My First Year as a Freelance Writer and Content Producer

A year ago, I did something that would change my life forever: I decided to become a freelance writer. While it's not making me a great deal of money right now, it has changed my life, and became the source of what is now a small (but growing) business.

How it all Started

What makes someone want to start writing? For me, it all started with Dave Ramsey. My husband was a writer, and we were struggling on an income that amounted to about half of the poverty level. We had just narrowly avoided getting evicted right before Christmastime; my husband's income wasn't high enough to pay the rent, and we were waiting for his school money (he's a student) to finish paying them. Our apartment company is very strict; they start evicting you if you are 15 days late. As I was listening to Dave Ramsey, he said something that I had heard before, but I began to mull over what he said. "If you do what poor people will do, you will be poor. If you do what rich people will do, you will become rich."

How does one escape poverty when they make half of the poverty level? I asked myself "what would Dave tell me?" He would tell me that our income needs to go up. I was doing everything that I could to save all the money that I could. We didn't buy anything that was unnecessary; I was entering sweepstakes to try to bring in a few extras. I didn't know how I could get a job; my main priority was homeschooling my kids. I tried applying for an evening job at a fast food restaurant, but they don't really like hiring college graduates, and I don't believe in lying on my application.

In desperation, I searched for legitimate work-at-home jobs. There was a thread on a bulletin board that I frequented at the time, where people were discussing what they did to earn money from home. I could answer phones, but the kids could get loud, and I can be shy when talking to strangers. I had looked into mystery shopping a couple of years before, but it looked difficult because you had to remember a lot in order to make a good report. I couldn't do sales; I tried selling scrapbook stuff and failed miserably; I can't sell anything, even if I'm passionate about the product, so that was out. One of the posts intrigued me: writing. I could write. I wrote a couple of books in high school, I've been writing product reviews for Epinions since 2000. Some people were saying that they were having good luck with Associated Content. I decided to give it a try, and it changed my life.

First Steps

If I was going to give this writing thing a serious go, I was going to do all I could. I read the tutorials. I went to the message boards and learned everything that I could absorb. I wrote on every topic that I could think of writing about. I looked to see what the other Best New CPs were doing, and I sought to match or exceed what they were doing. I set goals for myself. As a new writer, my first articles took a long time in the queue (since it was the Christmas holiday) and I couldn't publish anything as a display-only article yet. I was a little nervous while waiting for the first offers (or rejections). Fortunately, they were accepted, two weeks later. I was ecstatic; but in the meantime, I kept writing. Before I had my first article accepted, I had 12 articles in the queue. I kept on writing, and eventually was awarded Best New CP, which was my initial goal.

Branching Out

Associated Content was my main source of income for the first several months. I made $100 in my first month as a content producer, which was exciting for me. Much of that was in up-front payments. As I kept writing, I started to see other opportunities that other writers were involved in, such as Squidoo. Squidoo led me to Zazzle. I started producing content in all these areas, and started to see that all of these had their places. By not keeping all my eggs in one basket, I wasn't too dependent on any one company for my income. I was developing my own business. Although it was slowly growing, my income was going up every month.

Going Pro

In the summer, I wanted to take my kids on vacation. My husband had accepted a job working at a summer camp, and would be away. I figured that it would be the perfect time to take my kids on a road trip to Washington to visit my family. Unfortunately, that took money. Although I was making a limited income from my writing, it didn't look like I could make enough to take my kids on vacation. I tried writing more articles for Associated Content, pumping up my output to four articles a day, but that only had the effect of lowering my page view average, and I ended up with reduced offers.

My husband suggested that I apply for a job at his company. So I applied, using the work that I had done for Associated Content (and my 10 years of experience writing for Epinions.com) on my resume. What had started as a desperate attempt to earn some sort of money to help out my family has led me to a freelance career, and a work-at-home job as a writing employee.

You Can't Fire Me from My Own Company

Earlier this fall, my writing job started to cut back their hours. What had been 20 to 30 hours a week dwindled down to twelve, and then ten, and then three, and then zero. This is where I started to see the beauty of owning your own business. I can't be fired from my own business. A company can go under, or they can choose to stop using my stuff (unlikely in places that only pay me when they make a profit off of me), but they can't fire me from my own company. During the time when my employment was lean, I put extra time into my work as a content producer. The content that I was producing now ranged from article writing, to web pages, to t-shirts and mugs.

In the last couple of weeks, my employment has kicked up again. They bought an automobile site, and I have been keeping pretty busy writing automobile reviews. I am one of three people at the company who is being given this work (my husband is one of the other two). Being someone who initially didn't know much about cars, I'm learning quite a bit. It's a challenge, and although it takes hours away from my freelance work, it's currently more profitable.

One Year of Change

So here I am, and it's been a year (minus a couple of days) since I made the decision to write for pay. Right now, with the extra work that I have as an employee, our income has broken the poverty level. Really, it's nothing to write home about, but considering that we had about $10,000 in income last year and we doubled it in the last year, that's something of an accomplishment.

While the work that I do as an employee requires constant effort to bring in income, my pay as a freelance content producer continues to increase every month. I have broken the $75 mark in monthly commissions and other passive pay (based on page views, sales, and other criteria), and I'm looking forward to seeing that amount rise above $100 as I continue to work. This Christmas has been a great year with my Zazzle products; I've been selling one or two products daily for the last couple of days, and have broken the $100 mark in non-referred sales ($148 and counting) for the first time this month. I have hope that I never had before I started writing. I know that if something were to happen to my husband, I would still be able to support my family and continue to work at home.

I look forward to seeing what my content-producing business has in store for me in my second year of business. I enjoyed the first year, and encourage anybody else who is in the situation that I was in to find out what they can do and go for it! It may not be writing for you (maybe you're good at sales), but you'll never know what you can do until you try.