(Newswire.net — March 8, 2017) —Four years ago, I knew nothing of online freelancing. It was alien to me. I was trying to be an author and the pieces were finally falling in place. That’s all I cared about and that’s all I wanted to do.
A year later, I realized that I needed to freelance. Traditional publishing isn’t a magic bullet. Unless you get very lucky, it’s not going to set you up for life. However, it does give you a very strong CV that you can use to muscle your way into the world of freelancing. So, reluctantly, I became a freelancer. I wrote for a living and not for pleasure. I hated most of it. I found myself working 20 hours a day and being a slave to clients I didn’t like. But within 3 years I had what I wanted and so much more.
Now, I can basically do what I like, and it’s all because of my years as a freelancer.
The Experience
One thing I never thought I would get from online freelancing was experience. I considered myself to be a very good writer and I had already written for many major publications. But writing for magazines is different to the jobs you’ll get as an online freelancer. A lot of the emphasis was on content writing and SEO. I was writing for SEO companies who were charging $10,000 a day for their services and then outsourcing most of the hard work to me. I was working for people who ran hugely successful websites and made millions, and paid me to do all of their writing.
So, I started to ask questions. The people I worked for were very friendly (for the most part) and were happy to help. They told me how they made their money and what tricks they used. Even the ones that didn’t tell me willingly, had to give up their tricks in the end. After all, I was the one writing their content, posting it on their sites and, in many cases, actually running their sites. So, they had to tell me because that was the only way their business could operate.
Within a year, I learned all I needed to learn about SEO. I went from a person who barely knew what it stood for and certainly didn’t know what it involved, to someone who knew the ins and outs, the stuff you won’t even find in the bestselling “how-to’s”. That was the main thing that helped, but far from the only one.
The Money
If you’re prepared to work very hard and to be a slave to the needs of clients, then you can make a lot of money. Most freelancers are not, so they end up getting bad feedback that destroys them, or losing clients that could set them up for life. I sacrificed everything for those few years in order to please those clients, and they ensured I was able to make over $100,000 a year. Not a huge amount considering the hours I was putting in, but it helped me out massively.
I was able to use that money to invest in the stock market, in precious metals. As it happens, I knew nothing about the markets or investments, but I had taken writing jobs on these subjects so I had forced myself to learn. I was learning from the best and being paid for it, so I was using my money to invest and to profit. That money also let me build my own sites using the information I had learned from web masters and SEO experts.
The Contacts
Some clients were unbearable. Some were rude. Some treated me like a slave sent to perform all their menial jobs. One of them actually seemed to believe I was his butler and would phone me every hour of the night to tell me the latest things going wrong with his sites (sites I wasn’t even woking on). Others were brilliant, and those were the ones I stuck with. When I began building my websites and investing my freelancing money into them, these were the people I turned to for advice. They were the ones who helped me to get exposure, the ones who helped me to troubleshoot, to get strong back links.
Those clients had given me the money and the advice I needed to succeed, but they also remained on hand to deal with any issue I had, and they did that because I had been doing the same for them for so long. I was getting paid for it, but they still appreciated it.
A Means to an End
All of the above happened within three years. I made a lot of money, learned a lot and got a lot of contacts. In that time I grew tired of the job and the hours, but I had done enough to be able to walk away from it. To an extent, anyway.
These days, I spend more time on websites and investments. I am doing the same work to an extent, but it’s more profitable and I have to work less for it. I still freelance, but the contacts I have made mean that I can cherry-pick my clients and my jobs and I can focus only on the ones that pay the most. The network of sites I write for, as well as my own sites, means I can get paid a lot just to write simple articles and talk about occasional products or websites.
And on top of all of this, I was even given a contract to write a non-fiction book about freelancing. I didn’t meet the publisher through my work as a freelancer, but without that job I would have never been able to write it.
Online freelancing is very stressful as a full-time job. If you do it properly, it will burn you out very quickly. But stick with it and it will pay off tenfold. It changed my life.