8 Habits That Will Make You A Top 1% Digital Writer Effortlessly

Becoming a successful writer is dead simple — the reason why you’re not is that you have the wrong mindset.

You still live in a made-up world of overnight successes and shortcuts.

Hard pill to swallow: It doesn’t work like that. Writing success is made up of thousands of days and nights of performing the same boring habits over & over again. I’m telling you this to get you rid of the “writing hacks to fast growth” mindset

People always expect something like that when they came across such an article.

Yet the habits I’ll introduce to you today aren’t any special. You already know you’re supposed to be doing them.

But filling up that gap between knowing what to do & actually doing it is what is success all about.

The claim is: If you’ll be performing at least the majority of following habits for a couple of months, it’s impossible NOT to succeed.

Let’s take a dive:

#1: Going for walks

It’s boring. It’s cliché.

But walks are the powerhouse of most genius ideas.

Look at these greats:

Dan Koe (a 6-figure online business owner, 140K followers on Twitter, 17K subscribers to his newsletter) goes for a walk every single morning before he starts his writing session.

Justin Welsh — (earning 2.4M income, writer, 160K followers on Twitter, 20K subscribers to his newsletter) has in his week 2 blocks he calls “ideation” — basically walks with his wife when he captures all the ideas he gets.

It’s not an accident that majority (if not all) of prolific writers go for walks frequently.

Walking releases endorphins & supplies the brain with more oxygen, which is vital for creativity.

Also when you’re walking outside, your attention is diffused (because you’re not focusing on anything particular), which helps you to come up with more creative ideas than when you just stare at a computer screen.

Go for walks at least weekly.

If you want to move to another level, go daily.

Paradoxically, the best writers are walkers, not sitters.

#2: Studying analytics

Average or noob writers study analytics to either feel good or bad (based on the size of the numbers).

Pro writers use analytics to level up their writing further.

Analytics is basically a way your readers shout at your opinions on your content. If one of your pieces has 1K claps & 100 comments, they’re shouting “This was bloody awesome, I want to see more of this”. If it has 50 claps and 2 comments, they’re shouting “This is boring, go write about something else.”

Almost all prolific digital writers look at the data at least once upon a time and try to reverse engineer why certain posts blew up while others flopped, and then they apply it in their future posts.

It’s like a little puzzle you need to solve.

If you’ll keep doubling-down on the pieces that did reasonably well, and on the other hand, you keep cutting out the pieces that fell short, your growth is inevitable.

I was applying this strategy on Twitter for around 3 months, and since then increased my engagement from getting 5–10 likes/post on average to getting 100–200 likes/post on average.

To get actionable: Each week, sit down, look at the posts you’ve written the past week, and pay attention to the best-performing ones.

Ask yourself: What did resonate here?

Was it: the topic, the structure, the format or the story?

Experiment with different variables & over time you’ll find that sweet structure/topic that you know readers will love.

#3: Working on the first sentence

A huge amount of readers don’t get past the first sentence of your article.

If your first sentence doesn’t capture attention or doesn’t make the reader emotional, then your first impression is also the last impression you make.

99% of writers take the impact of the first sentence for granted.

So if you’re willing to spend hours brainstorming catchy first sentences, you’re bound to succeed.

The question is: How to create a good one?

The answer is: Volume. Create a lot of them. It’s like a flush. You need to give yourself a permission to create bad stuff so you can eventually gain enough clarity on creating masterpieces. So at first bash out a lot of sentences. No matter how much they suck. Eventually, you’ll release a lot of potential ones. Then, you can ask your peers for feedback, and there you go: You have a killer first sentence.

Killer first sentence creates killer posts.

#4: Crafting good headlines

The unconvient truth: People read more headlines than articles these days.

Headlines are often underrated — although, in most cases, it’s the only piece of writing people will ever read from you.

If the headline doesn’t promise them something worthwhile, they’ll scroll on.

That’s why working on the headline is worth it.

A Tempting headline has 3 components:

- WHAT are you writing about

- WHY should people read it

- The Candy — something that makes people emotional (number, story, celebrity name, achievement, money)

1–2-word headlines like “Cold showers”, or simple sentences headlines like “I was taking cold showers for 30 days” never work.

Better headline would look like this:

WHAT — “10 lessons I learned from 30 days of taking cold showers”.

WHY — that changed my view on consistency & discipline.

The Candy — and helped me go from a depressed skinny guy to a jacked happy guy.

Don’t worry about the length of the headline as long as the headline speaks volumes of what is the post about.

These headlines get traction.

Master them, and you can rule the writing world.

#5: Stealing from others

The lack of ideas you experience is just a lack of the right mindset.

My view on content creation & crafting ideas has completely changed when I realized that nothing in the writing world is really original, and it’s okay to steal ideas as long as you add your own experience, story or perspective to them.

Like realize how many posts about writing habits that will make you a better writer are on this platform, let alone the whole internet. And see? Nobody cares.

Don’t be ashamed of stealing ideas. Everyone steals. The smart writers just cover it in a way you won’t recognize is stolen. But that’s all just a matter of practice.

If you want to never run out of ideas again, create a swipe file where you’ll be putting everything that resonates with you. Headlines, words, lyrics, your random shower thoughts, movie lines, stories…whatever catches your attention.

Then, whenever you’re experiencing writer’s block, just look into the swipe file, and hunt for inspiration.

Easy, yet really effective.

#6: Create a lot of bad stuff

Good writing is like a dirty sink — you have to flush out all the gunk before the clean water comes out — Jay Yang (paraphrased)

A lot of writers face perfectionism. They always just sit and philosophize about the perfect piece. Another hard pill to swallow: No amount of thinking creates good writing. Period.

Instead, just start writing first, bash out whatever comes into your mind, and then, after a few minutes, you’ll just see those ideas flowing really fast that it will be impossible NOT to write.

The ideal writing process should look like this:

You start off somehow, and then you slowly polish it until you create a masterpiece.

Now it’s your turn. Open a page in google docs, and start writing whatever comes into your mind. After a few minutes, you’ll feel like a prolific writer.

#7: Voice notes

A lot of writers have trouble writing as they speak.

The reason this is a problem?

“Writing that’s hard to speak is hard to read” — Dickie Bush.

The killer way to assure you’re writing as you speak is using voice notes as your guide. The system is pretty straightforward: Download the app otter [dot] ai nd whenever you get an idea, just speak to it and it will transcribe everything you said.

Then, when you sit down to write, pull up your notes, delete the filler words and improve the grammar, and voilá. You have written a piece.

#7: Formatting

Everyone’s too lazy to read whole articles without even getting a preview of them. That’s why people scroll through your articles before they start reading.

Your job is to make the post look tempting while scrolling, so you increase the odds that they’ll actually read it.

It may sound hard, but it’s pretty straightforward.

It comes down to a few things:

Use subheads to separate paragraphs.

Use bullet points instead of long paragraphs.

Also, vary the length of paragraphs.

Start with one sentence. Then create a longer paragraph. It could be 3–5 sentences. Just makes sure the paragraph is not too long so the reader feels annoyed to read it.

See? As I did above.

Those are pretty much the secrets of good formatting.

If you want to catch even more attention, add quotes & images throughout your posts.

#8: Idea System

When you have a system, you don’t need to use excuses. You don’t need motivation or willpower. With proper systems, creating good content is pretty natural.

Every single writer you admire probably has one.

Jay Yang (5K followers on Twitter, 600 subscribers to his newsletter) does every week deep dive into one topic in Notion, from which creates his newsletter issue, tweets & Linked posts from it.

Justin Welsh has a whole workflow where he creates a newsletter, and then repurposes it into 6–12 pieces of short-form content.

Dan Koe has his idea bank where he dives deep into ideas that resonate with him.

Some people just use apple notes.

The main thing is: Having an idea system all boils down to having a system for capturing, storing & processing ideas in your writing.

It might take a few weeks of experimentation to create one, but once you find one that suits you, you’ll become a writing beast.