How I turned a simple writing habit into personal income without publishing online
Dear Reader,
This is a keyboard.
A portal to financial abundance.
Sit in front of it every day to write, and you will eventually turn your writing into personal income.
Without publishing content online (if you don’t want to).
Here’s how:
The CRAFT Method
The year is 2011.
I’m working through college as a tire lube express technician.
And I’m learning a lot about what I don’t want in a job:
- reporting to people I don’t admire.
- not having any money…ever.
- feeling trapped.
- following stupid rules.
- doing work anybody could do.
- trading my most valuable resource (time) for a whopping $7.45/hour.
But I wanted to be out in the world, learning and growing, coming and going as I pleased, making lots of money.
I wanted to be free.
But I didn’t know how to escape.
So I did something radical.
I decided to figure it out myself the only way I knew how: writing.
I bought a little notebook, the sat down to ask myself, in writing, what I could do to improve my situation.
With that seemingly mundane choice, I set my life on a new trajectory.
Because I stumbled onto the most lucrative skill of the 21st century.
The result:
- Launched my first service business after 3 years of daily writing.
- Launched my second business after 6 years of daily writing.
- Made six figures in a year for the first time after 7 years of daily writing.
- Launched a national TV show on A&E Network after 9 years of daily writing.
- Started publishing my writing online and building an audience after 12 years of daily writing.
Publishing online is not the only way to monetize your writing.
Every dollar I’ve made as an entrepreneur has been downstream from my writing habit.
The reason is simple.
If writing is just the process of thinking through problems and solutions,
And if entrepreneurship is the process of identifying problems other people have and offering them solutions,
Then writing is the most valuable habit entrepreneurs can develop.
The 12+ years of daily writing experience helped me develop a framework for how to turn a daily writing habit into fuel for personal and business growth.
If I had known this process from the outset of my writing journey, I would have monetized my writing a lot faster and made a lot more money.
I call it the CRAFT method.
Writing is your craft. As an entrepreneur, it is the skill that super-charges the rest of your skills.
Let’s dig deeper.
Commit
commit to writing a specific number of words for 28 days in a row. Bonus points if you convince a friend or two to do the exercise with you.
The whole entrepreneurial journey begins with the singular commitment to write every day.
At least that’s how my adventure started.
Millions of people in the world were running businesses they loved and living life on their own terms. The only difference between them and me was that they figured out how to do it.
They put the work in.
So I committed to myself that I would write every day — about myself, the world, and the problems between the two — until I figured it out.
It took me many years to understand that the writing WAS the work.
If you dream of starting a business,
if you dream of becoming a professional writer,
if you dream of earning lots of money and living life on your own terms,
then all of that is waiting on you just on the other side…of the writing. The daily writing.
Therefore, it all starts with commitment.
28 days is the perfect duration for commitment because it is long enough to make the practice part of your life but it is not so long to be overwhelming.
You can do anything for 28 days in a row right?
And the science is clear on the power of social pressure.
If you find a friend or two to commit with you, you can hold each other accountable and drastically increase everyone’s chances of success.
The threat of letting other people down is a much stronger motivator than the threat of letting yourself down. Put that wisdom to your advantage.
Commit to a daily writing habit first.
Everything else will follow.
Reflect
reflect on your life and the world around you by writing freely each day, allowing thoughts to flow without censoring grammar or spelling.
“But WhAt dO I WrItE aBoUt??”
Maybe my all-time favorite book that answers this question is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a 13-week lesson plan to help artist’s extract creativity.
One of the two primary techniques she teaches to unlock creativity is something she calls Morning Pages.
(She calls the other technique Artist’s Dates, which you can learn more about here.)
This is the foundation of her entire curriculum and the foundation of the CRAFT framework as well.
The beauty of the Morning Page technique is its simplicity:
Three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing inside a notebook of your choice. That’s it.
The author differentiates between two voices: the Creator and the Censor.
The Creator is the deepest voice. We listen to it when we are at our best, when we aren’t depressed about the past or anxious about the future, when we aren’t worried about how we are being perceived. The Creator is an optimist.
The Censor is our nasty, internal perfectionist. We listen to it when we are at our worst. The Censor loves to point out spelling and grammar flaws, loves to tell you how dumb you are and how you are thought of by others. The Censor is a pessimist.
The purpose of Morning Pages is to turn on the Creator-voice and silence the Censor-voice.
All you have to do to complete your Morning Pages is fill up three pages in your notebook with your thoughts. Grammar and spelling don’t matter. The quality of the ideas don’t matter. This isn’t art. You aren’t going to publish it.
In fact, one of the primary rules for Morning Pages is that no one other than you is allowed to read what you write.
Usually this means reflecting on your life, on what’s going on in your life and in the world, on past experiences or future dreams.
Just let it flow.
Get the words out.
That is your only job here.
*Caveat: you can write by hand in a notebook or with a keyboard on a computer. The method you should use is the one you will use consistently. Three pages in a notebook shakes out to about 600 words (200 words per page), so use that as a word count minimum, and you will get the same results. I write slower than I type, so hand-writing allows my mind to flow a bit better. The only way to learn what will work for you is by trying both.
Articulate
articulate problems in your life and in the lives of others through your writing, aiming to clarify these issues with as much detail as possible.
“But how does this lead to personal income if I’m not publishing the writing?”
John Maxwell famously coined the Law of the Lid, which says your business only grows to the extent you grow.
That is how daily writing turns into personal income over time, even without publishing.
The line between what constitutes a “personal” problem and what constitutes a “business” problem is porous. It is challenging to separate them.
All your problems are keeping you from earning more income.
If you are overweight, then your energy isn’t as high as it would otherwise be. A lack of energy makes it hard to take the action needed to build momentum.
If you depressed because you are lonely, then you need to find a companion. Depression steals energy, which makes it hard to take the action needed to build momentum.
The goal in this stage of the method is to articulate, in as much detail as possible, the problems you face. Write them out. Why is it a problem? What negative outcomes is it creating in your life?
The great Carl Jung once said,
“What you want most to find will be found where you least want to look.”
And where you least want to look is directly at your problems.
Problems of all kinds are like the monster hiding in your closet as a kid.
You knew it was there, and you hoped that if you kept quiet and didn’t rouse its attention, then you would be safe.
But as soon as you opened the closet door and dragged it out into the light, it was no longer scary. Then you knew its limitations and how to protect yourself from it (because you probably learned it didn’t exist).
The process of problem articulation works the same way (except your problems really do exist).
When you leave problems in the dark, they can fester and grow into much bigger challenges later on.
But when you pluck them out of the darkness of your unconscious mind and bring them into the light of understanding by putting them on paper, they lose all their power. You can see their limitations and how to solve them.
So if you are having a hard time allowing your mind to wander during your writing sessions, ponder the problems in your life and articulate them.
Formulate
formulate and document step-by-step solutions to the problems you’ve articulated, turning abstract ideas into actionable plans.
This is where things get interesting.
At this point, you have committed to writing every day with the understanding that this simple habit will fuel your personal and professional growth.
You understand how to use Morning Pages to reflect on your life and allow thoughts to flow onto the page.
You can direct your writing toward problems to articulate them.
This leads to one of the strangest lessons about consistent, daily writing I have learned:
It is possible to ask yourself questions that you do not know the answer to at the time and then go on to answer those questions with information you didn’t know you had.
How could it be possible for someone to pose themselves questions they don’t know the answer to and then go on to answer those very same questions?
Short answer: it’s magic.
Slightly less-short answer: the nature of human psychology.
Without going too deeply into it here (I’m looking forward to writing another piece in the future doing a deep dive into the human psyche), your mind is made up of two, broad components: the conscious and the unconscious.
It looks kind of like this iceberg:
And just like an iceberg, the portion of your mind that lives below the threshold of consciousness is vastly larger than the portion above that line.
So this question-and-answer approach is an intentional dialogue between your ego-consciousness (what you mean when you say words like “I” or “Me” or “Mine”) and your unconscious mind.
And your unconscious mind is exponentially more powerful than you think.
The goal in this stage of the method is to formulate step-by-step solutions for the problems you have articulated.
Example: I’m broke. What can I do about it?
- Stop spending on everything other than essentials
- Get a higher paying job
- Research easy-to-start side hustles
- Start a business to earn more money
And then what?
Go execute the solutions and solve your problems.
Bonus: typically you won’t have all the information you need to formulate a complete solution stored away in the crevices of your unconscious mind. Supplement your solutions with lots of research after you’re initial solution is documented.
Transform
transform your writing practice into a business model by selling the solutions you have packaged to people experiencing the same problems.
Now, let’s talk monetization.
At this point, you are writing every day by reflecting on your life and the world, articulating problems you and others are experiencing, and formulating solutions to those problems to test.
How does all this make you money, especially if you aren’t publishing?
You are already doing all the work of an entrepreneur other than selling.
You are articulating and solving your own problems.
And guess who has similar problems? Other people.
Isn’t it wild to know that you aren’t the only human on planet Earth struggling with your particular problems?
Package the solutions you have formulated and tested into a service or product and get to selling.
It doesn’t matter at all where or how you start.
The industry doesn’t matter.
The niche doesn’t matter.
All that matters is that you start.
My first full-time job was as a sales associate at a recreational vehicle dealership.
You know what those are, right? Campers. Fifth wheels. Motorhomes. Travel trailers.
When I took the job, I was fired up to learn sales. This was three years after I began writing daily.
For a lot of reasons we don’t need to discuss, I learned to hate this gig like the rest of the associates did within a month.
Now THAT was a problem. So what did I do?
I wrote all about it in attempt to wrap my mind around the whole issue, then I got to work trying to find a solution.
I kid you not, the following day I got a call from my best friend at the dealership:
“Dude, you’re never going to believe this, but I think I stumbled onto a business opportunity.”
“No sh*t?” I said.
“Yeah, I just took one of the shop technicians out to a customer’s camper to fix an awning. They had it on blocks, so they couldn’t move it. And they paid us DOUBLE what they would have paid at the dealership. I think we should start an on-site RV service.”
And just like that, my first business — RV Heroes — was born.
I saw a problem: some camper owners didn’t want to take their campers into a shop (or simply didn’t have the ability, like my friend’s customer). And they would pay a premium.
So we formulated a solution: we would create an onsite RV service business where we fixed campers where they were rather than requiring customers to bring their campers into a dealership.
That is how I made my first dollar as a real entrepreneur, and it came as a direct result of my writing practice.
And that is how you can use the CRAFT method to turn your writing practice into personal income without publishing.
I called this piece The Revolutionary Act of Daily Writing for the simple reason that the relatively mundane act of sitting down to write every day completely transformed my life over time.
If you want to change the world, create a revolution in your own life with a daily writing habit.
And if you want to eventually figure out how to turn your writing into personal income, shouldn’t you be writing every day?
If you use the CRAFT method, you can turn your writing practice into personal income without publishing online.
Happy writing,
Cody J. Cummings
P.S.
If you are building your writing empire, let’s do it together. I am scaling my writing business to 7-figures and sharing what I learn at newsletter.cody.blog.
P.P.S.
If you purchase the Artist’s Way (which I recommend) from the link in this article, you will generate a very small commission for me. It will not change the price you pay. If you prefer me not to earn that commission, feel free to order the book directly through Amazon or at your local bookstore.