Somewhere, someone else is practicing harder than you, faster than you, longer than you. They want it more than you. And when you meet them, they wil… - Nicolas Cole

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.

1 + Subhead And finally, if you want to just get straight to the point, why waste any time? One sentence is all you need in order to frame the piece — before immediately hitting the reader with the first milestone and subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is what the whole piece is about. And this first subhead is what we’re going to dig into right here, right now. I don’t recommend this technique for everything you write, but as a way to change things up, it can be a powerful mechanism for turning your Rate of Revelation knob to level 10. Here’s an example of the 1 + Subhead structure from my article, “I Used To Have Social Anxiety. These 4 Mental Shifts Made Me Confident.” Most people see confidence as something you’re born with — you either have it or you don’t. But the truth is, confidence is just like any other personality trait. If you want to be more patient, you have to practice patience. If you want to be more compassionate, you have to practice compassion. If you want to be more thoughtful, you have to practice doing things intentionally. And if you want to be confident, well then, you simply have to practice being confident.

But it wasn’t until I started writing about how I was a free agent and available as a freelance writer, that I realized the game had changed.