I’m going to be taking the plunge over the next few days and will be establishing a premium mailing list with weekly updates planned to “help you make better choices to create a better life for yourself”.
I was reading a blog post this morning that really inspired me. It was a guest post by Tom Morkes on Jeff Goins’ blog and called What war taught me about writing.
Tom was comparing being a writer to being in the army. Interesting comparison, but what was inspirational were these particular quotes:
“But unless you write – unless you publish – those who need your work are left without your contribution to the world.
In a very real way, the people depending on your work need you to be vulnerable and exposed on a daily basis. Your job, as a writer, is to go outside the wire and publish your work.”
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“Take risks daily: write and publish stuff that matters for the people who matter.”
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“Three simple but powerful lessons:
1. Go outside the wire and publish your work.
2. Take risks daily with your writing.
3. Remember why you do what you do.”
After reading the article I was inspired to ‘go outside the wire’. Like a soldier risking their life every day they step outside the wire, the least I could do was step up my writing and put myself out there where I’m vulnerable.
One thing led to another and I found that Tom Morkes is also a heavy proponent of the Pay What You Want method of receiving payment for services or products.
I’ve seen this model in use before, and I’ve seen others using similar models for their eBooks and downloadable courses, as well as subscription models for premium articles.
I decided to ‘go outside the wire’ and start my own premium mailing list for substantially better material than what I’m currently doing.
I know what I’m capable of, because I’ve been there before. With my Thinking Wisely website in 2012 I was doing articles that were designed to help people make better choices. It worked out very well, but the articles were being published for free, and I was pushing an article a day.
I learned from that experience, and what I learned is that writing quality articles of that nature every single day is incredibly difficult, to the point that I burnt out after about 4 months of it. But in that time I’d written over 100 articles.
This time around I’m going to be writing one article per week, and spend my time during that week making sure the article is of exceptional quality.
It’s going to be called Join The Journey (if you have any ideas of your own about what it could be called, please add them to the comments below), and invite people to join me in this journey we share, to support me with their subscription, and to receive premium content that’s never going to be available on my blog – at a price that anyone can afford.
The subscription will be offered at a minimum of $1 per month. Cheap! It should allow anyone and everyone to sign up for it. Subscribers can pay more if they want to, and it’s my hope that they do, but it will be worthwhile for me to just get people subscribing, even if it’s for $1 a month.
The onus will be on me to create the best writing I can, to justify the money people are spending on me, and to also provide an incentive for people to increase the value of their subscription in exchange for the high quality material I’ll be producing.
I need to ‘go outside the wire’, or ‘step outside my comfort zones’ if I’m going to achieve the successes that I want to achieve. If want to be a paid writer then I have to start being a paid writer. This is a good start.
I hope you’ll join me in my journey when I start offering the premium subscription within the next few days.
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