The Art and Business of Online Writing – Nicolas Cole

This post contains affiliate links that help supports this blog and cost you the exact same. If you do not wish to use affiliate links, then feel free to google the product.

Rating 4/5

Book Summary – The Art and Business of Online Writing – Nicolas Cole

Date Consumed: June 2022

You Should Read If: you are writing online and are struggling to capture attention and build an audience.

ISBN: 978-0525540830

Check Price on Amazon

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and gained insight on just how vital story-telling is and keeping the reader’s attention.

The Book in Three Thoughts

1. Nicolas, the very successful online writer shows us how to be successful at writing online by finding an audience and solving their problems.

2. We learn how to contend with the attention span of today’s readers being almost zero and the fact that they will not tolerate being bored.

3. Learning how to write online is much more than just putting information on the page. This book shows us how to implement acquisition, engagement, trust, and enjoyment.

Key Takeaways

1. Building a blog is not the best way to build an audience. In most cases, it is much better to use a platform that already has an audience searching for answers that you can provide. Examples of this would be Quora or even Youtube.

2. Capturing and keeping attention is a constant fight. Every sentence is an opportunity for the reader to get bored and leave. To keep the reader engaged you need to do more than lay out the points of your article. You need to hook them into the story, change the flow, keep it engaging, and provide as much value with every sentence as possible.

3. Don’t pretend you know what the audience wants, and in what format they want it. The best way to know is to start publishing your work, and publish as much as quality content as you can. With the magic of analytics, you can refine how you deliver information to your audience.

What I Am Going to Implement

1. Spend more time and effort to make my articles more interesting. This can be done by replacing huge blocks of texts with images, lists, different sections, and changing paragraph structure.

2. Use Quora to answer topics in self-development, leadership, Engineering, and business strategy. By doing this I learn which topics people really care about, and then turn those short answers into blog posts or Youtube articles.

3. Play the long game and stay consistent so that the audience knows who I am and what I stand for. That way, if they agree, they can join, and if not, that is okay because it wasn’t for them in the first place. (PS this has been consistently what I have wanted to implement from almost every recent book I have read).

Top 3 Excerpts

Excerpt 1

Writing online is a competition, plain and simple. We can call it art—and it is. We can call it a business— and it’s that too. But at the end of the day, the reason a reader reads one piece of writing and doesn’t read another is because somewhere in their mind, they are making a choice. And in that choice is a decision to pick one writer’s work over another. Which means one writer wins, and the other writer loses.

Excerpt 2

Practicing In Public is what separates aspiring writers from professional writers. In life, a lot of people talk about doing the thing they want to do. They talk and they imagine and they brainstorm and they keep their work hidden and all the while, they convince themselves what they’re doing is brilliant. They are waiting, waiting for the perfect moment to reveal their amazing work to the world—and then, then, everyone will see. But very few ever exit the “waiting” stage.

Excerpt 3

Likes = “This is something I approve of. Nice job.”

Shares = “This is something more people need to know about. This represents me.”

Comments = “This is thought provoking. I agree/disagree, and I want you to know why.”

Views = “This strikes a chord. There’s something valuable here.”

* Affiliate Disclosure