Nicolas Cole

There are only two ways to create something Original.

- Say something different.
- Say the same thing in a meaningfully different way.

An example of the former would be Pythagoras saying, in 500 BC, “The earth is round. Not flat.” These are six Original words. Six words that fundamentally changed the way human beings perceived the world. Before Pythagoras, no one had “thought that thought.” As a result, we now (centuries later) still associate those six words with Pythagoras. This is the epitome of “ownership.”

An example of the latter would be Aristotle, a century and a half later in 350 BC, essentially saying “the same thing” but in a meaningfully different way. He proved Pythagoras’s round-earth theory through empirical and observational evidence—pointing to lunar eclipses, horizon lines, and changing constellations.

This is the art of writing.

It’s not to manually type words. It’s also not to repeat Commodity Ideas (“conventional wisdom”) and call them your own. It’s to think deeply about a small number of topics and use writing as a mechanism for understanding. But as you understand each Commodity Idea, you should not remain attached to carrying the burden of repeating those chosen Commodities manually yourself. That’s what the robots are for. And you should feel empowered knowing you are continuing to focus on the next-highest-leverage task at hand: making new connections, forming new hypotheses, and thinking different thoughts, in pursuit of pushing your area of interest further than you found it, creating something Original.

Large Language Models are miraculous machines. But they are not going to replace the need for human beings to “think different thoughts.” And if writing is the most effective mechanism in human history for crystallizing one’s thinking, then AI is not going to replace writing as a skill anytime soon. Besides, in order to use AI, you have to know how to prompt. And in order to prompt, you have to know how to… what? You have to know how to write.

You can’t automate what you can’t articulate.

My hope is these Large Language Models will reduce the amount of time we spend as a society writing and re-writing Commodity Content, and give our Personality Content leverage, so we can spend more time thinking and writing what hasn’t been said *yet*.

2 days ago | [YT] | 32

Nicolas Cole

If language is an open-source operating system for communication, then most combinations of words and groupings of words are Commodity Content.

If Commodity Content was never yours to begin with, then spending your finite time here on earth manually writing and re-writing the same Commodity Ideas in slightly different variations out of pride for “doing it yourself” is not a symbol of purity, but a Scarlet Letter of stupidity. You are making the conscious choice to write the wrong things.

Personality Content is the unmade data set. It is also one of the only forms of differentiation, association, and “ownership” in the age of infinite text-based Commodity Content. Time spent writing and re-writing Commodity Content, past a baseline level of proficiency, is low leverage and unnecessary. Time spent writing and re-writing Personality Content is higher leverage and additive to the long-term value of your Digital Brain.

But when all conventional wisdom has been said, and “how you became yourself” has been sufficiently articulated in your library of content (your Personal Language Model), what is left? What do you say when there are diminishing returns in repeating yourself, and a machine can repeat the same stories, insights, opinions, and lessons from your Digital Brain, infinitely, without needing your continued involvement?

All that’s left is the creation of Original Content: thinking thoughts that haven’t been thought before, and making connections that haven’t been made before, to say things that haven’t been said before. And I would posit nothing would have a bigger impact on the collective intelligence of our society than having exponentially more people spending exponentially more time “thinking different thoughts,” opposed to endlessly repeating and manually writing the same Commodity Ideas over and over again in the hope of establishing those words as “theirs.”

You do not create something Original simply because your brain thought the thoughts, or your fingers clacked the keys. You also do not create something Original simply because your creation consumed time or effort. Original means additive. It’s new. It’s net-positive. It’s moving the world forward in some big or small way, identifiable to you.

3 days ago | [YT] | 24

Nicolas Cole

AI writes in a Commodity Content Voice.

It’s not that it’s wrong, and it’s not that it’s “AI Slop.”

It’s simply Commodity Content written without any Personality Content, resulting in a Commodity Voice.

The same way you cannot expect AI to write non-Commodity Content without a library of Personality Content to pull from (your Personal Language Model), you cannot expect AI to write in a non-Commodity Voice when you haven't written in a non-Commodity Voice yourself (and then stored that writing inside your Digital Brain). That’s not to say you must learn to joust a pen like Jane Austen, but you should at least have some baseline awareness around the qualities of your distinctive voice should you ever hope to recreate it—either yourself, manually, or with the help of a robot, automatically.

That said, I have been teaching writing for over a decade. I have helped tens of thousands of people start writing online. And I find this fixation of voice in the writing world to be utterly unproductive. Just because “you” wrote it does not mean it has a voice. And just because a sentence has a Commodity Voice does not mean it’s bad—or worse, is “AI Slop.”

Commodity Ideas and Commodity Sentences are somewhat unavoidable across every industry and topic. There are only so many ways you can say the same Commodity Thing—just like, no matter how creative you get with dynamics and ornamentation, there are only so many ways to play a scale on the piano or film a scene of a movie. Voice is a minority element, and a much harder variable for differentiation.

The everyday person would be much better off acquiring unique life experiences (non-Commodity Content), and then writing about those unique life experiences (Personality Content).

4 days ago | [YT] | 19

Nicolas Cole

There is a misconception that when you write something, the mere fact “you” wrote it (as in, your fingers typed the keys) means it is in your voice—and that is not true.

Commodity Content has a universal Commodity Voice.

For example, who said this sentence?

“I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and got to work.”

It should be obvious this sentence cannot be attributed to any individual person. That’s because there is nothing *identifiable* about it—neither from its content (what it’s saying) or its “style” (how it’s being said). And yet, the vast majority of people would like to believe that when they write these 13 words (as in, their fingers click-clack on their keys), not only are the words “theirs,” but they are in “their voice.”

But ask the average person to articulate what makes their voice “their voice,” and what you will often receive back is a word salad of bundled, non-specific terms and phrases:

- “It sounds like me.”
- “It’s to the point.”
- “It’s clean. I like it.”
- “That’s how I would say it.”
- “Because I wrote it!”

But none of these are correct.

Your voice is not what you think it is.

“Voice” is a term we use to represent 3 smaller variables that show up in our writing and speech:

1. Vocabulary: Your voice changes depending on whether you say, “cool” vs “exquisite” vs “dope.” That’s because vocabulary is a reflection of your identity, and sends all kinds of signals to readers and listeners about who you are and how you see the world. For example: choosing academic words over conversational words, or saying “Chi-Town” instead of “Chicago” in a sentence. These vocabulary choices often have little impact on the sentence’s meaning, but do change your perception of the writer or speaker’s identity—adding unspoken layers of communication.

2. Rhythm: Your voice also changes depending on the cadence of your speech patterns. William Faulkner notoriously wrote in long, verbose sentences, whereas Ernest Hemingway more favorably wrote in short, terse sentences. Rhythm is the combination of sentence length, punctuation placement, and vocabulary—the three together creating what is known as “tone.”

3. EDAN: Explanation, Description, Action, Narration. What is the purpose of your writing? Better yet, what is the purpose of each individual sentence? Your voice is not a static decision. Your voice can change sentence by sentence. Are you someone who likes to Explain (tell)? Do you prefer to Describe (show)? Do you speak in Action? Or do you hypothesize in Narration? Voice is the combination of what you say (content) and how you say it (style).

As a result, you do not “find” your voice (as many people would like to believe, forever on a quest of linguistic enlightenment).

You *create* your voice—the same way a painter creates new colors through different combinations of Red, Green, and Blue.

5 days ago | [YT] | 26

Nicolas Cole

This is, by far, the biggest question and objection people have when it comes to niching down.

First of all, people think that when they pick a niche, that means they “can’t speak to everyone.”

And that’s correct. You can’t speak to everyone. Because when you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one.

For example, just think about who you follow on social media.

Do you follow one person for “everything?” No, of course not.

- You follow one person for fitness advice.
- And you follow another person for travel recommendations.
- And you follow another person for investment strategies.
- And you follow another person for news and trending topics.
- And you follow another person for memes and pop culture.

It would be impossible for you to speak on “all topics” for “all people.”

Second, it’s not until you commit to a niche for a prolonged period of time that you realize just how deep each niche can go.

For example, I’ve been writing about digital writing and writing on the Internet since 2015. That’s over a decade! And today, after writing thousands and thousands of articles and newsletters and Tweets, and making YouTube videos, and writing books, and recording podcasts, all on the same topic, I am STILL coming up with new ways of explaining concepts to readers.

The deeper you go in a niche, the more you realize how much more there is to say.

But if you haven’t done this work yet, then yes, it’s very easy to think that you can write about 10 different niches and be the best person to listen to in each of them.

We call this *blissful ignorance.*

6 days ago | [YT] | 19

Nicolas Cole

Once you’ve started writing on social platforms, once you’ve started moving rented readers over to your owned email list, and once you’ve launched some sort of product or service (and made your first $1 online), there’s only one step left.

Do it again, do it more, and do it in more ways!

Volume wins.

The first big idea I want to share here is that there are two ways to scale a business:

- Traffic: Offer more people the same thing.
- Upsells: Or offer more things to the same people.

The goal is obviously to do both.

Traffic means marketing.*Once you have a product or service for sale, how much money you make is directly correlated to how much marketing you do and how much better you do it. So, as a beginner, more marketing first means doing more of it: post more times, across more platforms. And then once you’ve maxed out “more,” do it better. How can you make each post perform 2x better? 5x better? 10x better? If you want more insight into this More/Better/New framework, I recommend reading this piece I wrote on 20 Lessons Selling $20M of Online Writing Courses.

Upsells means helping people solve more problems. If you sell digital products, that means creating other “different” digital products helping people solve other “different” problems. And if you sell services, that means offering other “different” services helping clients solve other “different” problems in their business. This is how you extend LTV: the lifetime value of each customer.

From here, you can then add other offer types to monetize in more ways.

1 week ago | [YT] | 39

Nicolas Cole

You should not choose a niche, or pick a topic without some sort of Information Advantage.

This is probably the biggest mistake people make when they decide to start writing and creating content online, with the hopes of one day making money.

They think their niche can be ANYTHING. And it can’t. No one is going to listen to you talk about a topic you know nothing about. The ONLY reason “people follow people” online is because there is an Information-Advantage-trade happening.

- You know things about this topic most other people don’t.
- People follow you to learn those things in a fraction of the time—so they don’t have to go through all the work you had to go through in order to learn the things you know now.

That’s it.

And if that doesn’t convince you to start with a niche where you already have an existing Information Advantage, here’s an even more logical way of thinking about it.

When it comes to making money on the Internet, there are lots of marketing & monetization skills you need to learn.

- You need to learn how to write clearly
- You need to learn how to generate infinite ideas within a niche
- You need to learn how to hook people’s attention
- You need to learn how to retain people’s attention
- You need to learn how to move readers from social platforms over to your email list
- You need to learn how to write compelling emails—compelling enough to keep them subscribed, and ultimately buy something of greater value
- You need to learn how to build a landing page
- You need to learn how to write a landing page
- You need to learn how to process payments on a landing page
- You need to learn about upsells and downsells to increase each customer’s lifetime value

The list goes on and on.

And none of these skills are hard to learn. Each one maybe takes 5 or 10 hours to reach a moderate level of proficiency. That’s nothing. That’s a Saturday morning. That’s a weekend.

But now imagine trying to learn all of these skills, **while simultaneously applying them to a niche you know absolutely nothing about.** You have no Information Advantage.

Well, if you thought building all those marketing & monetization skills was “a lot of work,” congratulations, because the work just doubled. Now you have to learn all of those things AND start from the very beginning learning about an industry you’ve never worked in, never had a hobby in, and never experienced—but you picked it because it seemed popular, or lucrative, and you thought that was a shortcut to success.

So, here’s a little secret for you: the shortcut is always the longer road in disguise.

And you would get to where you’re trying to go a whole lot faster if you just started with something you already knew a lot about.

1 week ago | [YT] | 40

Nicolas Cole

Your goal, for your first 1,000 customers, is to collect 1,000 testimonials.

You should ask every single person who buys something from you:

- “Would you mind sharing a testimonial?”
- “How did this help you?”
- “What problem did you have, and were you able to fix it?”
- “What outcome were you hoping to achieve, and were you able to achieve it?”

Testimonials themselves are valuable. But in all honesty, what is even more valuable is what each testimonial teaches you about your target customer.

Their words will become your marketing copy.

Their stories will become your transformation thesis.

Their fears will give you ideas of helpful content you can create and share.

Nothing will make you more money than talking to your customers.

I repeat:

Nothing will make you more money than talking to your customers.

1 week ago | [YT] | 29

Nicolas Cole

Your niche should be an industry where you have what I like to call an Information Advantage.

An Information Advantage just means you know more things about this industry than the average person.

For example:

- If you’ve worked as a nurse in a hospital, you have an Information Advantage in healthcare.
- If you played hockey as a kid, you have an Information Advantage in athletics.
- If you are obsessed with Pokémon cards, you have an Information Advantage in collectables.

The easiest way to identify where you have an Information Advantage is to audit these 3 areas of time spent:

- Jobs: Any job you’ve ever had has given you an inside look at that particular industry. Which means you know things (even if they’re simple, fairly basic things) the average person does not—because they’ve never worked a job in that industry before. For example, if you’ve worked in retail, you inherently know more about “working in retail” than someone who has never worked in retail before. This also applies to people close to you who hold jobs of their own. For example, my dad is a spine surgeon. Just by being his son, I have soaked up lots of random knowledge and terminology when it comes to spine surgeries. In a small way, this gives me an Information Advantage.

- Hobbies: Anything you’ve ever gotten interested in, either as a kid or an adult, means you spent a prolonged period of time learning about it. Which means you have an Information Advantage, and know things the average person doesn’t. For example, if you spent your college years teaching yourself music production, then you know more about “music production” than someone who has never taught themselves that skill before. This also applies to people close to you who expose you to hobbies and interests of their own. If your best friend is a pilot and flies planes, you probably don’t even realize how much you’ve learned just by being their friend and listening to them talk about their interest. In a small way, this gives you an Information Advantage.

- Experiences: Anything you have personally experienced means you have an Information Advantage in that particular experience—and the more rare or unique the experience, the more rare and unique the Information Advantage. For example, if you’ve experienced a parent overcoming a sickness, that’s an Information Advantage. Or if you’ve experienced traveling to a certain country, or done something crazy like jumped out of an airplane, those are Information Advantages. You know more about those things than people who have never done those things before.

For example, back in 2016, I was a columnist for *Inc Magazine*. I wrote a daily column about creativity and business. So when I started ghostwriting and providing writing services to founders and business owners a year later, in 2017, and they would ask me to help them get their own writing in major publications, I could tell them. Because I was already doing that for myself.

I had an Information Advantage.

1 week ago | [YT] | 36

Nicolas Cole

When customers or clients give you feedback, that feedback usually leads to two types of upgrades:

- Feedback to improve the existing offer. As a general rule of thumb, until your product or service is generating at least a million dollars per year, the answer is not to jump around and launch more products or more services. The right next step is to keep improving the product until it’s good enough to become a 7-figure business. This is what I did with my ghostwriting agency, which I scaled to millions of dollars in revenue. And this is what we did with Ship 30 for 30, which crossed a million dollars in revenue in its first year operating as a cohort-based course.

- Feedback to expand the offer into an upsell. Sometimes, customer interviews reveal other problems you can help them solve—either with information in the form of digital products, or additional services. In this case, it’s actually counter-productive to try to solve more and more and more problems within your original product or service. Trying to solve too many “different” problems ends up making that product or service more confusing—not necessarily more valuable. Instead, you’re better off breaking out these problems and monetizing them as separate products or services, otherwise known as “upsells.”

This is why the hardest part of writing and making money online is “starting.” Because once you start writing, and especially once you launch your first product or service, you very quickly realize how much more you have to write about, and how many more products or services you could provide people to monetize over and over again.

1 week ago | [YT] | 14