How I Built a Full-Time Career as a Freelance Writer

10 min readDec 18, 2020

As a teenager, I’d always had dreams of ‘making it’ as a writer, whatever that meant. And at eighteen, brimming with ambition and fresh out of high school, the time had come to give it my best shot. That’s when I realized a harsh truth about the often-romanticized world of writing. It’s not easy to make a career as an author.

My childhood naivety had left me with the false belief that becoming an author would be as simple as waiting for inspiration to strike, writing a bestselling novel, and reaping the rewards for the remainder of my happy, carefree life.

While such a journey would have been great, my first steps into the world of freelance literature crushed those unrealistic hopes pretty quickly. Of course, I could become a writer. But it would never be as easy as I’d once thought.

I was yet to learn about how to market my work, how to establish my personal brand, how to build connections with other creatives, and how to deal with clients. And after trial, error, more error, crippling failure, and many years of being soul-crushingly poor, I found my footholds and learned to climb higher in a new industry as a complete beginner.

How did I get from point A to B? Let me tell you.

Finding My Feet

Usually, finding your first client is the toughest step. At least, it was for me.

I was a complete novice. Watching all of these other writers achieving such big things left me feeling deflated and disheartened. They were all earning so much money, generating tonnes of views on their content — and here was me unable to land a single paid gig.

After applying for high-budget jobs over several months and being repeatedly rejected, I reasoned that I’d just have to suck it up and settle for some low-paid, uninteresting jobs until I gained more experience. Alas, as many do, I resorted to using Upwork to find my first client.

There, I started writing articles at £0.01 per word, earning me a little over £3 per hour of hard, focused work. It sucked, but as a beginner, I couldn’t expect much more than that. I was being paid to write. That’s what I wanted.

And so, I figured that the only way I was going to crack this industry was to knock that small-time gig completely out of the park. Although I was earning next-to-nothing and couldn’t care less about the topics I was writing about (cryptocurrency, kitchen hardware, dog food, you name it), I gave those blog posts everything I had.

I researched extensively, fact-checked all of the information I sourced, and ensured that every sentence I wrote was as good as it could possibly be, even though I was being paid peanuts. And it paid off.

Lesson One: Overdeliver

The client providing me with work was so impressed with my performance that he referred me to another businessman looking for some written content, willing to pay double my current rate.

After just a month of doing exactly the same thing as before, providing as much value as I could, my new client put me in touch with another entrepreneur, this time looking for somebody to write copy. My rates doubled again.

This pattern continued. As I gained more experience and my network expanded, more people started asking me to write for them. Now, I’m paid a dollar per word to write about subjects I’m passionate about. That small network of clients has landed me the majority of the connections and clients I have today, all because I worked as hard as I could to overdeliver from the very beginning.

If I’d carried on expecting high-paid work because of my ‘natural talent’ and not focusing on gaining experience, as most of us do, I’d never have made it to where I am today.

The lesson? Don’t let your sense of self-entitlement overshadow the sheer importance of working your way up from the bottom. To borrow a line from Ryan Holiday:

“Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room — until you change that with results.”

Lesson Two: Find a Golden Ticket

One of the biggest problems freelancers tend to have is increasing their rates. They secure a few clients, those clients become accustomed to paying x amount of money per article, and then the budding writer gets stuck. They don’t want to demand more money and lose a client, but they also don’t want to spend years writing for the same nominal sums.

How, then, do you increase your rates once the money starts coming in? Well, as with any sale, if you’re expecting customers to pay big money, you’d better start demonstrating big value. You wouldn’t spend $10,000 on a fake diamond ring, so don’t expect your clients to pay triple your current rate if you still have next to no experience.

It doesn’t matter how much value you claim to provide. Anybody can say they’re providing value. You have to be able to prove it. You wouldn’t pay thousands for something if you couldn’t ascertain its value, so don’t expect clients to pay you a lot of money just because you tell them you’ll provide high-quality content.

In the world of writing, the proof isn’t in the pudding, but in the experience. Often, not even a degree in creative writing is enough to persuade a person to pay you. Trust me. I’ve employed many writers, and not once have I asked to see a degree. I ask where they’ve been published.

In my experience, being published in reputable spaces has enabled me to ramp up my rates quickly. Last winter, I was charging a standard price of £0.10 per word. Fast-forward 12 months and I’m being paid $500 for 500 words — $1 per word. That’s an enormous jump for a year, and the only way I was able to provide it was by demonstrating value.

Interestingly, the client paying me those rates approached me. I didn’t apply to work for them. They found me through my work.

So what changed? Well, around a year ago, I was catching up with my mum at a local cafe over a hot mug of coffee when my phone lit up, displaying an email that seemed too good to be true.

After reading the subject line, “An Invitation From Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global,” my first thought was ‘surely this is spam’. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

Getting published to Thrive was a huge deal for me. But most importantly, it was a golden ticket that allowed me to increase my rates. Adding to that, I had two articles of mine go semi-viral, attracting 50K views each. More recently, my publication, Mind Cafe, exceeded 100K followers and began reaching millions of monthly readers, as well as welcoming esteemed writers such as Nir Eyal, Benjamin Hardy, PhD, and Brianna Wiest to our roster.

All of these things communicate one thing to my clients. That is, that I know what I’m doing. I stand out amongst the competition, and therefore they’re happy to pay more money for my work.

If you want to charge more and get away from those peanut-paying clients, you need to find ways to make a name for yourself either by growing an audience or being published in a reputable space. Those are your golden tickets — your credentials.

Every decent feature is like an extra dollar in your pocket where your freelancing rates are concerned. You’ll probably be rejected a few times, but that’s okay. So long as you’re taking the time to write truly engaging, high-quality content, somebody will publish you, and that somebody will become your golden ticket.

Lesson Three: Scale

Along the journey, there are a few other things I’ve learned about the writing industry that have proven to be useful. Two of these include niching down and building a network. Let’s explore those points in more depth.

1. Nail your personal brand

As a writer, you’re a business. You’re charging money for a product. That product is you. Or rather, your services. Any good entrepreneur understands the value of a well-defined brand when it comes to driving sales and attracting customers.

An example of an author with a killer personal brand is Sarah Knight. Her tone, content, image — everything about her online presence reflects her style as a writer.

If you’ve ever read any of Sarah’s work, you’ll know that she swears a lot. She’s casual, funny, and writes as though she’s your foul-mouthed best friend offering you life advice over a glass of wine.

Her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, is an accurate representation of everything she’s about. If you know Knight, you’ll be able to recognize her writing from the first couple of sentences.

That’s branding, baby. And it’s critical.

The first step toward creating a strong brand is to pick your niche. Mine is personal development, self-help, all that good stuff. Yours might be practical philosophy, like Ryan Holiday, or entrepreneurship, like Tim Ferriss.

Whatever it is, define it, and define it well. Define what it is, who cares about it, where they live, everything. And once you have, ensure that every single thing you put out online aligns with that sacred brand of yours. That’s your unique selling point in the densely populated metropolis of writing.

That way, anybody looking to employ you that stumbles across your social media channels won’t be met with cat memes or drunken videos of you dancing to Come On Eileen (guilty as charged), but a professional, well-defined representation of what you’re all about.

2. Build your network and then…

The first action point is to get your foot in the door, and building your network can be an incredibly effective way to do exactly that. It’s often the key to finding clients in the first place.

Studies show that as many as 85% of employment positions are landed simply by networking. By networking, I mean getting to know the big names in your industry — the people that are likely to employ you or help you progress further. It isn’t always about what you know, but who you know.

Just by building a single connection from a content mill and working hard for a couple of months, one contact led me into three other paid contracts. That’s the power of networking.

3. Engage

Once you’ve fertilized the soil by branding yourself and selected your crops by making a list of potential connections, it’s time to start planting a few seeds by engaging and interacting with the people on your list.

The practice of establishing new connections can be broken down into five simple steps:

Follow. Start following the people you listed on all relevant social media platforms.

Interact. Once you’ve followed them, begin to interact with them by liking their content and responding to their posts.

Wait. Keep this up until they become aware of your existence. (Either by following you back or responding to your interactions.)

Develop. Once you’ve made contact, you can start to dig a little deeper. Send them a direct message telling them how much you like their work or ask them a question about something. Anything — just start a conversation.

Fire. And, when you’ve built that connection, pop the question. Ask for help. If they already know you personally, they’ll be much more inclined to support you than if they’d never even heard of you.

Networking doesn’t have to be difficult. Providing you’ve painted a pretty picture of yourself online and have a good idea of who best to contact, following these five simple steps can make it incredibly easy to build strong relationships with the right people.

It’s important to remember here that you should never use people just to get what you want. When you build connections, do so because you genuinely like or admire the person you’re approaching. Don’t just flatter them and use them to get your own way — they’ll see right through it. Be sincere. Help them, and they’ll help you too.

The Takeaway

Starting out in a brand new industry can seem incredibly daunting, especially before you’ve managed to secure your first client.

But by providing maximum value for your work, creating a strong, professional online presence, and building genuine connections with big names in your industry, working your way up from the bottom isn’t as impossible as it may at first appear.

And, if ever you feel disheartened in your efforts, return to the following quote from Seth Godin.

“Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.” — Seth Godin, The Dip

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