Bring your best words to party
I started working online as a writer under severe circumstances. In my early twenties I suffered a traumatic brain injury which led to me losing my job, my confidence, and almost everything else I held dear.
For a year after that I tried to find employment, but I couldn’t sustain even a low-level part time job due to lingering symptoms from the injury. I ended up depressed, on disability, and feeling like I’d never achieve any level of success.
In desperation, I turned to the only skill that I still felt capable of wielding. I could still write, weaving words together in ways that left readers aching for more.
With no concept of how to find work online, I joined eLance (now Upwork) and applied for a variety of gigs.
My first professional writing work paid less than $0.01 per word. It was a short work of fiction and the client loved the result. They offered me more work at the same rate and I took it, but I also went back to applying for gigs.
Before long I landed a client who paid $0.01. That felt like a big step up, but it would only last until I found someone willing to pay $0.015. For a year or so I worked with a revolving door of clients writing everything from fiction to product descriptions to ebooks to author profiles.
By the time I hit $0.025 per word, I’d become a typing machine. I churned out between 40,000 to 80,000 words per month in an attempt to make ends meet. When I finally found a couple clients willing to pay $0.03 per word or more, I felt like I’d struck gold.
Fool’s gold. Within a month of finding those “high paying” clients, I started experiencing repetitive motion injuries in my wrists and fingers. They would cramp up while typing, and some nights I’d wake up with my hands frozen into painful claws.
I tried to keep going, writing in short bursts and icing my wrists in between and even using voice typing as much as I could. But damage had been done, and I required time off to recover.
The month and a half I spent resting tested me like a trial by fire. I came out the other side of it forged from a stronger alloy than I previously thought possible.
I stopped writing for pennies, and I started learning digital marketing and building an agency from nothing. Two years later, I’ve grown to the point that I’m ready to teach others how to better monetize their writing skills.
If you’d like to join myself and this group of writers, marketers, and entrepreneurs on our shared path to freedom, sign up today.