The Art and Business of Online Writing with Nicolas Cole, Author, Speaker, and Founder of Digital Press

Nicolas Cole is a best-selling author, international speaker, a 4x Top Writer on Quora, and the Founder of Digital Press. Nicolas is the author of The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention, a book dedicated to showing writers how to succeed online. He has helped countless thought leaders, CEOs, and business owners captivate their audience with the same storytelling strategies he uses in his writing.

Nicolas Cole has written for Forbes, Fortune, Huffington Post, and many more. He received his Bachelors of Arts in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Nicolas Cole shares what he’s learned about consistency and algorithms
• What can you learn about creating content by volume from Malcolm Gladwell and other successful writers?
• How to create a flywheel that shortens your feedback loop
• Nicolas talks about Minimum Viable Repeatability
• How to overcome the limitations to be a better writer
• Nicolas reveals how to maintain authority in the blogging space
• Nicolas shares how he became a top writer on Medium and Quora
• Thinking of your writing as a media company versus a one-hit-wonder
• Credibility and why self-publishing is a better model than traditional publishing for making money as a writer
• Nicolas shares the lesson he’s learned as his writing develops and grows
• How do you attract other people to your work and stand out with your craft?
• Nicolas reveals how to sell your story and create a brand your audience will support with storytelling elements

In this episode…

What is your favorite piece of writing? It could be a book you read in your teenage years or an article you recently came across. What’s important here is whether what you’ve read has created a lasting effect on your writing style and how you tell your story.

Nicolas Cole, the Founder of Digital Press, started out playing World of Warcraft and has gone on to write for Forbes, Fortune, and many other publications. He credits his success to the long hours he spent writing as a teenager and his ability to go from ideation to a written text in just a few hours. Nicolas uses these same strategies to create and sustain his personal brand on storytelling all while maintaining a repeatable process.

Join us in this week’s episode of The Michael Simmons Show as host Michael Simmons sits down with author, speaker, and Founder of Digital Press, Nicolas Cole. They compare their writing journey, chat about writing platforms, and what it means to create a flywheel. Nicolas shares his strategy for creating a repeatable process for content creation, what it means to have a career as a writer, and how storytelling has to lay a foundation for your personal brand.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Michael Simmons on LinkedIn
• Michael Simmons
• Michael Simmons on Medium
• Nicolas Cole on LinkedIn
• Nicolas Cole 
• Digital Press
• The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention by Nicolas Cole
• Malcolm Gladwell
• The Subtle Art of Giving A F*ck by Mark Manson
• Craig Clemens on LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by my company, Seminal.

We help you create blockbuster content that rises above the noise, changes the world, and builds your business.

To learn about creating blockbuster content, read my article: Blockbuster: The #1 Mental Model For Writers Who Want To Create High-Quality, Viral Content

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:02

Welcome to The Michael Simmons Show where we help you create blockbuster content that changes the world and builds your business. We dive deep into the habits and hacks of today’s top thought leaders. Now, here’s the show,

Michael Simmons 0:14

I am really excited for today’s guest. His name is Nicolas Cole. He’s the author of six books. And his content has been viewed over 100 million times. He only started writing about six years ago. And if you’ve ever had the excuse that you don’t have enough time, you can put that excuse away right now. He started writing when he had a full time job, get a one hour commute each way. And he was working out every day. And he’s still found time to write. And I’m really excited about this interview that Nicolas Cole and I have become friends and have a lot of similar philosophies. And one of the things that really makes him stand out is him showing the power of just showing up every day, having no excuses, and shipping. And if you just do that for a long time, you will be successful. Welcome to the podcast call I’m really excited to have you been looking forward to this for a few weeks now.

Nicolas Cole 1:15

Thanks for having me, man means a lot.

Michael Simmons 1:18

I admire you as a writer. And I’m also excited because you have different approaches than me as well, though, I’m looking forward to learning more about that. And maybe I need to update some of my models of how I view writing.

Nicolas Cole 1:32

I don’t know cuz that’s, that’s what originally prompted me to reach out was, uh, I was I was reading your stuff. And and I saw big differences between our two approaches. And so same thing with me, you know, I’m always looking at other people questioning, maybe there’s something that I’ve become too married to, you know, or I’ve become too stuck in my ways in this in this thing. So I appreciate the way you approach writing and the way you think about it, too.

Michael Simmons 1:57

Yeah. And I feel like it’s sometimes when there’s a polarity, the answer is they’re both true. And that’s currently how I view it. So when I started off writing, I focused on a blockbuster approach. So as I got invited to write for Forbes, this 2013, I didn’t have a following at all. And I had written before, when I was in college, I did a few 100 blog posts, on my own blog, and that and there wasn’t really social media then. And it fizzled out. And I was like, all right, quantity didn’t work. I need to focus on quality. And so right away, when I started to write for Forbes, my average article got 10,000, 20,000 40,000 views per article. And I think I got too wedded to it. And so, you know, after just doing people like you, you’re seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, where it’s, in your book, The Art of online writing, you’re talking a lot about the consistency, what makes a successful writer as being a consistent writer. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 2:55

But you know, if you think about it, that makes sense why you went that direction, though, because I think the volume, or the thing that I’ve kind of created and solidified for myself, it really is intended to work on social platforms. It’s intended to work where there’s algorithms and algorithms benefit from volume. But if you think like you were writing on a blog, which, whether you were using your own site, or using something like blogger, you know, I remember the days when I use

Michael Simmons 3:22

back in the day, I remember that too

Nicolas Cole 3:24

neither one of those had algorithms, and then writing for Forbes, all those big publications, they don’t have algorithms. So it makes sense how you got to where you did and why your conclusion was, well, I don’t have a flywheel that’s really like making this go faster for me. So I have to come up with a different way to get people to really latch on to it. Whereas for me, I was realising that these platforms, you know, there’s thresholds in place where if they see that you’re a, you’re a power creator, and you’re putting stuff out all the time, one of their variables is, well, we’re gonna prioritise this user, because they’re creating a ton of content on our platform. So that way, they

Michael Simmons 4:06

can you tell me more about that? I haven’t actually heard that before, I guess I would assume that they prioritise. Actually, I’ll just let you unpack that. How did you find that out?

Nicolas Cole 4:15

It was just through trial and error, like I one of the, you know, for context, right? Like, I was a pro gamer as a teenager. So my brain is wired for. If I look at something, the very first thing that I do is I look for all the rules. And I look to understand what what what’s all of the, you know, what are the edges of this game? How do I learn and master all the rules? And then how do I break the rules?

Michael Simmons 4:39

That’s like, right, right.

Nicolas Cole 4:40

Yeah. And so when I first got introduced to Quora, a few things immediately popped out to me as like rules of the platform. One was every person that was getting a ton of engagement. They weren’t just answering questions. They were telling stories. So instantly, I was like, cool. I need to tell personal stories. Second, second one was, every one of them was writing stuff on a daily basis, if not multiple times a day, they were like, pumping out content. So same thing, like, you see that on YouTube, you see that an Instagram, like, true creators are constantly in volume mode. So I was like, okay, there’s another data point. And, and so the more that I just picked up these different data points, the more I started to realize that it’s it, you know, I could always spot these trends where like, I would write something on Quora, and it would get a little traction, and then I’d write something again, and it gets a little more traction every day, as long as I was remaining consistent, the algorithm kept working to my benefit. And then and I see this on medium all the time, I try and either write or post something every day. And then the moment I let like, three days go by my whole algorithm just like flips and restarts, and I don’t post them. And so I don’t know these things change all the time. But I just, I, it’s, it’s a pretty clear, and I’ve heard this from a lot of people, it’s pretty clear that as long as you are consistently putting things out, the algorithm learns, hey, we want this person to stay on our platform. So we want them to be rewarded. So we’re going to help nudge them in the right direction. So that way, they keep coming back and creating more and more.

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