhythm of your introduction. Here’s an example of the 1/4/1/1 structure from my article, “6 Important Life Lessons You Can Only Learn Through Failure.” Nobody learns the hard lessons in life without some element of failure. When we let someone down, we learn why. When we fall short of our own expectations, we become aware of our growth edge. When we crumble under pressure, we become attuned to our weaknesses. There is a “lesson” inside each and every defeat — and those who ultimately reach their goals see these moments as valuable opportunities, not punishments. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the learning process any less painful. There are some lessons in life you just can’t learn without falling down, scraping both knees, and getting back up again. Like the other structures above, you can elongate your introduction by adding a bit more text in the first major paragraph. 1/5/1/1 works, and so does 1/6/1/1. But once you start getting up

When it comes to online writing, conclusions are optional. The truth is, readers don’t need them. Especially in an 800 to 1,200-word article, a conclusion should happen in the span of a paragraph — or even a single sentence. Your last Main Point is technically the “climax” of the piece. And if we know anything about digital readers, it’s that as soon as they’re “done,” they’re done. They’ve already swiped back to their feed and started looking for the next piece of content to give their time and attention.

Specificity: Remember, Specificity Is The Secret. The more specific you are, the more likely a reader is going to immediately assume they are in the right place, reading the right writer for them.

Numbers alone tell the story. Inc Magazine averages around 30 million page views per month. Medium, a social writing platform, has somewhere around 30 million users — and Quora is about 10x the size of Medium, with 300 million users. Side by side, my Inc column never once outperformed my exposure on Quora or Medium. A really great month writing for Inc Magazine, I’d bring in 300,000 views. On Medium though, 300,000 views in a month was considered average. And between 2014 and 2018 on Quora, 300,000 views was considered a monumental failure. I consistently averaged over a million. Even still today, my Inc Magazine reports tell me my 409 columns continue to generate around 80,000 views per month, passively. Meanwhile, my content on Medium and Quora together generates between 500,000 and 1,000,000 views per month passively. Publications “seem” big, but in reality, their distribution is rather small.

Anyone who truly makes something of themselves takes their free time and reinvest it in themselves.