How to Make 2x More Money as a Writer

This is a guest contribution from Puranjay Singh.

Around six months ago, I quit my job to make a living as a writer. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy my work; it was just that I wanted to travel and needed the freedom of freelancing. I didn’t know a lot about writing, but I knew I could turn a phrase or two.

Besides, how hard could it be?

The answer: very hard. Freelance writing is america phone number a hyper-competitive industry where you are fighting against thousands of writers for the same jobs. Sheer writing skills count for nothing, degrees for even less. Add writers willing to underbid you, and you have a recipe for total disaster.

To succeed, I had to go against a lot of conventional advice. I had to change the way I approached my writing. I also had to bring in all my years of marketing knowledge to get the jobs I wanted.

In the process, I ended up making 2x more money as a writer.

Here’s how you can do the same.

Think Like a Business Owner

I started my freelance writing career like most others – I found gigs online, wrote long cover letters highlighting my education, then waited patiently for a response.

I won a grand total of two jobs this way. My proposal to job conversion rate was an abysmal 4%. Clearly, this was no way to replace a full-time income.

It took weeks of despair and error before I realized my approach was completely wrong. I was thinking like a writer, not like a business owner.

I took a couple of days off and thought hard about why businesses wanted to hire me in the first place. Obviously, it wasn’t because I had read all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets or knew five different synonyms for ‘tempest’. No, they wanted to hire me because they had a business problem and needed a solution.

Ultimately, this problem boils down to two things:

  • Businesses need high quality marketing content to sell their products and services.
  • Businesses don’t have the time or expertise to create this content on their own.

When you sell yourself as a writer, you are only solving half of the problem (creating quality content). A business will still have to invest time and effort into training and monitoring your writing in order to meet its business goals.

To the business owner, thus, a writer is a cost center, not a revenue center.

Top marketers and consultants know this. This is why they always sell themselves as solutions, not as mere skills. Instead of talking about their education or their experience, they talk about how they can help a business make more money and have more free time.

In other words, you must be updated 2024 mobile phone number data more than a writer. You must provide solutions.

This is the bedrock of a successful freelance career. Once you adopt this thinking, you will see opportunities where none existed before. You will become an asset to every business you work with, not just a replaceable writer.

Once you’ve adopted this strategy, you can work on some tactics to get better paying clients.

5 Ways to Get Better Writing Jobs

updated 2024 mobile phone number data

These are my top five tactics to increase freelance writing income:

1. Position yourself as a premium provider

When I started my freelancing career, I was hoekom oproepopsporing elke bemarkingsagentskap se geheime wapen is convinced no one would ever pay me over $10/article. It wasn’t that I was bad writer; it was just that I hung out on internet marketing forums where this was the going market rate.

I then learned about top content marketers charging big brands $150+/hour to create content. You couldn’t tell my $10/hour article from the $150/hour blog post. The only difference was in the way we had positioned ourselves.

“Positioning” is marketing speak for how a brand projects its solutions with respect to competitors. This is why Rolexes start at $20,000 and why Apple can charge twice the going price for a laptop.

 

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