How I Started Making $1000 a month as a Freelance Writer
Freelancing might seem cool and convenient but it all means working in the end. Not everyone is keen on working and grinding hard for a better living. I’m not so different myself but I have had way too much motivation to get started with freelancing.
My route to making my first $1000 freelancing wasn’t pretty comforting. However, I can certainly say that getting started was pretty fun for me. What’s hard for me now is keeping up my motivation, which is a major struggling point for many freelancers out there.
Today I’ll talk about my path to making $1000 a month freelancing and we’ll keep the motivation thing a talk for another day. First of all, $1000 a month is a pretty good sum for an Indian like me. With this amount, I can look after a family of 5 members. Right now, I earn around $2000 a month as a freelancer and I live alone so it’s a pretty huge deal for me as an Indian.
I know there are a lot of freelancing websites out there. The likes of Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer are leading in this industry but truth be told, I barely had any success with any of them when I first started out. If you need the unfiltered truth, what really did help me in my career was Medium and LinkedIn.
Getting out of school was a huge thing for me. I clearly wouldn’t have made it here so early in my life if I decided to stay and pursue my further studies. My first $1000 came from being a content writer when I was 17. It was for writing tech-related articles for GDT and I received my first $1000 monthly payment 3 months after joining their team. The agreement was on a pay-per-word basis and I charged $0.01 per word. If you’re outside India, this might not seem like a satisfactory amount but in India, this is an average pay. The workload was really small for the first few months but it really got big in June and that month got me my first $1000. After that, the workload remained constant and I still continue to make $1000 a month from that client.
Now, let’s talk about how I got there. I decided to drop high school studies in February this year. A day after that, I dusted my LinkedIn profile and made it better with a few hours of editing. This was sometime during the third week in February. I started searching for jobs, set some filters, and saved my searches for notifications. I then applied to every single content writer jobs that fell under my expertise.
In the last week of February, GDT reached out to me and I was hired the very next day. Unfortunately, I don’t have conversations about them hiring me as it was all in Whatsapp, which I lost when changing my phone. We had a little interview session through both messages and voice calls. It was very quick and landing on my first writing gig turned out to be pretty smooth.
When I really think about it, all it took me was a week of hard work to get my first job. I even had no fruitful portfolio to show them but the stories I published on Medium in the past really did help. Starting out before reaching 18 did pose some threats before me and I had to throw in a bunch of lies along the way but it was all for the good days to come.
Landing on your first job might not be that easy but it’s not hard either. If you’ve got that motivation in you, then putting in some hard work will win you the first job pretty quickly. If you’re feeling lost in this journey, feel free to ask me anything and I’d be happy to help you in any way possible.
Thank you for sticking to the end of this story. I hope the information that I shared has brought you something valuable. I’ll be following up with new stories by tearing my own experience as a freelancer. Your suggestions are valuable so let me know in the responses if you need further help regarding freelancing or have suggestions for freelance-related content. Thanks!
