From $147 in My Account to $1,500,000 Writing Online: My Twisted Path to Building a Full-Time Business

Don't stop until it works.

Writers should get paid for doing what they love, which is something few people are truly capable of: entertaining, educating and inspiring others through the written word. Become a paid subscriber to How to Write for a Living for just £8 a month to unlock every article in our archive and gain full access to the Member Resource Hub.

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By

Ayodeji

I didn't know it then...

But a question from an old high school friend changed my life forever.

It led to:

• A career doing what I love

• A sense of passion and purpose

• An online business that helped me make more than $1,500,000

Before we get to the question and the crazy ride to where I am now that happened as a result, we have to go back to the real beginning of the story for everything to make sense.

But first…

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Sometimes Things Have to Get Worse Before They Get Better

At 25, I was a college dropout, convicted felon, and low-wage employee who worked a $ 10-an-hour job at an electronics factory.

I didn't grow up poor. I came from a middle-class family with two college-educated parents. There were no extreme circumstances that held me back. If anything, the exact opposite was true. I went to good schools. Both my parents stressed the importance of education. I enrolled in a good state school in Minnesota.

Had I just gone to class, worked moderately hard, and got decent grades, I would've graduated and gone on to get a nice corporate job, make a nice salary, and live a nice life.

I had other plans.

I was never into school. 

Fun fact: I never once did a single homework assignment at home. I either did it during study hall or copied the answers from a classmate. I despised authority. I was the kid who had to have his desk put in the front of the class next to the teacher so as not to disrupt the other students.

I was precocious. Always the smartest kid in my class. Scored in the 99th percentile on my pSATs. Harvard sent me a full application to fill out in the mail. Which of course, I didn't do (my mom still gives me grief for this to this day). Everything came easily to me. Words came easily to me. I'd glance at the words for our weekly vocabulary tests 5 minutes prior and ace it.

I was kicked out of grade school. And high-school. I even managed to get expelled right before graduation at my second high school for having a flask of whiskey and a knife tucked under my seat in my car. They gave me my diploma but I couldn't walk across the stage.

That was the recurring theme in my life. An intelligent kid who liked to get into trouble. Who had all the potential in the world but squandered it to the confusion of every adult and authority figure around him. This continued in college where I spent almost zero time in class, drank and did drugs 7 days a week, got arrested for selling weed, and was put on academic probation or suspension multiple times. I dropped out in my senior year of college.

I found myself stuck. No potential, no money, no degree, and no future. All self-induced. The story takes a positive turn from here though. Even though I'd screwed up my life, I always had this sense that I was going to be something, be somebody. I held onto that and decided to make a change at a pivotal point in my life, which led to a series of coincidences that brought me to where I am today.

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The Job Interview That Changed My Life

I was working at an electronics factory for $10 an hour. It was the worst job I've ever had. 12-hour shifts six days a week. It was one of the few places that would hire me with a felony on my record.

One weekend, stressed out from work, I decided to go out to the bars and get blackout drunk. I ended up getting in a bar fight and got a nasty black eye in the process. The fluorescent lights at the factory made my eye hurt so bad I ended up quitting. I'd been there for six weeks.

With no job and $147 to my name, I went looking for new employment. I walked into a video store and applied to be a clerk. I was articulate, dressed well, and knew how to impress, so I walked in with my resume and chatted up with the manager. She made me take a math and vocabulary test. You had to get a certain score to get hired.

Apparently this test was hard. It was notorious around town. People with college degrees failed it. I breezed through it and gave it back to her so fast that she seemed confused. I could see her eyes light up while she was grading it like she hadn't seen someone do that well before.

She was impressed. She let me know that she was looking to train in her replacement and asked if I wanted the job. At that point, I'd been fired from 95 percent of the jobs I had. As strange as it sounds, I took it as an opportunity -- a sign. I told myself this was going to be the one thing I didn't mess up.

I started studying personal growth because I wanted to be a better manager. I watched YouTube videos, listened to podcasts, and even bought some courses on the subject. It worked. I excelled at my job. I got in amazing shape. I wiggled my way into a better job as a project manager at a marketing agency and got promoted to marketing director.

As I was learning these concepts I started to post about them on social media. I shared little tidbits from books I read and pieces of motivation or wisdom from my own personal development journey. I was writing. I always had a penchant for posting things on social media and it started to ramp up the more I dove into self-help.

The job, the studying, and the posting led to the moment I mentioned in the beginning that changed my life forever.

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My First Opportunity to Put Fingers to Keyboard

"Hey man, I'm starting this new blog and I was wondering if you wanted to write articles for it?"

"What can I write about?" I said.

"Anything you want," he said.

My buddy Bobby must have noticed I liked to write. I'm forever grateful that he gave me permission to do something I've always wanted to do. From about the age of 14, I knew I wanted writing to be a part of my life. I wrote poems in middle school. I tried to write a novel in high school. You can find old posts from me on X from college where I said things like "I want to write a book someday."

I even remember a few months prior telling my girlfriend that I wanted to write. She said:

"Well, Ayo, maybe you should start writing then."

For whatever reason I didn't start until Bobby asked me to, but it was off to the races after that. I whipped up an article and sent it to him the same day. He published it on the site and shared it on the Facebook page for his blog. It got a few dozen likes. I was ecstatic. I fell in love with writing instantly. From that point on you couldn't keep me away from the keyboard.

That was more than 8 years ago. I've been writing every single day since. Never took a break. Along the way, there were a handful of coincidences that helped me stumble into a six-figure opportunity.

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Outdated Advice On The Internet Could Derail Your Growth Journey as a Writer

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Life-Changing Writing Opportunities

"Oh my god this is crazy my article went viral!"

I'd been writing for my friend's blog for a little while. I started to do more research about this whole 'writing online' thing and I took it more seriously with each passing day.

One day, I was on Facebook and I saw an acquaintance from high school talking about this viral blog post she wrote. It was a site called Thought Catalog. I checked out the site and saw they were accepting submissions. I figured, if she could do it I could do it, so I submitted a post to their site.

They accepted it. One of the editors took a liking to me and started to mentor me and give me feedback on all of my posts. About a year in he said the company was going to open up a budget for freelancers. He wanted me to be one of them. But before the program launched he switched jobs. The new editor didn't love me as much as him and things started to stall out.

By then I was set on writing for a living, so I started searching for other places to write. I began to 'build an audience.' I wrote guest posts on a bunch of different blogs. I started to write my first book. When I was close to publishing it, I had another chance circumstance almost like deja vu.

One day on Twitter I saw someone post almost word for word the same thing as my high school acquaintance. 

"Oh my god, my article went viral!" 

One of the writers from Thought Catalog said her post went viral on this website called Medium. At this point I was on the hunt for new places to write, so I gave Medium a shot. I published the first book around that time. Sales weren't great. But this Medium website started to show promise. It was here that I'd begin to build the little 'writing empire' I have today.

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Grab your copy of my debut novel now!

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All of a Sudden…The Cash Started Pouring In

The traffic on Medium was getting so good I stopped publishing on every other website altogether. For a while, I was just posting and building an email list that I figured I'd sell something to down the road. I published my second book, which did well, but still not enough to be life-changing.

In September 2017 Medium announced they were going to start paying writers. They were going to charge memberships to paywalled content and if you put your content behind the paywall you'd make money based on views and engagement. I had a full head of steam and an established audience when they rolled out their partner program.

The first month I made $225. A couple months in I was at $1,000 plus per month. Then it got crazy. The numbers kept climbing - $3,000, $4,000, $8,000. I hit the magic number of $10,000 per month and the rest was history. I made $10,000 or more on Medium for 19 months in a row. I was the highest-earning writer on the entire website for six months in a row.

My audience grew like crazy and I started to launch products. I published my third book. I sold a course based on the ideas in the book. I launched a self-improvement mentoring program. Companies were reaching out to me to do paid freelance work. I became a known commodity in the writer scene.

A bunch of people kept asking me how I was making so much money writing, so I launched a course on writing Medium articles. That course did $250,000 in sales. I launched a community for writers that also did $250,000 or so in sales. Book sales totaled $100,000. Now I run a higher-priced group coaching program that helps people build their writing businesses that's helping me do record numbers.

I quit my job in 2019. I've been writing full-time since then earning six to multi-six figures every year. I totaled up the numbers and I've done $1,500,000 in revenue from my writing business. I haven't set an alarm clock in years. I've traveled. I bought my dream car. 

I gained something far more valuable than money in the process. I lived out my dream and found a sense of purpose, and I've also been blessed to make an impact on others. I've had people reach out to me and say my writing inspired them to launch businesses, quit addictions, and make dramatic shifts in their lives. One student even said my course prevented her from committing suicide.

If you had told me back then that this is what my life would look like now, I wouldn't have believed it. But here we are.

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What I’ve Learned Along the Way

What are the lessons you can learn from this?

For one, just know that pursuing this path can and will work if you do the work. It won't be easy, but it will be worth it.

Have fun. I wanted to succeed and I wanted people to like my writing, but I didn't put a bunch of pressure on myself to be perfect. I started and kept writing because I liked it.

Naval Ravikant said to find what feels like play to you but feels like work to others. It's been easy for me to compete with other writers because...writing is not hard for me at all. I took to it quickly. It's play for me.

Regardless of whether it's writing or something else, the key to success is finding a game you have an edge in because you have a knack for it. If you pursue writing because it's the hot money-making scheme du jour you will fail. You should only pursue it if you enjoy it or else...what's the point?

Seize opportunities. You could call some of those situations luck like stumbling onto those websites, but was it? 

Where attention flows, energy goes.

When I got serious about my life, life opportunities presented themselves. When I got serious about my writing, writing opportunities presented themselves. What you focus on shapes your life, so make sure your attention is in the right places.

Don't stop until it works. I didn't make good money for two or three years. In year four I made more money than the entirety of my entire work history. For a while, nothing happens until one day everything happens. 

Keep writing until that moment happens for you.

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