In January 2020, I started writing online.

What followed was 9 months of lonely, frustrating, and painfully slow growth.

So if you're a beginner, let me save you hundreds of hours and plenty of headache.

If I was starting over again, here's the exact playbook I would follow:

Here's the playbook breakdown:

• Where you should be writing
• How often you should be writing
• 1 thing you shouldn't waste time on
• The single most important thing you should do during your first 9 months (that I completely ignored)

Let's get into it:

First, where you should be writing.

When just starting out, I followed the conventional playbook.

I spent (wasted) hours creating a fancy website to host my fancy new blog.

And that's where I published.

I had to own my platform, right?

Except, there was 1 big problem:

No one knew my blog existed!

I was publishing into the void, spending hours every Sunday morning slaving over a hot keyboard & nitpicking every word.

Then, I would hit publish, waiting for the rush of attention.

Except... crickets.

The internet's crickets of indifference.

And because no one knew my blog existed, there was no feedback loop.

I had *no clue* whether what I was writing was interesting, helpful, or valuable to the reader.

Instead, I was *assuming* I was on the right track.

Newsflash: I wasn't.