Writing for Your Wealth

When it comes to writing and making money, are you a dairy farmer or a cattle rancher?

The Difference Between a Dairy Farmer and a Cattle Rancher

A dairy farmer raises cows in order to milk them daily and profit from the milk.

A cattle rancher raises cows in order to slaughter them and profit from the meat.

For a dairy farmer, a cow must be fed and cared for and raised to adulthood. It then lives for many years, producing milk day in and day out. All you have to do to continue getting that milk is toss in some food for the cow and spend a few minutes each day milking it (you can even get machines to milk the cow for you!).

For a cattle rancher, a cow is fed and cared for and raised to adulthood… and then slaughtered. Short-term, the rancher makes good money on the sale of the meat, but for the next week, the next month, the next year, no more money comes in. The rancher must go through the whole process of raising a cow again in order to profit again.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a dairy farmer. Not only is there less blood involved, but you get to keep your asset alive and well, generating a steady income for you day in and day out.

Dairy farmers and cattle ranchers in the world of writing

You can probably think of ways people act as cattle ranchers or dairy farmers with their writing.

For example, a freelance writer is like a cattle rancher. She spends time finding a client, she spends time researching the topic, and then she spends time writing the article. When everything is done, she sells the article and gets paid once for the work. Usually the rights are sold along with the words, meaning she can’t profit from that particular article again.

Another example of a cattle rancher is someone who flips websites. I’ve noticed that “site flipping” has become popular of late (or at least selling products on how to flip sites has become popular). This is where you put in the time to build up a basic blog or site, write some content for it, get some links to it, and then sell it once it becomes profitable.

If you sell your asset, you can usually make more money upfront than if you kept it (a cow’s worth of steaks doubtlessly brings you more than a pint of milk). This is where people lose their way. They chose immediate financial gain over long term cash flow. As the saying says, they don’t do the math.

If you sell the cow and make $1,000, that’s a good deal of money. But what if you kept the cow, and it produced $5 worth of milk a day, and it lived for 10 years? That would be $1,825 a year and $18,250 for the lifetime of the cow!

Your writing can do exactly the same thing.

But what if you invest your money?

This is the argument the cattle rancher type invariably makes. What if I sold the cow and invested the money? Couldn’t I get rich that way?

Here’s my response to that argument:

How many people do you actually know who are financially independent thanks to saving and investing money in stocks and bonds?

I’m willing to bet it’s not very darned many. The slick talkers on Wall Street (AKA the people who make money by taking a share of your investment money) like to talk about how much the market increases every year and how much you can make with compound interest, and yada, yada, yada.

At the end of the day, very few people make enough to be financially independent this way. And they’re never truly secure. Their financial fates rest on complex markets and companies they have no control over.

Just look at what the stock market has been doing lately. My parents are of the retirement age, but there’s no way they can do so right now. They invested all along as they were told, but their portfolios are way down right now. And chances are things are going to get worse for a lot of people before they get better.

Now that you’ve dredged your mind trying to think of people who have truly gotten rich in the stock market by investing and diversifying and following the Wall Street propaganda, think about the people you know who are financially independent and maybe even rich.

The people I know who fall into that category have all gotten there by buying and holding rental properties or starting their own businesses (or both). They’ve made their money–and created true financial independence–by owning and controlling assets that create positive cash flow every month.

Real estate is one way to create financial independence, and building a business is another. What’s the third?

Create something and get paid by royalties, licensing fees, advertisers, etc.

Traditionally, for writers, our only route was to write a book and hope it was picked up by a publisher and hope people bought it.

Today the internet makes it much easier for us to turn our words into profitable intellectual property that we own and control. Blogs, books, ebooks, subscription newsletters, membership sites, e-courses… we can do it all without querying agents or appealing to publishers.

It’s entirely possible to get started with nothing but your time and a few bucks for webhosting (heck, you can even start on a freebie blog site if you need to).

By investing in assets you own and control, you create security you don’t have when you’re investing in someone else’s company. Also, you don’t worry about retiring. As soon as you get to the point where your assets are earning you more money than you spend each month, you’re financially independent.

It took me about three years to get to that point, and that was with working at it part time.

Of course, everyone is going to have different results (some people who aren’t as lazy as I am have done it a lot faster, and others take longer to find a route that works for them), but if you work toward creating ongoing cash flow, instead of getting paid a dollar’s wages for a dollar’s work (or raising a cow and sending it to the slaughter house), you can become financially independent a lot sooner than if you set 10% aside and invested it in the stock market each month.

How to be a dairy farmer (create profitable intellectual property assets) with your writing

This whole site is about building assets that create cash flow, so it’s hard to condense all the good stuff into one post, but here’s my attempt at the brief version:

1. Keep the rights to your writing and publish in a model that lets you get paid again and again — If you sell your work to someone else, you get paid once. If you keep your work, you can publish it in a way that you get paid again and again. One way is to write books and/or digitally delivered information products that let you get paid every time someone buys them. The route I’ve taken is to build websites and blogs and charge merchants to advertise–no one buys anything from me, but it averages out to me making money every time someone reads one of my articles.
2. Build up a fan base — Anyone can write and publish a book, but if no one buys it, then you’re not going to make anything. If you use a mailing list to build up a fan base you can contact any time, then you’ve got a ready-and-waiting group of people who will buy your products or visit your blog posts whenever you publish something new. It’s a lot easier to sell products to people who are fans than to try to sell to strangers.
3. Start a blog — Right now, there’s just no better way to find those fans than by starting a blog. It’s a way to attract your target audience, establish your authority, and build something that will become an asset in and of itself. You can make money directly from your blog (i.e. by selling advertising or promoting affiliate programs), or you can use your blog as a way to attract people who will buy your books, information products, etc.
4. Write what people want to read — This is huge. A lot of writers flounder because they’re writing about what they want to write about. Figure out what people want to read about and write that. Writing for profit is just like starting a business. It can’t be about you; it has to be about your customers. That doesn’t mean you have to “sell out.” Chances are there are places your interests intersect with the wants and needs of a potential audience. Popular topics are making money, diet/health, and finding love. Of course you can find other topics to write about–just make sure there is an audience before you sink too much time into creating an asset.

Those are the basics, and if you know that, you know more than most.

Now, for all you freelance writers out there who have your hackles up over being accused of slaughtering cows, let me finish by saying, I know we all live in the real world here. We have bills that need to be paid today. We can’t spend five years without pay in order to build up our assets. And I’m not telling you to.

However, what you can do is keep the “day job” and in your spare time work on building assets that produce cash flow. This is where true financial independence comes from.

Good luck, everyone!