Starting and Scaling Your Freelance Writer Career

1. Intro: Hi everyone, I'm Alexandra here. I am a growth mercury, currently working in house as well as a consultant. And then the past I've worked both as a freelance writer myself and with a lot of freelance writers as the client. I have this double perspective on what it's like to be an actual writer and what it's like to work with freelance writers. This is a super clear and straightforward course. So if you ask me, it's really the only course you need to actually get started with taking your first few product. This scores is derived fit, whether you are just considering this career or maybe you've already decided to start working as a freelance writer, but just don't know where to start. Or maybe you'd want to do content writing on the side. So as a side EA, alongside your main role, your main job, regardless of whether you want to get started with freelancing or you're looking to advance your career as a content writer and learn some more extra tips and tricks that you might have missed in all of those years that you've worked as a consultant yourself. This course is definitely the right fit for everyone because you will have everything from the basics to more advanced tips and tricks to actually help you find clients, sell yourself, create a personal brand, and so on. So I decided to say their experience and put it into one single course. Basically the only course you will need to get started with your career as a freelance content writer. Now what you'll notice in this course is that I pay cue from that stage where you decide if this is the right career for you through every single step that you need to go through in order to set yourself up for success. Now we're going to tackle topics like how to create your portfolio, how to choose your rates, how to find clients, how to communicate with your clients. And so many more questions that I often get when talking to my mentees. At the end of this course, you will also have a fun project which will help you set yourself up for success from even before you start working as a content writer. So I'm looking forward to seeing those projects if you have any questions, just leave them under the scores or feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. So let's get started with this course. 2. Why become a writer: The very first thing I want you to think of is why you want to become a writer. And it's super important for you at this point to really be honest with yourself. Because once you get started with content writing, it's super easy to just do this forever. But you might be missing out on some other opportunities you have. Maybe at our careers at or gigs, anything like this. Before you actually start considering this career, I really want you to take into consideration a couple of logical reasons why this career might be right for you, as well as why it might not be 100% right fit. The first reason why a lot of freelance writers actually started with this career is because they are passionate about writing. So in your case, you know that you might have enjoyed writing in the past, either in school or for a previous career or job you've had. So maybe you already have a blog that you enjoy writing on, or maybe you just like creating either short form content, long-form content. Maybe you enjoy writing books. This is super important. However, I know a lot of freelance writers who started working in tech or in SAS. So doing business writing, even though they are original passion lies with fiction writing. When you are starting to consider this freelance writing career, It's really, really important to think about what are you wanted to pursue this fiction writing path? Or, you know, jump into this non-fiction like business writing, tech writing world. Now in my case, for instance, I was just passionate about marketing. For me it was like super easy to start working in non-fiction career. That's number one. The second thing is obviously money. Freelance writing can be a very lucrative career. Or side gig. If you are involved in really growing your personal brand, networking, really it's more than just being a great writer. You really need to know how to get your clients, how to make sure you have clients on a regular basis. How to scale your business. Because in time you might want to work with other writers or editors. Something to keep in mind is that sometimes when you're just getting started with writing, It's won't bring you, like all of a sudden, all of that money that should dremel. For instance, in my first year, I started doing freelance writing on this side just to kind of test the waters and see how easy it would be for me to get clients on a regular basis. For anyone, I would really recommend starting small. And then when you start really knowing how things work, when you're seeing that money come in on a regular basis. That's when, you know that you might want to go full-time or part-time if you really want to just work less, it really depends on how you want to work essentially. But again, don't expect to earn a six-figure income in your first year, essentially. One last point here is if possible, save up some money and then make the switch. Even if you think this profession is going to bring you a specific sum of money because sometimes things don't go as you expect them. So it's best to just make sure you're not living paycheck to paycheck before you start doing freelance writing essentially as a full-time gig. Because otherwise if you're just looking to earn some side income via freelance Friday, then it's like it's super easy to just get started, start getting that money and time. You're going to be able to tell if you can stick with this approach for working on this side, or you can really consider a full-time career. Now the third and something that was also super enforcement for me is career development for certain industries. For example, in SAS Software as a Service, the industry I was active in, it's super easy to actually get. Involved in the industry from a writing position. What I usually recommend to my own mentees is to start with a full-time or a part-time content writing role being in housed with a company. Then in time, you can actually scale. You can go from a rider to maybe an editor or to a content marketing specialist. And in tiny can be a content manager, VBN SEO experts. Maybe as Director of Content. If you want to, you can scale up from this to a marketing specialist and marketing manager. I know people who went from being a content writer to a VP of marketing within the same company. There's definitely options in there. And also keep in mind that this writing career can scale into more than just content careers. You can do marketing, you can do sales, you can do operations. Sometimes you can get involved in a char may be doing employer branding. You can also do PR and communications. So there's really like a lot of options to consider. Because for some of you, like it was also my case, you might not want to do writing forever because it's a, It's a repetitive type of tasks. If you don't enjoy repetitive tasks, it might be worth considering your other career options. However, writing is definitely a great starting point for a lot of carriers essentially. Finally, the other thing you want to consider is, again, one of the biggest reasons why you are probably considering starting freelance writing is the flexibility you will get. Here. You have a lot of people who are maybe in college or maybe you are a mother, or maybe you already have a different job. So writing can be done whenever you have the time you worked, mostly async. You work whenever you feel like you are at your best. In my case, for instance, I would just break my schedule by working in the morning and in the evening. So I would have my afternoons free. It really depends. And also something super interesting about being a writer in general is that the better you get in time and the more efficient you get, the more money you can make for a shorter amount of your time. So if as you're getting started, you are going to earn maybe 30, $50 per hour and time. You can take that too as much as two hundred, three hundred dollars per hour. Now if you really want to take it one step further, I recommend doing a SWOT analysis of your career opportunities. So really what you're going to do is one, consider the strengths that you have. Maybe you are a creative person, maybe you are super quick to come up with new ideas or you just love writing because this is super important. If you love writing on a regular basis, It's a great starting point for this career. Then you want to consider your weaknesses. So maybe you're not attentive to details. You hate researching. Research is a very big part of being a good writer. And the better you are at researching, the more success you will have. Four, maybe you just like to rush your tasks. Again, this is a recipe for making sure that none of your clients will work with you in the future. So there's a couple of these, the points that if you're not able to improve on, you might want to really consider a different paths in your career. Then something else to really think of. Your opportunities. What you're able to do more as what trends you can take advantage of. For instance, maybe you already have experience in a certain industry that's trending. For example, in my case, I was originally a marketer. Naturally I could write on topics such as marketing and similar. And also my first role was in this Productivity Project Management industry. A lot on topics like productivity and remote work. For example, when the pandemic happened, I had quite a lot of work because this was in the men. So it's really important to think of your past experience, passions, as well as the current world situation specifically in the industry that you're interested in. Also another opportunity you can think of is if you know someone that can teach you more about freelance writing. So for instance, taking the scores is honestly probably the only step you need before you actually get started with writing, finding clients and so on, because I will go over everything. And finally, you really need to consider your, you know, the problems that can happen. What's stopping you? What's your competitors are delaying? Definitely recommend checking out some other freelance writers, maybe even talking to some of them before you start working as one yourself. Because some things that can happen is there might already be a lot of other people working as writers in your specific industry. Or you might just not know how to get started with finding clients. Or maybe you just don't have the time to send out pitches. Really. After doing this SWOT analysis, I recommend actually getting started with finding some gigs. Make sure you do go through this whole course to have a full picture of what the freelance writing career entails. However, before you decide to rule out this career altogether, definitely give it a try if you feel like you're calling is with this carrier. 3. How to choose a niche: Now, the most important thing to the side when you are starting a career in freelance writing is what your niche is going to be. Generally, you will be able to change or niche and time is you realize you don't like the one you started with. However, I would recommend really trying and experimenting with a couple of niches so that you can build your portfolio in them and really become an expert in the field. What I advise my mentees is to talk to one or two companies and niche of interest and start doing some articles either for free or at a lower rate. Especially if you're thinking of entering new industry where maybe you don't have a lot of experience. Now there's also the option to maybe do some side writing in an industry where you have a lot of experience. For example, at my previous company, I was working with riders who are actually subject matter experts in certain fields. So I was working with actual marketers, actual software developers, actual sales people who also did content writing on the side. In their case, even if maybe they were at the beginning of their freelance writing career, they were still able to charge more because they had that experience in that niche. I really want you to consider every single niche in this list. This was a mistake I made when I got started with freelance writing. Just pursued the niche where I had more experience. So in my case, that was SAS and specifically some industries such as marketing, productivity, HR. What happened if I stuck with those industries? But I would have liked to do some writing and other industries such as pets or maybe certain wine. However, as you have the experience in those niches, I realized five years into my freelancing career, that if I were to get started again with a new niche, like maybe traveling or whatever, I would have to start from a lower rate. So I was charging for my SAS articles where I had this extensive experience, but I would have to do some free writing or writing at a lower rate for the travel industry, which for me was relatively impossible because my schedule was full with SAS writing work, who I never got the chance to actually experiment with this different niche. Specifically looking at these industries here you have SAS, this is Software as a Service. It's one of the most common industries because frankly put it does pay well, however, keep in mind that it pays well, only though only when you work with bigger companies, if you work with startups pays pretty much the same way as the other niches. So it really depends on what's clients you're able to get. Now, with SAS, you can pair it with some of these other industries. What's really important is really knowing what you're passionate about when it comes to writing. For example, in my case, and what I usually recommend is choosing to tween niches at most and just sticking to those and becoming an expert at those. I know a lot of generalists virus, however, they don't charge a lot because they're not really a pro at any topic. So ultimately, you're just an average rider who's going to essentially not get paid that well, because you don't have that background in specific industries. And also side-note, having expertise in an industry in a niche, if you will, helps you get clients as well because they will see your activity on social media or you will get referrals from other clients. Essentially, they will choose you over other generalist writers because you have experienced in a certain field. That's what SAS and there's other industries like finance, cybersecurity. Then there's other industries like finance cybersecurity. These two specifically also pay well, and they're not that competitive in the sense that there aren't that many writers in these specific industries. However, there's also fewer companies looking for riders in this pace. Then there's fiction writing. Yes, you can get paid for freelance fiction writing. I don't have a lot of experience in that area just because I've only done fiction writing for funny essentially. I also know a lot of writers who went from being a fiction writer to a more attack business writer. When you make that switch, because you might be in that situation, make sure you really enjoy what you're going to do. Because I see a lot of these writers who went from being amazing fiction writers to being average business writers because they don't love it, then there is technical writing. So this is specifically a niche I don't like. You might enjoy doing in technical writing in general is exactly what the name sounds. So you're going to be writing documentation, instructional stuff. I'm not a pro at this industry, but I can tell you it pays well. However, again, you really need to consider what you want because it's not fun, but it pays well. And also you have some interesting career development opportunities that can help you scale quite nicely. But again, not a fun industry. If you ask me, then of course there's the more fun industries like travel, fashion and beauty education. Hats in wine, gardening, Home improvement is actually a popular one that doesn't pay that well. But again, there's a lot of demand for it. These industries, it really depends on what you're passionate about. Then there's, for example, blockchain. So in block chain, what happens is that it's probably the most, let's say in-demand industry. So there's a lot of companies who need blockchain writers. However, there's very, very few writers in this pace. And also yours, very even fewer writers who are good at writing in this industry specifically. So this is one of those industries where again, you need to have some experience, some passion for it and it does pay. Well. Now again, what I recommend, as you can see here as trying a mix of these industries to begin with. So what I would recommend is starting with some of your passion projects like maybe travel, writing food and wine, writing whatever. Pairing this when one of the more, Let's say look furtive niches such as anything, SAP, cybersecurity, blockchain, whatever. Try doing some writing in these spaces before you actually decide to start promoting yourself as a travel writer, cybersecurity writer. It's again a matter of really considering where you want to go in the future. Because if you just want to do freelance writing, you can be a generalist and just write on whatever topics. But if you want to scale and become maybe a marketer or, or just a content manager at some point, you might want more specific industry. If for instance, right now, again, my background is in SAS, but if I were to decide right now what niches to go for, I would probably start choosing a fund niche, like travel for me, then something that would bring some more money. That can be cybersecurity, for instance. But it's really depends on how much time you have to learn more about these industries. If you are actually willing to put in time to learn everything about the new industry when maybe you already know stuff about the HR industry and can mix that with saffron. But also keep in mind, sometimes you'll have clients that are really a mix of these industries to begin with. For example, at some point I had this South clients, you would have to write for them on topics such as marketing and small businesses. Then on the other end, on topics like finance and a bit more of these not so fun topics essentially. So again, it really depends on your passions, your development opportunities. And also to be honest, how much money you can make in each of these industries. 4. What makes you unique: I really wanted a section in this course to emphasize the most important thing that really makes a writer a great writer. After working with a lot of clients myself, and also after working with a lot of freelancers myself, I realized that be fair and honest. A lot of the writers out there, our average, sometimes below average and there's only a few like honestly ten when t, that are really great at what they do. And then there is occasionally some other writers that are trying to stand out by doing specific things and I'm going to tell you exactly what those specifics are. But at this point, what's really important for you to understand is that you really need a differentiator without something that makes you unique compared to the other ten thousands of writers out there, you won't be able to find the best clients, get paid more. And also it will be tougher for you to get referrals and to retain your clients even before you get started with writing. Definitely think of what your biggest differentiators could be. One thing, for example, that I used as a differentiator was being great at research. This includes a lot of things, but for instance, I would work with a lot of freelance writers who would write these very plain articles like anybody could write the same thing on the opposing n. You want your final piece of writing to be highly researched. The sense that you'll look at studies, you talk to experts in the field, you'll reach out to them for quotes. Some writers have even made a business out of just reaching out to people for quotes. This research parts. And your willingness to make that article as unique as possible is really what's going to help you keep your client. And it also if you're writing for SEO purposes, you're going to get an article that maybe has your own name attached to it. You're going to get it higher in the search engine results. This is going to provide more exposure to your content and ultimately to you. You're going to get a lot of new clients without any new effort from your end. The second differentiator is just having a big network and this ties into my previous point. Maybe you are just, you enjoy drawing your personal brand like I did. Or you have an extensive network in an industry in which you worked in before. And this will allow you to get those insights and quotes from experts. And also it will make it easier for you to ultimately get clients moving on having extensive experience in a field. I've already mentioned this. This is something everyone should aim for. Whether you already have experience in a field or you're just getting started with your first job. So to say, you definitely want to keep building upon this experience for five years into your career. You I mean, sometimes even earlier you start getting requests from clients who have seen your past content, who maybe saw you on a podcast, who know about your YouTube channel wherever you have to kind of highlight your expertise. This is a differentiator that you need to, I mean, like with the rest really, you need to develop upon them in time. So for instance, you really need to position yourself as an expert and make sure that you stay there at the top. Going on podcasts, speaking at events, gas, those things, and making sure that all of these appearances are in the places where your ideal clients are. It'll be something I would occasionally do. But specifically, I was super impressed by a freelance writer I was working when I had reached out to her, but she didn't have experienced in our industry. However, I liked her style of writing, so I decided to give her a chance. Let me tell you she more than delivered like she'd seated all of my expectations because besides the writing, which was amazing and besides sticking to the guidelines and everything, she also provided the images. But when it comes to images, There's different things you can do. I like the basics are just suggesting stock photos. In my case, what I would do is I would write a lot of articles on lists like pop ten project management tools or a best time tracking software. And I would actually try the tools. So this plays into my research point. I would really give those tools or try tasks every feature, look at the reviews so it would take more time. However, I was also able to provide organic natural screenshots of me actually trying out the app. So instantly my client would have those screenshots. And they were not just random screenshots. And this freelancer I was working with provided illustrations like diagrams, charts, so those were super-helpful and we'd Canva, you can create pretty much everything that you can imagine. And actually I'm going to show you an example. All you have to do is go to canva and ride something like a chart. If you need a chart or there's infographics, There's presentations, there's social media posts, There's different diagram, and you can just choose one of these and start developing upon them and provides the link to your client so they can further edit this image according to their brand guidelines were whatever. This is like super easy. It doesn't take a lot of time, but it's one of those extra services that will make your clients come back to you every single time. You probably, in general, some points that you are super proud of. Those things that can really make you different essentially. I would say this is super important if you really want to be irreplaceable for your client. Because one of the biggest struggles all freelance writers have at some point is really making sure that you keep your clients and get that work on a regular basis. Once you're able to really show your differentiators and deliver upon them. You can be a 100% shirt that you're going to keep clients and scale your business. 5. Deciding what you're going to write: Next is again another matter of really experimenting with different formats and seeing what you like as well as what pays well and really where the demand is. Going to decide what you're going to be writing, specifically what formats you have to consider and what you enjoy doing. For example, a recent mentee of mine initially started writing in SAS, doing SEO content, but she realized she liked the more journalistic style, the editorial type of content. Some of your options when it comes to really what you're going to be writing, our SEO Writing. This is when you ride for a SAS company or an e-commerce company, or even in the niches like travel, gardening, and so on. There is a demand for SEO writers and this does pay more because it involves you having some form of SEO experience. Then there's short form writing. This includes writing either shorter articles, snippets, social posts, anything like this essentially. Then there's the journalistic editorial style of writing. When you're going to say take it a step further and start writing for magazines and even for some SaaS companies that don't focus on SEO. So in this case, it's a lot more about really the ideas that you present and how you present them. Then there's long form writing, width or without SEO implications. Ebooks, white paper is actual books online or not. Large guides, pillar pages, anything like that. Then there's the classic listicles. Everyone needs these. They're not necessarily the best at performing in the search engine results. However, it is a lot of demand for them. There's expert roundups where you would need to also reach out to experts for quotes or videos, whatever the client one's email writing, this is very expensive. For example, at some point I had a client in this pace where I needed to contribute to a newsletter. So it was a lot of research in my case, and less on the writing side. Butt. You can write any kind of emails from newsletters, too cold emails to on-boarding e-mails or just like a series of emails. It depends on what the client needs. Then there is case studies. So this is another popular niche, if you will. So I actually know a lot of writers who do just case study writing. However, if you ask me, it's a bit tougher to find clients for this. Basically case studies as opposed to, for example, SEO Writing. They involve mostly you're talking to the clients, client. Really getting insights from them and putting those together into one piece. Veterans, as I mentioned, social posts. So anything from LinkedIn to YouTube, video descriptions, videos, scripts. So this is also in demand press releases. And as you know, I recommend trying a mix of all of these. So I did STR writing. But for example, a lot of Mike Lyons would mean a press release or a newsletter and email. So it's best to really provide multiple IT services if you will. Usually what I would say is that you can't be an expert at everything. For example, in my case, I didn't do a lot of journalistic writing, but I did most of the others. But there's definitely areas that you might not feel comfortable with or you might just not enjoy writing about. Some other formats include reviews. This can be a bunch of stuff. Usually it's articles or list of tools. Then there's academic writing. Also, copy. Copy is the actual tax that goes onto a homepage on a landing page. Lending page writing, for instance, does fall under this umbrella. Then there's infographics, which is really just not that much text, but it can be fun to provide these. Something I would always recommend is doing more than just content writing. There's definitely other services that you can consider. For instance, editing. Editing can include just simple grammar checking, spell checks, and maybe some SEO edit. Or it can be a complete content revamp where you take an old piece of content and make it great. Then there's editorial calendars. So a lot of start-ups are new companies will need ideas and really a structure for their content. Then there's brand books. So anything around messaging is an interesting area to consider specializing in and then providing this as an actual formal document. And then there's other extra services that you can consider that aren't related to writing. For instance, you can be doing link building. You can do SEL of all kinds from on-page two, off-page and technical SEO even. And then as you're doing emails writing, you might be able to offer some Email automation services. And then it really depends on what you're most passionate about because you can do PR, you can do product marketing, you can do ads, even. You can definitely scale your freelancing services towards other types of services besides just writing. 6. Creating your portfolio: Finally, the moment you've been waiting for and that is putting together your portfolio. The very first thing you obviously need to do is actually have some writing samples. You can ride for free at a cheaper rate, or right for a friend, right on your blog, any kind of content that's out there. Ideally, ideally you do want it to be published as opposed to just like a PDF you share with someone. Saying like this essentially will help you start putting together a formal portfolio to be fair, the way you display this matters. But does a bunch of formats that you can choose from and really any format works. So for example, in my case, I just had the Google Docs like this essentially, some other options are to go, for example, into Canva and put together a presentation kind of as a freelance portfolio, if you will. Other options include creating an e-book. So I've seen great portfolios as e-books, videos even. Or you can just have a template of really articles that you wrote to share with your a potential clients. However, I did see some freelancers in the past who did not have any portfolio. So when you ask them for samples, they would just send you links. Essentially, that is definitely not a good best practice. I recommend a clear, simple short portfolio. For example. This is actually going to be a tablet that you can download from the courses resources. Mine is a bit long, so I would definitely recommend maybe shortening it's a bit so that it's super easy for your prospects to see what you wrote. Essentially, what do you want to do in your portfolio is maybe here at the top, add a image of yourself just so you can make a better connection with your client, then you're going to maybe briefly introduce yourself. This is not a must, must have section, in my opinion, though, is actually displaying your services. For instance, in my case, besides this, I actually had a full marketing services proposal presentation, if you will, where I went into all of the details of the services I would offer and some success stats and everything like not essentially. But if you're just getting started, this will do so. Feel free to add it all of this as you wish. Then this is differentiation section I would add essentially in my portfolio I would say this is optional, but this is writing essentially what you are really be the best at. So definitely add in here kind of the points that differentiate you and only you. Then in my case, I added in here some reader testimonials. So I have my client testimonials on my LinkedIn profile so anyone can see them in there. But I really also wanted to show my clients what readers actually send about my work, my communication style, and so on. What I would do is maybe leave this section as testimonials. In your case. You're going to be adding in here in time some testimonials from your clients. Essentially. If you're just getting started, you can get them from anyone you're working with, or also just add again comments from readers, then what's super important? And a section that you can actually move way higher is the actual content that you wrote in the past. In my case, I started with just listing some of my own articles and then I took screenshots of some of the results I had in the past. This is because I wrote SEO content. So I really wanted my prospects to have a good idea of what resolved. I could provide for them. And then I went and provided my niches, remote work, HR, productivity and project management, marketing. And I gave examples for every industry. So I see this a lot with content writers I work with. They just send you a bunch of articles. And as a client you have to sort through them or to ask for more, definitely organize them. And when you reach out to a potential client, accounting in a specific industry makes sure you only give them relevant samples. In this case, just kind of break them by industry. Add in here like the sample. And ideally, you want to add in the name of the article, the company, and so on, not just a random URL, essentially. Basically after this, what you're going to do is maybe write some of the types of content that you provide. So we went over this in a previous lecture essentially, but it's everything you're comfortable writing. Because somebody who wants to work with you long term, we'll look at this and really consider you for multiple projects. You can list your topics of expertise here under your actual content samples. You might also want to just write them here under a separate section so that a prospect can get a good idea of what your possible writing about where your expertise lies. And you can get as detailed as you want with this. You can just write topics like this. Or you can be like, I enjoy writing on topics such as broad activity, specifically Kanban boards again, charts, time tracking if you get a bit more detailed, because this will also give your clients some ideas of future content that you can provide for them. Finally, don't forget to add your email and whatever other contact options you have. Again, this template is going to be in the resources section so you can take this, customize it to your own needs and definitely recommend customizing it. That really do focus on this section where you provide your samples. 7. Setting rates: In one of the most important things in your career as a writer, is your rate. Often the most popular question I get from other people who are considering this career as, how do I set my rate to be super clear? This is going to be a rate scarred sample that I'm going to attach to discourse in the resources section. I believe having this formally on in a spreadsheet in a document is super handy because every single time I would send this to my potential clients, they were super pleased with it because it gives them a super clear idea of how much you're going to pay for each service when you decide upon your rates, there's generally three different options. One is this per word rate which I personally recommend because it takes into account not just the time that you would spend for that article, but also your expertise and the research that you put into this your network, everything essentially. Then the second option is an hourly rate, 402060, whatever dollars per hour. This is an option when you get a project, you estimate that it's going to take you 34 hours. And you tell your client this estimate as well as your rate so that they can know how much they're going to pay you. And the other option, which is also another good option. I generally don't recommend hourly rates because you would just be getting paid for your time and it doesn't really take into account your experience that much itself. Like some clients might want you to actually track your time. And sometimes an article might take you less. It's, it's tough tells to manage to really scale in time. Another option that would work is to pay, to get paid per project. I have noticed this is the most common way in which content writers, especially the good ones, tend to prefer it to get paid in, is, as a marketer, go to them and ask for three articles for a month. And each one at, let's say, to 1000 words, they would say something like a 2 thousand word article is $600 or whatever. And it's really going to be the same every time. Now in this case, if you decide to charge a specific sum of money for an article that's at a specific length in really need to consider your terms beyond that length. So what happens when they want 200 extra words? What if the article is a bit shorter in the end, stuff like that. So it's a bit more complicated to juggle. In my case, what I would do is take to a per word payment like in this example. But in every brief. So whenever I would send either the brief, either the outline, depending on the client, I would at the very top. Right. The actual sun, how much they're going to pay. So in that situation, I would usually make a per project based on the word weight. For example, a common project would be like a bit over 2 thousand words, ten thousand, ten thousand and two hundred inch. You would again take into account your work per word rain. But if you ride a couple of extra words, you can technically give those for free. So it really depends on how much wiggle room you have. Some writers are willing to give this counts if the client agrees to an article package. I don't like that idea because what happens is that you're going to be writing a lot for less money. I would definitely not. This count articles. There's definitely situations when you can try giving a discount. Generally don't recommend them, so I don't have a very good example for you. Another popular situation is when a company reaches out to you and they want to pay you less money, but they promise regular work. You don't want more work for less money. You want to work as little as possible for more money for better companies, for higher-quality articles, I definitely recommend sticking to the rates that you set as much as possible. So as a conclusion, stick to your rates. Opt for either a per word or a per project payment. And really always make sure that you agree upon a specific payment when you start writing the article. Now to make sure that you get paid, you can ask for maybe half of the payment before you get started with the first article or after you send the outline. In my case, whenever I had a new client, I would ask for half of the payment after I sent the first outline. So they would send the remainder of the payment when I send the final draft essentially. And then they would pay me either on a monthly basis or after every project. This is just something you need to decide whether your client before you start working with them. And you can also mark it in your contract. So we're going to get to that topic in one of the next lectures. If I really wanted to talk about how you decided upon our rate. Because I remember when I was working as a freelance writer, the information you have out there essentially is all over the place. Everyone's charging different sum of money. People are really not very transparent with their rates. Sometimes I would find competing writers who had their rates displayed publicly. They were similar to mine, but what they would do, for instance, I remembered this freelance writer would charge extra for ghost writing. So in my case, I would charge the same for every article. Whether it had my name to it or not, it will be the same thing. And I saw this as a differentiator because these other writers were charging extra for ghostwriting. Essentially. It definitely helps to look at what your potential competitors charge. If this information is public, if not, I can give you some cues. So after I started working myself with content writers, so when I became a client, essentially, I realize that Everyone was charging the friend Ray. But lot of the times they were not justified. For example, you would have a rider who they had experienced in the field, but the writing was in the vast, however, they had worked with draped companies in the past, so they raised the ray. But I realized that it was for me as the client, it was just too expensive to pay that much for average writing point number one, when you decide to charge more or to raise your rates, you have to make sure that you have those differentiators that you are actually providing value to your clients. Otherwise they might not accept to give you more money, or they might just go to other writers because again, there is a lot of writers out there. So if you're not able to differentiate yourself, you cannot raise your rates is unfurling. Now, a lot of writers still charged, ends then $0.20 for word. But at this rate, they usually write basic articles with minimal research. So if you're just getting started or maybe you don't have experienced in an industry, I would definitely recommend starting at 15, $0.20 per word for maybe a couple of months a year. It depends from what I noticed, most companies can afford this rate specifically. Now, if you want to scale to vigor companies that pay 3040 $0.45, because these are realistic numbers that you can get to. You really need to make sure that you're offering as a writer keeps up with that rate. So you really want to deliver either through extra research, having a solid network, providing some extra services may be creating images that are included within that price. Some clients might ask you to upload the article so you want to add it into day your CMS. So in WordPress or Webflow or whatever. So that's like one extra thing you have to do for that specific sum of money that you agreed upon. When looking in practice and writers that asked for this money, It's pretty diverse. So you have the situation I just told you about where you have average writers kind of charging this sum, but for no real reason, then you have actually decent writers. So the thing is that there's a lot of competition at this. 3045 rate range, if you will. So this is kind of the range you want to aim for looking at maybe midterm. So after your first few years in freelance writing, and then there's definitely options to scale to as much as $1 per word or even more. I've actually talked to a lot of writers who charge more than $0.60 per word. But what happens is that sometimes they just charged this because they might have more experiences writers, or they might be experienced in that specific field. When you are a subject matter experts in an industry, you can easily charge $1 per word. However, the problem is that it's very difficult to find companies that are willing to pay you adapt much. By remember, at some point I was talking to some freelance writers who were charging $0.60 for word. When in reality they wrote in the past for companies that would only pay $0.20 per word. The thing is that sometimes riders are willing to work for maybe companies that pay us, if you will. But it really depends on how much time you have, on how many new clients you're willing to take. But really what's important for you is to be honest with your rates because it's tough to scale to more than $0.4,550 per word. You really want to think of your progress in time. So for instance, you can start with charging three hundred and four hundred dollars per article. An article can be, let us say anything up to who tells in words. And then in time start charging 600 for the same article, or seven hundred, eight hundred. And it's common to see writers charging more than 1 $1000 for the same 210 thousand word article. Really what's important that this point is again, to think of those differentiators and those extra services, extra work, extra research, extra images that you can provide to justify that cost. So what happens in time is what I mentioned at the beginning. Instead of working and our $460, you will work an hour for $200 or a similar. Really when choosing your rates, it's best to assume that every rider does their own thing. But ultimately what matters is how much a client is willing to pay. When you reach out to a startup, you can assume they don't have a lot of money for content. You can give them a rate like 20 sons, for instance. But if you reach out to accompany that bit bigger or you see that they work with big rider is essentially you can definitely charged more. Now, what I did was to really stick to my rates, so I wouldn't really discount rates. What you can do, however, if you end up working with a startup, I'll just briefly tell you a situation I had where the start-up was willing to pay my rate. However, we agreed to work on shorter articles. It was fewer words at the rate I had. However, I personally wasn't pleased with just having super short articles. So what I would do is I would reach out to some subject matter experts for quotes. And I would add in those quotes essentially for free because it made that article so much better. And ultimately, I had an auteur profile on their blog. Every single article I had was attached to my name essentially. So it would bring in more clients ultimately. It really depends how much money went to make, how much time you're willing to put into writing how you want to scale. The easiest formula for deciding on your rates is to think of how much money you want to make this year, how many hours you want to work every week. And really kind of finding the middle ground there. For example, in my case, when I was working full-time as a writer, I was making a bit over a 100 K per year and I was working roughly 20 hours every week on writing. However, keep in mind, I was actually working more than that to promote my brand, to grow my personal brand. I'm working on my YouTube channel on my LinkedIn's following networking with people. It was a lot of this extra work that doesn't get paid, so you definitely want to take that into account as well. And finally, what's super important as the way you display your weight. This template that I'm sharing with you has really list of services. So in here you can add article writing, editing, editorial calendars, any kind of extra services that you offer, part-time work. If you're willing to take that, Then for every service I have a rough cost. Definitely change this so that it's, it's up to your liking. And I also include a description, again, do go and added all of this. Because this basically helps you clarify what every service includes. In my case, I think this template is a bit too detailed because I would still get a lot of questions from my clients like what does this include or Kenya also provide this extra service, stuff like that. Do add this, add in your contact info so your name, a link to your website portfolio, LinkedIn, e-mail wherever. Essentially, you're just going to be sharing this with your anyone who asks for your rates. And that's it really. 8. Where to find a job and how to pitch: Now that you've set a portfolio, you know your niche, maybe you have some back experience and you are a 100% sure of your rate, it's time to start looking for an actual writing game. Now the most fortunate situation is when a past client refers you to other potential client. So people started reaching out to you asking for your services. The second most fortunate situation is when you just have a solid personal brand and jump and he's looking for services like yours will find you easily. Now, when you get started most of the time you don't have any of these. So there's specific websites where you can look for writing gigs. One of them is pro blogger specifically to jobs section. So if you look in here, you will see writing jobs in multiple industries. This is actually handy when you are considering your niche because you can look at the most popular industries, at least the ones listed here. Because what you'll notice here is that there's quite a diversity from enemy to CAC, personal training and just like fitness, lifestyle held software, SAS, WordPress, this is a specific niche technical writing with QE and software development experience. And if you look beyond these highlighted jobs, you will find some that aren't promoted but maybe paid just as well. For some of these. When you look through them, you might not get a rough idea of how much they pay. The only thing to keep in mind with the jobs in this directory is that every single freelance writer knows about this website. So they get a lot of pitches. However, it's not impossible to get a gig from this website as long as you have derived experience. I'm telling you this from my own past experience as a writer, I got quite a few gigs from here. Specifically, you can also find editing jobs in here, not just writing 1s. The second website, not as popular, but still getting quite a bit of interest is blogging Pro. What you'll notice in here is that the jobs here specifically aren't updated as often. Then there's the classic remote job websites. For instance, remote.co has a writing suction with gigs, some of them freelance, as you can see marked in here, some of their full-time, part-time. And there's also the editing section. And sometimes you will find some lost writing gigs in here under other including some reporter jobs and similar gigs. Dynamite jobs is another website for remote work. And if you search for writing, you can find quite a bit of options in here, including the niches I was talking about like SEO and just did journalism side of writing. If any gigs are available. Content writing, jobs.com. This is a website where you can find high-quality, mostly SAS roles. And all of these roles, even when it's like content strategy, they involve actual writing. So in here you can actually find, for example, internships. So for example, this is actually a very good gig to kind of get started with. Some of these internships pay as well. So it really depends on whether the rule is remote or not. Then there's working in content. This is a bit trickier because as you can see the categories here, there's quite a few options. But for example, in the situation when I recommend this website the most is actually for technical writing or UX writing. It depends again on what you want to do, but keep in mind that most of these jobs are full-time here, then the super-pattern job, that directory. And again, this tends to be, I would rather just select the freelance option to actually find the freelance gigs in here. Because otherwise, again, it's mostly for full-time roles, for super-fast, I recommend joining their smack community as well where you can keep up with some of the roles. And when you look through all of these channels here, sometimes you'll find people looking for help with writing, but they don't really want to make an official, an official job posting. Then one of my favorites is obviously Twitter. So what you can do is just search for something like looking for a content writer and you can actually find some gigs in here. Or you can just search for content writer, role or job or something like this. And you will also find some opportunities in here. And you can do the same thing with LinkedIn. And as you can see, I actually have a post in here from back when I was looking for some extra content writers myself. You can also find roles for content editors. And specifically with LinkedIn, there's the jobs section. So you can search for something like content writer select your location, even if it's remote, you can actually go and select remote from here. Then you can opt for the job type to be, may be contract work. You can find technically all of the freelancing opportunities in here. Something I like doing is also writing freelance, the search query, and just look through these to essentially find something that suits your expertise, something else you'll do a lot when you're getting started. And really any writer does I also did this a lot even when I had clients sometimes because I wanted to just bigger clients or better clients, I would reach out to companies directly. But the question is how do you find the companies that you want to reach out to? So really the main point is defined company directories or to just make a list of companies you're interested in working with or accompanies that already work with freelance writers in your industry. In SAS, for instance, you have Product Hunt. There's a lot of startups launching daily. You can just make lists of these or you can start engaging with them on their launch day and then reaching out to them again to see if they need help for driving. Another popular solution with some of the best writers is CrunchBase. So you can find a lot of companies and you can store them by industry and all that. However, there's a limit to how you can use this for free. So it's not really a free website, if you will, that are commonplace to search for writing rules is AngelList. You can search for something like and copywriter role. Select that you want a remote job and then start looking through the gigs. Or you can just look through whoever is hiring and reach out to them to see if they need help with writing before they realize this and make it public. So that you are the first to kind of have the lead when it comes to becoming there and go to a writer. And beyond that, it's all about getting creative. So for instance, if you'd like writing about the specific topic, just look through the results on Google, see who the author is, is the auteur is a freelancer, reach out to that company to see if they are looking for more writers. And not a trick I used was to use lap and Ninja. This website really gives you a look at really a lot of new companies. So you'll find a mix of SaaS, companies, e-commerce and a lot of other types of websites essentially. And if there's something that catches your eye, you can reach out to that company, ask if they need help with writing, editing, the content strategy, whatever really. But the next part that's important as how you pitch these companies. Most of the time, these companies aren't actively looking for a writer. You really need to let your experience shine. I will give you a simple basic pitch where you introduce yourself, you write the topics, you come and me write them out and you give some samples essentially. But what I usually recommend is actually customizing these as much as possible. From the gigs I gotten the past, true cold outreach. The most common feedback I got was that my pitch was relevant to what they were selling. In this sense, you really want to customize everything from the topics that you'll write about. These should be directly related to their product, to what they already write about on the blog, to the samples you provide. Because if you provide irrelevant samples, they are just going to skip your pitch. Now, if you have other achievements like a words or whatever, essentially you can put this in here. Point is to always be highly relevant. Now, you can send this pitch via e-mail, but you can also start building relationships with content managers, marketers, CEOs, founders, whatever, via LinkedIn, Twitter. Wherever you want to grow your network. I'm going to be attaching this sample template to the course, but definitely do edited. For a final quick note, I recommend using Clearbit connect to find the e-mails of these people because that's often the most difficult task. Knowing how to actually reach out to someone. The process is basically finding the companies, deciding what your pitch is going to be and then finding the right person descended to the right person is also important to consider. Because if you're going to be sending your pitch to another writer on the team, they're obviously not going to be paying attention to it. Maybe they don't even check their e-mail. You want to send it The someone with the position to actually start working with you, paying you, collaborating with you. This can be a marketing manager, a content manager, conduct strategic, founder and CEO. Sometimes you'll be working with a customer success manager or a sales manager just because the theme is enlarge enough. So it's really important to choose the right people within that theme. 9. Client communication: Let's talk client communication and what to do about contracts. There are, in my opinion, five golden rules for communicating with clients. Number one is to be fast. Now when I was working as a freelance writer myself, and even today when I work with my clients, my biggest differentiator, if you will, is actually being fast to answer their emails. And this applies to how fast you deliver an outline, an article that you really, the ideal situation is a client writes to you and you reply as soon as you see the email. Now this will give you a lot of advantages. You will be the first person they think of when they need a fast delivery for an article. So generally it takes writers roughly two weeks to deliver an article. Of course, it depends on its length, but most writers give a 23 weeks that line just to be sure that they can actually write that article. However, if you are able to provide the same quality within a shorter time span, you will definitely have an advantage. For example, in my case, when I was working as a freelance writer and also when I worked with writers my cell. There's a lot of situations when clients need an article within the next three days. So if you can be that person that deliver is that article within this short timespan, you have an extra advantages actually. But generally, as you can see, I did mention that you can take your time because this is by no means a must. If you want to have those specific deadline when maybe a minimum of one week before delivery, that is perfectly fine as well. The second rule is to be clear over communication is perfectly fine as much as possible before you get started with a project. So a project being an article, for instance, be as clear as possible. Ask questions, make sure that everything is super clear to both you and the client so you won't have to add it that article. A lot of times. The third rule is to meet up with the client beforehand. A lot of companies, So clients don't have the time to on-board their freelance writers. On the opposite end, there is actually quite a few companies that take the time to an interview with the rider onboard them, answered their questions, show them how your product works as much as possible. Ask for one of these meetings to clarify anything that's not super clear to you in terms of what they sell, how they like to work, how they're quantity strategy works. The fourth step and also super important is to always get feedback. I noticed that the best writer client's relations happen when the client is able to give super clear feedback and then the rider can act upon that feedback in detail. For instance, I didn't work with a lot of writers who would make super basic changes after the feedback I gave to them. So I would go over a paragraph and they had essentially super, super basic edits that they made when instead they were supposed to maybe completely rewrite that section. So as much as possible go the extra mile when editing. It's better to be a bit more detailed than to just finish editing an article and five-minutes. Finally, sticking to guidelines, I cannot stress how many riders don't stick to these guidelines. So for instance, at some point, I was working with this content writer who had the specific guideline. But if you wrote to me saying he couldn't stick to that deadline, so he wanted a couple of extra days because he wanted to take the time to really look through the guidelines and get familiar with the company. This was perfectly fine for me as the client. I would read or extend your deadline then have viewed not stick to the guidelines. Switching back to when I was working as a content writer, I would always take one or two hours to get familiar with what my new client was selling, what their products were, everything in the guidelines. And this is super important and really depends on your industry. For example, in SAS, one of the ways I was trying to stand out was by being super product-focused. I would always add in mentions of the product, how it worked in the article. So this essentially took one or two extra hours that were not necessarily paid. But it helps me write better, write faster, and just provide quality at the end of the day. Now when it comes to contracts, I don't specifically have a template for you because Pieces, the client will be the one that provides the contract. For instance, when I was working as a contractor. Now when I do consulting, it's most of the time the client that has a contract. So all you have to do is go through it to make sure that everything is correct and there is no rabbit holes in there. If you really want the contracts for the few clients that don't have one, just Google freelance writer contract. Take that template wherever it is and customize it. So there is four main points that you want in that contract, regardless of whether you are creating it or your client, one is clarifying the rates. How much does an article cost and when the extra cost happen, and how much that extra costs are essentially. The second is the timeline. How long will it take you to deliver an article? What happens if you don't deliver within the due date? How many extra edits editing rounds are needed. If an extra editing round costs extra centrally. Vendor. Other special conditions like when you want to be paid, how collaboration should happen? When do you deliver an outline? When do you deliver a draft? What tools do you use? Who is responsible for uploading that content? Who owns that content? Who's going to be the auteur, stuff like that. Then there's the penalties section. This is optional. I personally never added penalties and I've never had problems. There was one situation where a client I had a contract with essentially didn't pay me for a couple of months because my point of contact left the company. So it did take me a lot of back and forths to actually get paid, but because I had the contract, I did get paid. However, I didn't have any penalties, so I didn't receive any extra money. So it really depends. Sometimes penalties can be off putting for certain clients and they might not want them in there. So it really is up to you. Now, finally on the communication topic, I wanted to mention some quick notes on invoicing. Something super important with invoicing is obviously you want a nice-looking invoice for this. You can just go to canva and honestly, there's some freelance invoices, consulting and voices in here. Just choose a template, use it. Most of the time the actual client won't look at these invoices. It's always there. Theme like finance theme, HR team, whoever it takes care of their payments. And if it's a smaller startup, they might make the payments themselves. But it's always good to just have a nice-looking templates. Always the same with all the info in there. You'll always want to triple check these invoices. So make sure you have all the correct sums and the conditions and the numbers in there, then you want to stick to the clients guidelines. So before you even sign a contract, makes sure it's super clear what currency you will be paid in and also what methods they are going to use to pay you. Because some clients only wants to pay you via PayPal. And if you are outside of the US, this means extra costs for you. So you might prefer just a direct wire transfer instead. After you clarify the currency and the payment method, you make sure all of this is clear in the invoice as well. You'll also need to be aware of that some clients might want to pay you once a month, Not every time you deliver a project, but you can still speed up things if you can offer a payment link. Tools such as FreshBooks, QuickBooks, even PayPal, I think as a direct payment blank. So you take that link, you send it to them with the invoice and they can easily just add in their card info and pay you straightaway. Finally, if you want to, you can include some reminders of the penalties that apply or other special conditions. I would definitely recommend having these on the invoice if it's in the contract. Just so the person that actually is paying you will be aware of these so that you are keeping a fair collaboration process. 10. Structuring your work: Structuring your work can be another challenge as a freelance writer because ultimately you have to manage your own work. With some clients, they might ask you to use certain tools they already use like certain project management tools, maybe even Slack. So some might call you over into day or Slack channels. Or they might just want you to keep track of your work in a specific document, maybe do some time tracking. But most the time you will be working independently with no help with no tools from other companies. The number 1 to keep in mind when actually structuring your work is to keep all of your work progress in one place. This really depends on how organized you want to be. In my case, when I was working as a writer, I would just have a list of my client's name, the usual rate, and then I would write every project, the cost and the due date. And then at the end of the month, I would invoice all of this, delete it, and then start adding it again as I was working on these articles. Then at the bottom of this document, I would just have a huge list. We're talking 50 pages of target companies that I would reach out to sometimes. So essentially for me it was like one document, super simple stuff with everything in here. Another option is to have a Kanban board or a to-do list. So you can use a lot of tools, any task management tool or Trello will do. So essentially you're going to come in here and in maybe the name of your article, a due date, some details, resources, and just move them as you work on them. So when you are done, you can just easily move them over to the final column here and you can see what other articles you need to work on. You can also just create a spreadsheet or whatever and just add in all of the info you need. In my case, I only needed the rate and the due date essentially. And sometimes they would add in quick notes of special requirements from the guidelines or whatever. But you might also want to keep track of when an invoice is paid or when a project was accepted or any kind of status related information. The second is to actually create a clear schedule or timeline, and this is for yourself. The best option is again to use a Kanban board. So maybe Trello or any kind of task management tool to actually organize your work so that you know that during the next week, you will be working on three specific articles. My approach was a bit different. The moment I got an article, I would start working on it. And essentially, I would work on whatever I had and just finish them as soon as possible. If that makes sense. I would prioritize them based on due date and I would just work on them for, let's say, three straight days and then I would have four days free or whatever. So I always knew that I had the time to take on more work and that I would deliver within the deadlines I had. However, sometimes you're weeks can get is routed and you might have to deliver five articles within the same week. So it's best to just keep a super clear schedule. Now the third is something I consider a differentiator. When I was working as a marketer with my previous company, at some point I reached out to a rider who had some rates that were a bit too high for our budgets. Ultimately, she ended up guest posting for us. So that was her opportunity to really show her expertise and show her style of writing, but also she used some extra tools. Those extra tools actually did justify the price. So in her case, it was the content optimization tools, specifically clear scope, which helps you kind of know what keywords to include in your content. Most of the time the client will have access to this. They might actually ask you to make sure you get a high-grade here. But as a writer, you can also have this and maybe offer it as part of your services. You can also use SEO tools like a Trout's. Again, these are all paid tools. And most of the time you won't need to use them because your client already has access to them. But sometimes you have clients that are maybe just the startup, just getting started and they don't want to pay for an extra tool. So it definitely pays to have access to that tool yourself. Or you can use a free keyword generator like LSI graph is an interesting one, and journals quite a few options out there, however, they are a bit more time-consuming to use. Finally, what I recommend when it comes to structuring your freelance writing work is to set limits boat in terms of your timelines as well as personal limits when it comes to how you really, In module your time. When you're working as a freelancer, it's super easy to just work all day. And I've done this again, my strategy was to work maybe two days and then have the rest of the week free. This is tricky if you have maybe another job to balance. If you have a family to take care of, you really want to set boundaries between your work and your personal life. What I would recommend is setting specific timeframes during the day when you want to work. For example, you can work three hours in the morning, two hours in the evening. But really stick to that schedule. Otherwise, it's really easy, again to just work all day and forget about your actual life. And ultimately, this is what's going to make you're not as happy with this freelance writing career because you're going to realize that you're writing all day. And really this is not what we want for you. We want you to enjoy this career. It's really, it's really a nice profession, but you really need to be careful about the way you schedule your day. 11. Building your personal brand + networking: One of the most important parts of a freelancing career in content is growing your personal Ren are going to discuss everything on how you can do this as well as where networking comes in. Now the first obvious question is, do you even need a website? Now the answer is no, but it's handy to have a website. If you look at my own website, you will see that I focus a lot on my work displaying some articles of my own that having some pages for a disservices, I offer the classic About page where I choose to just list some of the places where I write. A website will help you, mostly in two situations. One is when you just want to use it to display or portfolio, and two is when you actually want to potential clients define you. Even in this case, it's tricky because if it's like a general content writer topic, it's tough to actually rank for these keywords. So some prospects will look for something like a content writer in SAS and travel in the pet industry. When you actually look at the search results, you'll see a mix of directories and agencies. And occasionally you have the virus who have managed to actually score ablaze in here. Even though you might drink for some of these keywords, you really need to do the keyword research before you start optimizing your website. And the biggest problem is that these writers that you see here has already gotten control of the syrup. So it's tough to really achieve a higher ranking, if you will. So let's just look at one example from another freelance writer. So if you can see in here and I recommend you just look at the competitors you have in your space. It's again, the basic listing services, metal portfolio. Some writers choose to display just a couple of the pieces they wrote by industry. Others actually list their rates. It really depends, but I'm seeing this strand of displaying your rates publicly die down. Then you have your blog where again, you can showcase some of your pieces. And it's super important to have a blog because it helps you grow your website. And then of course, you can have some of these frequently asked questions right away. Sometimes you can find in here pins on what rates these competitors of yours, if you will have, as well as if they charge an additional 20% fee for ghost writing or anything like that. To be fair, it's not super common for someone who's interested in your services to actually go through this list. So most commonly they will contact you either via the website or LinkedIn or Twitter. Just ask the questions there. So again, a website is definitely handy and I would still suggest you focus on growing your domain authority. Something I did for my own website, for instance, was to use a website like health or B2B writer for help or report around. And you can sign up as a source or both as a source and a journalist slash rider. And what happens is that you will get via email on a daily basis, which opportunities so that you can submit maybe a quote to a writer, blogger, journalists that needs it on a specific topic. So for instance, I would submit quotes on the marketing topics, content freelancing and similar, whatever is under your expertise. But when using a solution like this, which by the way is free for you, try to provide quotes for websites that, you know, they are the place where your target market spend your time. Because otherwise it's really just going to help you with kind of improving your domain authority, which is not bad. But you want both the link juice as well as the actual eyeballs on your quote. Besides your website, There's other opportunities for growing your personal brand and as kind of ranked how important they are, but these are basically interchangeable. The most obvious opportunity is any kind of social media, starting with Twitter. I specifically don't use Twitter a lot although I should, because to be fair, I've gotten more clients specifically brought spots, that's where my exact ICP via Twitter as opposed to LinkedIn. So the point here is to just publish on a regular basis. And also there's hashtags you can use freelance writing so that you can see what other freelance writers are talking about, what challenges they have and just start interacting with them. Then there is also specialized accounts that provides gigs. It on a regular basis. So it's super easy to keep up with potential gigs than simply if you write something like content writer or content writer and the travel space. So it can be something just like travel writer. You just have to play with these keywords and then look at people who will find basically all of your competitors, if you will. But if you work in a separate, in this tree, so a different one, then all of these people in here are your potential freelancing mass friends. So I definitely recommend connecting with them, talking to them. This is great. That's working opportunity for you issue. And also you can look for your target clients in here. So maybe you want to target something like marketers in the SaaS space. Again, you can find a lot of people this way. Just follow them, interact with them. Again, it's really a matter of not just posting, but actually talking to people. But something that's super important with any of the social networks you use is actually understanding where your target market spends time and also what kind of content you create for them. For example, cat, in this case, uses Instagram to create content for other freelancers. And this is amazing for her because she has some materials resources she's selling for freelancers. So she is trying to kind of positioned herself as the go-to place. If you need advice as a freelancer. In this case, Instagram doesn't really help her actually get clients, but she's growing her brand in this freelancing space. On the other end, if you want to get to your target market, you really need to understand where they spend their time. For business in general, whether it's SAS, cybersecurity, in sales, marketing, whatever. There's a high chance that their go-to network is LinkedIn. You want to regularly post content on this network and it can be videos, it can be podcasts, snippets, it can be just Tweets you've had and turned into image for LinkedIn. It can be images The long for an taxed discussing a specific issue. You can start yourself and use lateral here besides the newsletter that you have on your website, the point here is to continuously grow your network, specifically your followers, that you can get yourself and your posts every time in front of more people. So the tricky part with this is exactly what I mentioned on the Instagram situation. For instance, in my case at the beginning, I would connect with a lot of people who had the same profile as me. So it was freelance writers, content marketers, other types of marketers. But in reality, I should have connected and started talking to people who were my target market. For instance, startup founders and similar when crafting your LinkedIn strategy, always keep in mind your target market and put out content that suits them. Disclaimer here, I will have a separate course on how to use LinkedIn for all of this to get either a job or new clients. And I will take you through every single tiny thing that you need to focus on. Something I just wanted to briefly mentioned is to definitely make sure that you are open to providing services. And really make sure you polish your profile and have as many keywords as possible. In my case, I just listed some of my areas of interest. And then I do publish on those topics on a regular basis. This makes it easier for people to find me. Besides social networks, there's the option for yourself to start a YouTube channel. Again, think of whether you want to create it for freelancers or for your target market. In my case, for instance, my YouTube channel is in a completely different area, if you will, and I'm just doing the videos for fun. And then I occasionally drop in my marketing and writing styles. Then there's obviously the auction for yourself to create courses like I'm doing right now. And then there's just other projects you can consider. Now among these projects are obviously my third here, just being active in Slack communities, Twitter spaces, going on podcasts, getting speaking gigs, and yes, all of these are a must specifically because if you really take a look at the writers that are earning, they are dream income, all of them are doing, at least part is what you see in here. Then finally, some other options to consider our guest posting. With guest posting in particular, again, there's two options. You can get those just to get a backlink. You can go to any kind of blog, website in your industry and get yourself a post in there. Or you can have a guest post or a sponsored post on the website that has a solid readership. You know that your target market, we'll be exposed to that piece of content. See your writing style and then reach out to you because they saw you in their favorite place essentially. And finally, there's partnerships. For a partnership, there is a lot of things you can do from simply partnering with companies that have a webinar series and events that you can attend and speak at any kind of virtual events or an ask me anything session. So for instance, community takeovers. And then also you can partner with other freelancers. So you can have, for example, features in their newsletter. You can maybe have a joint event or video series with them, whatever do you kind of feel that will bring in the most benefits. And this ties into my idea for networking because you will have to inevitably keep doing that to working with both other freelancers and with your target market and with other marketers and editors. And maybe even some publicists and journalists who actually started building those relationships so that at some point it will be easier for you to start being featured in the places where you want. But let's see what the options for doing that's working are. So there is roughly for a big secrets for building relationships as a freelancer. Number one is knowing where to look. There's specific social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn. Most commonly sometimes you can find freelancers on Facebook as well because there's some communities in there as well. But then there's maybe closed communities, especially associations. And this is just if you want to build relationships with other writers. Because you will also have to inevitably consider, for instance, a Slack group like super path, which I told you about where there's a mix of both freelance writers and what I would call prospects. So marketer's content managers and so on. You really need to dig into kind of where they spend most of your time and started reaching out to them. And you can be as creative as you want. For instance, if you like someone on YouTube that does videos and talks about the freelancing live. You can definitely reach out to them as well. But the second really is to actually be open to helping. The whole idea behind networking is that you can ultimately exchange. It's not just ideas and struggles and challenges and tips, but also clients. So quite often you will maybe have a company reach out to you, but they're not exactly the right fit for your expertise. Or maybe they want you to write in a separate industry. But if you know someone who writes for that specific industry, you can refer them to this potential client and return. Hopefully they will also do the same thing for you. So actually if you just look on LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever, marketer or whatever asks for help with content in a specific niche. You will often see even writers, freelance writers specifically recommend other people, even if sometimes it's in their own industry. Because to be fair, at some point you will be overbooked. You want to continue to help others, essentially flying gigs, that eventually you can get the same level of help in return when you might need it. Then the third is Paul up a quick chat. Anything from a quick meet up over Zoom to maybe even meeting in person if you live in the same city helps to create a closer bond with this person. So specifically, you will definitely want a couple of freelancing best friends to really turn to whenever you need advice with something. Or again, if you ever need some extra helping hands, where do your writing something as simple as actually talking to that person face-to-face. I'll see you build a completely different type of relationship in the sense that one, it will be easier for both of you to remember one another To you will find out a lot of extra stuff about the other person so that, you know, whenever you see a client that's a fit, you can recommend it to them. And then it just helps to kind of have these relationships both in your industry and in Azure industries that aren't exactly what you're focused on right now. Finally, do talk to people in other industries or roles. Yes, you do want to talk to people in other industries because they're not necessarily your direct competitors. But they also share a similar challenges that you do. And also you never know when you might want to just enter a new industry. But it's really interesting to actually talk to people who have different roles. So if you are a freelance content writer, it's definitely interesting to talk to someone who is a consultant, maybe on the PPC side, or who has just SEO, or maybe someone who is a bit more of a generalist marketing consultant, or even someone who just does illustration and design and UX as a freelancer. Again, there will always be these kind of challenges and tips you can share. And also it's just very handy to have an extensive network. For instance, sometimes I would have clients that needed help with a comprehensive guide or a case study so I could provide the research and the writing. But then you needed someone else as a designer, It's definitely handy to have someone to recommend that when maybe that designer gets a gig somewhere else, they can also recommend you for a copywriting, content writing and so on. So this would be a summary of what you need to do to actually develop your personal brand and maintain a solid network. As a disclaimer, everything we've already talked about, you basically need to keep doing it forever. The only thing that changes in time really is that after a couple of years, you don't have to be so obsessed with it. So in the first few years, let's say two to three years, you do want to be as active as possible and just everywhere really. After four or five years, you can take it easier and just kind of pick the places where you focus your attention. For instance, instead of going on Slide smaller podcasts, you can just opt for one that's more popular. Or instead of posting daily on LinkedIn, a post every week we'll do because you've already gotten that network that's looking forward to your content and that has previously engaged with your content. So the algorithm, depending on the network, will pick it up, pick your posts up high are essentially. So it really depends on your situation and what you want to do in time. But networking is really something you need to keep doing for pretty much the rest of your career. 12. Conclusion and how to develop your writing skills: Congratulations on making it to the end of this course. It's been a wonderful journey for both of us because we've had a chance to go over everything you need to get started with your career as a content writer and also with growing your expertise in the field. Now keep in mind there was a very insightful bonus section to this course that will teach you more about how you can scale your career as a writer, as well as there is a Q&A section with just common questions I get from other mentees I have. Before I say bye to you, I want us to go briefly over the project for this course, so I'm looking forward to seeing your progress on that. For this project, I want you to head over to the projects and resources section. And that's where you will need to go through all of the details of the project. Essentially, you will have it put together kind of like a freelancing plan. We are going to briefly think of the niches that you might want to consider. Think of the passions that you have. And then after you're done with this plan, you can essentially analyze if it's worthwhile if the industry is in demand. In the freelancing plan, we will also consider a rate that you can charge. You can also add a starting portfolio in there. You can also list your pitch if you want to, and a bunch of other details. The goal is that at the end, you will have an overview of your freelancing profile. So the points that you're good at lunch, unique to charge, and so on. Now optionally you can share some of your public articles with us. Now obviously you won't be sharing your freelancing plan because that's only yours. So ideally, don't share it with anyone. Just go over it on a regular basis and keep improving it until you have that ideal profile. Now again, thank you so much for sitting through this course. Don't forget about the bonus section, which honestly if you asked me it's really the best board because it has really does small secrets in there. And if there's anything I missed or if you have other questions, just let me know and I will get back to you as soon as possible In enjoy the rest of your day and see you in another course. Don't forget on my profile you can find some other courses that will help you specifically improve your writing skills. I have this hands-on content writing course that shows you really examples of great content and how you can create that yourself, as well as what tools you can use in the process and more tips. And then there is obviously a keyword research course if you want to kind of scale your services. And the most interesting one in my opinion is the writing an article from start to finish where I do just what the title says. You can use the scores if you are interested in SEO Writing. And it's like a super short course, though it will take you less than one hour to kind of gain those skills. Again, see you in the next bonus lecture. 13. Bonus: Scaling your career + Q&A: Hi everyone, Alexandra here. So in this bonus lecture, which is available both in my course and on YouTube, we're going to discuss ways of scaling your freelance writing career. I also have a Q&A session from questions I often get from my Mandy's. Now usually I recommend a freelancing writing career as a go-to starting point if you want to enter a new industry or if you want to get started when a marketing role, there is a bunch of opportunities to actually scale your freelance writing career. The number one thing and the most common one is to go from a content writer to a continentally. For instance, you can join, accompany in-house. Start as either a contractor or as an in-house content writer than scale to a content specialist or to an editor, and ultimately end up working as a content marketing lean or a VP of content. Then the second common option is to actually go from a rider to a marketer. When you join a company as a writer, you will most of the time actually be part of the marketing team. So if you stick with that company for a couple of years, you can actually advance towards getting more skills and becoming a human generation market or a content marketing manager, a growth marker and so on. Now something else to consider is whether you want to be in house or maybe you just want to work as a contractor. So as a freelancer, There's also the option to do content writing part-time, or as a side, Yea, maybe you have your main job as a specialist in a field and you just want to do freelance writing on the side centers, obviously the option to become an auteur, either for fiction or not necessarily a content creators. So for instance, in my case, I create courses, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Instagram, I'm on LinkedIn. So there is a bunch of options and you can actually monetize these by selling resources, templates, courses, whatever it actually. Then finally, what I always recommend is actually considering at, or careers at our roles and our industries. So if you maybe right now are passionate about travel, you can actually get started with just writing about this. But it's in time. You want to, maybe you're just considering a different industry. Maybe something in SaaS like the project management industry or productivity tools or anything like that, there's always the option to actually scale towards this different type of niche. Essentially. As course, you're not just limited to being a freelance writer or a marketer, because just being a writer is an amazing learning opportunity. You can learn a lot about a char, about sales, about operations union, about software development and more technical topics. In time, you might want to start considering a separate career. Now something that I cannot stress enough is to please by all means, ideally right now, take a piece of paper and a pen and outline your career expectations. If for example, what I did was to think of every single role and maybe industry, Maybe company that you want to work out every single year. So this year you're going to start working as a freelance writer room. Maybe next year he wants to be in house. That in your third year you can be a content specialist that move the words being a content manager, the content lead. And then maybe after 67 years, you can move into a more generalist marketing role like a demand generation lead or road marketing. And then ultimately in ten plus years, maybe you want it to be a marketing director or something like that. Now, since this course focuses a lot on how you can scale your career as well as your services. I have prepared a couple of questions that I often get from my mentees and that in general, as a freelance writer, you might want to know more about. The first question is, how do I onboard new clients? So I did mention in the scores that generally fly-in might want to have an on-boarding session with they are riders. Ideally, it's the client who comes forward to teach you about how they do content, what their expectations are, and how their product works. You might also need a couple of steps to go through with your client. It can be reviewing the contract, reviewing any kind of guidelines that you might have for the way that you like to communicate. So it's best to always call up a meeting or at least go through some points so that your clients can approve your rates. Again, the contract and any other guidelines you might have potential penalties that might happen if they don't pay you on time. Or it could just be walking them through your writing process. So this is a must telling them exactly how you expect the collaboration to happen. So for instance, in my case, I would meet up with the client, then they would send me a topic and the guidelines. I would take a couple of days to go over the guidelines. When I started working on the article, I would first send out either a brief or an outline depending on whether they had this themselves or not, then they would approve the outline and then the nut stuff was for me to work on the actual droughts. So it was a lot of back-and-forth that just needed to be clarified during this on-boarding process. Now, the next question is, should I add leaves to my waiting list when I'm fully booked? So this is a big yes. I have talked to a lot of content writers who didn't have time for extra work and they just said this but they didn't add, in that case, my company to their wavelength. This is a big no. So what I did instead when I was a freelance writer was to let them know that my schedule right now was full or it would sometimes take on short pieces of writing, but not necessarily regular work. And so for irregular articles like we articles per month, I would just tell them that it's okay. I'm going to add you to my waitlist and get back to you in. And then you would give them an aesthetic like three months, six months, when something opens up, essentially you're maintaining this communication with them. You're not just saying no to them altogether. What do I do with leaves there are into fit? This happens often in my case, for instance, I always took on science in industries I was super familiar with because I wanted to be a subject matter expert at everything I was writing about because this just makes your process easier. It's faster to write content. You put together much better content. You know where to get insights and so on. So if you have leaves that aren't exactly a fit, don't just say you don't want to take that to work on. You can, on one end suggests maybe helping them with some services like maybe putting together an editorial calendar or helping them with certain topics that they might tackle and those that are within your reach. Or you can actually help him find a rider. The rider as you network with those you talk to that are maybe not your direct competitors. It can be writers in a different niche. You can refer clients to them essentially. And in return, they will also refer your clients to you if they are not a fit for them. What happens when an invoice payments are late? In the contract section of this course, I did mention that some writers do like to include penalties in the contract ends on the invoice. So there was a couple of things you can do in my case. I never had penalties. I would just follow up with the client if they were allay or sometimes they just forgot to make the payment. But another option is to include a penalty. So something like 0.5% for every day that they haven't made the payment. Or it can be like ten extra dollars per month. To avoid this issue, definitely want a contract in place and telling you I've had situations where to be fair. It wasn't like super often. I mean, it only happens twice to me. In one case. It was like I had to wait for months to get paid, but I did have the contract and I did understand the situation because my point of contact with that company had changed. So they were kind of restructuring their marketing. So it's one, understanding the situation and to just following up with them and as much as possible having a contract in place. How do I project manage multiple Science at the same time? So again, I do recommend looking over my how to structure your work section in this course because it's relatively uneasy process. It's really a matter of just again outlining your clients the project ideally kind of breaking down your work. So knowing that this week are going to work on three articles for three different clients or something I did was to take one week for one client. For example, I would have five days to take care of three articles for the same client. And then the next week I would work on three articles for another client and I would just deliver all of them in bulk. So this works amazingly. You have a contract or some type of formal agreement which are applying so that you deliver more articles during one month. I had amazing clients who would give me a list of articles at the beginning of the month, I would take care of them and just deliver all of them at once. How did you deal with writing about things you're not an expert in? So to be fair, I don't recommend this. I personally, again, I always wrote on topics. I was confident with topics where I had experience. Yes, you might be getting started in this career or you might want to enter a new niche, essentially. In this case, one, you'll need to take a bit of extra time to do the learning. Instead of giving her deadline of one week or two weeks, may be make it three weeks to a month so that you can actually deliver a high-quality piece without any mistakes in it. Generally only take work in what's under your expertise. But if you are planning on entering a new niche, definitely add in a couple of extra weeks to do the research. And what works best honestly, if you're just starting to write about a new topic is to take a course as much as possible. There's a lot of free courses on any topics. There's even just on Skillshare essentially. You can find even free articles that are kind of like guides to that topic that can give you a better overlook of every detail essentially because that's what you want. You want. If you want to scale specifically, you need to really grasp as we detail as eight topics, how many revisions should I include in my rates? So for instance, I never mentioned this because to be fair, it was almost always like two or three revisions maximum that the clients needed. So what I would recommend when you're getting started is to actually include this New York contract. Usually you're going to want to mention something like free revisions. Definitely not more than three revisions. Because what happens after that second or third revision round is that you risk having to rewrite that article. So as someone who didn't add the revisions in there, I had this situation once where I actually had to rewrite the article because declined kind of changed your mind on your positioning. So after the first revision round, it was still within these three rounds. I was basically asked to rephrase everything and change some things. So that honestly sucks, but it's somehow part of the job. So that's why it's best to just clarify everything from the beginning. How do you manage seasonal changes? So honestly, this was my biggest challenge as a freelance writer. There's months like during the summer or December is often the worst one where your point of contact with accompany is on a holiday or maybe they just don't want to put out that much content anymore during these months. So it's going to be a bit slower. So what you do at this point is you'd turn to your waitlist of client and you go to those people who've expressed interest in your services and ask them if they need some help during this time. Also, this is an amazing time. So these months, specifically, to just take care of your personal brand, find a list of potential new clients. And firstly, what I did was to look for clients that would need occasional work. Instead of the three posts or however many per month, they would need one posted a month or one post every quarter or whatever, so that you always have these companies to turn to essentially. Also this time is your perfect chance to start a newsletter. It starts some courses. That's what I did essentially, that's how my course is started. I had a free break, let's say in my schedule. So I started creating other types of content. Do I need formal educational training to become a writer? Now, the short answer is no, but most writers do have some form of education behind. In my case, I do have a master's degree and I do have like other types of trainings. So there's a lot of online courses starting with this one to anything you can find on Skillshare. The HubSpot Academy has a couple of amazing courses for free if you wanted to get started in marketing. Also, you can just look for a topic on YouTube and look through a couple of the videos and webinars to get more experience with. It really as her spending every aspect of content of marketing, specific parts of marketing, whatever you are looking to learn. Even though you are a freelance writer, you still need to maintain that long-term learning essentially. Definitely take courses. Talk to people like if you don't want to invest any money on this, it's still possible There's free courses out there, free content. There's options to talk to experts in a field. For example, I personally talk to marketers that are at the VP level, kind of where I wanted to get. Because I can kind of craft my career so that it's easy for me to get there by making use of their expertise. So for instance, my approach when I don't know how to do something is to go into community or to my network to actually see how they did that thing themselves. So that I have this starting point. This is like in formal education. So really kind of just summarize this question. You do need some form of education, but it does not need to be formal. However, if you are already in college. So maybe because I know a lot of writers who've done, for example, like chemistry and life sciences for their bachelor's degree. You can use that expertise to write about those topics. So it's definitely an amazing starting point. Now another question, Do I have to pay to find work? Never. If somebody comes up to you and asks you to pay a certain sum of money to get leads or whatever. No, finding clients is free. It shouldn't cost you anything. You should not pay ourselves for anything. Noah's answering my emails, what do I do? This is simple, but it's time-consuming, so you just keep sending emails. So remember how in this course I told you to focus on having a list of prospects and keep updating that list of ideal companies. Definitely want to start writing to all of those. So sands may be, in my case, I would send like 50 emails a week during a single day. But in your case, it can be like ten emails a day or whenever up until you actually start getting 34 clients. One, always keep polishing your pitch. Again, there is a pitch template you can start with, but I definitely recommend customizing it. The pitch template is in this. Resources for this course. Always keep polishing that and specifically made sure that it's customized for every company so that the samples are up to par with their expectations, the topics they write about. And then do follow up with all of the people who reach out to, to be fair following up sometimes in this field is not like super effective. You wanted to get creative. In my case, I would send videos instead of e-mails on LinkedIn as a kind of first interaction after a connection request. I would also kind of sometimes just ask a content manager if they needed help with content. So it's really diverse if you will, really need to experiment. But the point is, you're going to have, this is something I heard early in my career and I was like was, but it's so true. You have to send probably more than a 100 emails, so a 100 companies to actually start getting some replies. It's because not everyone's looking for a freelance writer. Most people work with in-house writers. Lot of companies don't even want to focus on content, so it's tricky. How much can I realistically earn however much you want as long as you are willing to put in the time. Like super realistically speaking, anything above 30 to 40 k as doable quite easily when you want to scale beyond, let's say 60 K dollars. It takes a lot more time and building your personal brand realistically independently, like just viewed doing the writing work, you can guess 200 K. That's kind of the point to where I got. But beyond that, so beyond the 100 K, especially if you're still at the beginning to mend freelancing stage. Beyond this stage, you want to maybe work with other freelance writers to scale your business in time. You might want to consider doing some of the writing yourself and then having some other freelance writers you work with to kind of keep up with the demand you might want to start a small agency is small studio. It's really up to you. What do you need to know about a project before you start writing? One? The very first thing is just clarifying everything that's in the contract. So the rates. Emissions, communication type, and so on. And then specifically about a project and the most ideal situation you would get a brief. That's brief would include everything from keywords that you need to include to the goal of the posts, to resources you can use to competing pieces they want to be, and so on. The more detailed debrief, the better. But in a lot of situations the client will just give you a topic or a keyword and you have to put together everything. Nevertheless, something you should clarify is exactly kind of what the goal of the content strategy overall is. Specifically when you get a topic, do make sure you clarify what they want out of that topic, out of that specific keyword. Do they want a product lead content? Do they just want to rank? Is it may be just like for taught leadership purposes and so on. Second, because in some situations this is possible, try to make use of the resources the company has, from designers to internal experts. For instance, I had a client where I would reach out to some of their sales leaders to get quotes for a piece and to clarify a topic that was a bit controversial. So it's not necessarily alone in this, even though you are a freelance writer. Should I promote if on socials and my website? Definitely, definitely if, especially if you are going to be ghostwriting on article, nobody's going to allow you to share that content. But if you do get a byline, if you have that order name next to the post, you definitely want to promote this work because it's in your best interest. Because the more people see your article, the more people that you will get as prospects and just getting that exposure over your articles is ultimately what matters no matter who is promoting the post. Also keep in mind sometimes there's clients who directly demand that you promote that article. It's a bit tricky, like you want to promote that article because you want to not because somebody else says so. So it really depends on whether you liked the company, whether you are actually willing to promote every piece. I partnered up with other freelance writers, definitely. So this is what I mentioned during the personal branding lecture. Definitely wants to keep networking with other freelance writers and to exchange clients, exchange workloads. It depends, like sometimes you won't have time to do all of the writing for one client. So you might need to turn to one of your freelancing best friends, so definitely partner up with them. Plus a lot of freelance writers have different projects like newsletters, podcast, different types of events that you can participate in. How do I demonstrate expertise, knowledge in a field? So again, if you are going to be writing as a subject matter expert on a topic, you are super familiar with some of the ways essentially in which you can do this as one either have formal education, some formal type of training, or maybe you've just written on that specific topic quite a lot. So this is the most common situation. If somebody wants you to demonstrate your expertise, to send them some of your best pieces as samples. Some other things you can do are obviously talk about your expertise and above the things you know, during a first call with a potential clients and moving over to the personal branding side of things. One of the most efficient ways of getting prospect's without doing the manual, reaching out is to actively talked about certain topics. For instance, I talk a lot about marketing and even productivity and project management. And especially when I was working as a freelance writer, I would talk about the topics I wrote about on LinkedIn, on Twitter. You also want to do some guest posting. The bigger websites you can get, the better you can showcase your expertise. Now for the final question, how do I scale from 60 K to a 100 K? So again, it's what I already mentioned. It's a matter of really being willing to spend full-time amount. So 40 hours per week to actually dedicating us to widening as well as to keep pitching clients. For instance, in my case, I had roughly 56 regular clients. But I also had a lot of other types of work like editorial calendars, marketing consultancy, briefs that I had to put together. Calls with just consulting with startups and so on. So all of these one time, which sometimes turn into regular work, essentially, all of these efforts do kind of add up. So you definitely want to consider again, doing more than just writing. So I talked about this in the course. You want to extend your services, expand them so you do writing, editing, wreath creation, editorial calendars, other types of marketing services like SEO, email marketing and so on. Plus as much as possible try to get some passive income. So to be fair part, my earnings were passive income. To be fair again, passive income is not always just passive. So when I'm creating these courses, I'm putting a lot of time into these, so you are still working hard for that money essentially. The second really option to scale to earn more than a 100 K is two against started working with other freelance writers who can help you scale. Maybe start an agency is small studio. But something, I mean, I would say the most effective thing if you don't want to work with attorneys is to actually take a part-time job. For example, in my case, I would have a part-time job for three months or something like that. Like the most I've had was like for six months, three months, six months. You can even do a year if you want to. This will bring you, depending on your expertise, income you want on a regular basis. For example, at some point I was charging for K for part-time work, but I did have a lot of expertise in that field. So that's how I was able to get that rate essentially. And besides that, I was also doing writing for me. This was like super easy to scale to convey a month essentially. Now another thing you can do to actually scale your business is to obviously focus on your writing skills. And I've talked about this a lot in this course. And I have some other courses that actually teach you how to become better at SEO Writing, how to do keyword research, how to just provide amazing and unique content because all clients are looking for this. There's still companies that want the basic content just to populate your blog. At the companies that pay more money for the same amount of time that you would spend working for a company that doesn't pay you that much. These higher pain companies, they won cued to provide actual quality, unique content, anything that can help them stand out, essentially, looking ahead at the future kind of what you should do after this course is definitely, again, go through the project of the course and then start polishing your writing skills again, I do have some courses that you can take under my Skillshare profile. So if you have other questions because it's super important, just write to me or leave a comment and I will get that to you as soon as possible. Enjoy the rest of your day and I will see you in some of the next courses.