My 30-Day Plan To Press Restart on My Freelancing Career
Using the power of Medium
Firstly, I have to mention I’m already a freelance copywriter. When I say ‘kickstart my freelancing career’, I’m just talking about content writing.
Copywriting is very different from content writing.
The purpose of copywriting is generally to persuade; writing content is a lot more innocent. It’s to entertain or inform. And while content writing takes on an extended form, copy takes the slogan ‘ quality over quantity’ to a whole new level.
So….what’s the general gist of it all?
The idea is I write a story on Medium every single day in an attempt to grow. You can almost certainly expect an ‘I made $____ writing every day for a month’ article at the end.
And, as I write, hopefully, I’ll also start writing better.
My goal is to be at a point where I’m able to actually charge people for my services, as a freelancer. This Medium account would ideally act as my portfolio. Of course, I understand that’ll probably take a lot longer than a month, but I’d say it’s a pretty solid start.
Where have I got this idea from? You’ve probably heard of Zulie Rane; someone who’s pretty big on the Medium scene. Her YouTube channel also talks a lot about finances and her income from writing. Fascinatingly, the biggest source of clients were people who saw her on Medium.
Again, Zulie’s a much better writer than me, now, and probably in 30 days.
Why do you want to do this?
Short answer: I like money.
No, but seriously, my dream has always been to switch to freelancing full-time. And, hopefully, opening myself up to a whole new different type of writing will allow me to do that.
Also, I like writing. Personally, I think that’s the most important bit for anyone who wants to freelance full-time.
My Medium journey so far…
In my first month on Medium, I made just over 5 bucks.
Back then, the money I made from a story was pretty important to me. I was obsessed with how well it did.
Nowadays, I care about different stats. I always take a look at the reading time. I think that’s a pretty good indicator of how good your writing is.
But, after that first month, I got lazy.
In my first month, I wrote 2–3 stories a week. In my second, I churned out one a fortnight. In my third, I put out one story that I'd written a couple of months ago. Medium never heard back from me for a while after that.
That’s what I’ve learned and what I intend to do. My aim is to write a story a day for a month; in the words of Mike Boyd, this is ‘Day One, Hour Zero’.
