10 Tips I’ve Learned from Nicolas Cole on Being a Better Creator

Nicolas Cole is an online writer who has accumulated 100m+ views. He co-runs the Ship30for30 community helping aspiring writers become successful digital creators.

Here are 10 tips I’ve learned from consuming his work:

1. Publish every day: to be a successful creator, you need to build a daily shipping habit

2. Create more than you consume: there are two types of people on the internet, creators and consumers, we must shift our balance towards the side of creating

3. Use data as a guide: don’t publish content without intention, every piece of content we ship is a data point

4. Create a category: the turning point of being a successful creator is when you define your own category instead of playing in somebody else’s

5. Writing brings clarity: the act of writing is a tool to bring you mental clarity

6. The more you write, the more you write: this applies to all forms of content creation, the more you create content, the easier it will be to produce more content

7. Repurpose your work: shipping content only once is a missed opportunity, find ways to ship your work on multiple platforms

8. Don’t start a blog: trying to bring people to your blog is much harder than publishing your work on platforms where people are already hanging out

9. Headlines matter: creative headlines rarely work, use clear, to-the-point headlines and sub-heads to grab attention

10. Love the process: people who love the idea of doing something will always talk about the end-result, if you love the craft itself, you’ll talk about the process