5. Freelancing Experiment
$1K In My First Month Freelance Writing
I talked about my experiment a bit in this popular Reddit thread here.
These are genuine stats, too. I considered buying upvotes to “seed” the post with social proof (much like how Hallal Guys put 10 $1 bills in their tip jar when they open for social proof to encourage tipping), but I was too cheap to pay the $25 to do it.
A more updated / detailed version below:
Results
These are results for 2 months.
Why Freelance Writing?
Many want to start 'side hustles' or 'businesses' listening to gurus on dropshipping and get-rich-quick schemes.
The problem with get-rich-quick is that if you can get rich quick, so can your competitors. Thus, any success is very short-lived.
Another over-arching issue with most other guru business models is they focus on the upside, but not the downside. They show flashy (but almost all fake) screenshots of your 7-figure gross revenue that you'll make "just doing an hour of work a day." Fake screenshots aside, gurus thoroughly enjoy bragging about gross income, completely neglecting things like cost of goods or advertising cost. And when they do include those costs, it's generally also fake or grossly exaggerated.
In other words, many of these gurus lure folks in with ridiculous upsides but don't talk about downsides. I've done:
Airbnb Arbitrage for 5 years only to be down $30K. Largest expense: vacancies that cost us $1K a day when they banned us (either a tenant or a cleaner installed a 'hidden' camera in a very obvious place).
Dropshipping to be down $20K in 3 years. Largest expense: "experiments" with ads that rack up plenty of costs. Second largest expense: Vendor mishaps and poor manufacturing, leading to massive refunds and chargebacks. Third largest expense: Cost of goods and shipping.
The reality is if you want money, you need to just do something for a long time, and survive. And in order to maximize your probability to survive for a long time, you need to simply reduce your probability of catestrophic failures. Catastrophic failure = running out of money.
Thus, in order to be successful in business, just do something that has a high upside + low downside and do it for a while so the profits can compound on each other (so you can hire people and leverage your time).
Freelance writing fits this model. There's almost no downside, other than the time of applying to platforms. And writing the articles generally are pretty quick. If you do it for long enough, you can reinvest some of your profits to hire out writers and simply arbitrage the hired labor and the amount you charge for the service. Most service models expand like this:
Start out doing the hard work / building clients
Reinvest profits so the work has a higher $/hr (hiring, marketing, etc).
Repeat step 2 ad-infinitum + systematization / hiring / firing.
Scared money don't make money
is a myth. In reality, it's
Fearless money makes you live under a bridge
High-Level Concepts
These concepts make the rest of this essay easier to understand.
ROI
Return on investment. You invest time, or you invest money. EIther way, you want to extract max value for time or money invested. This is important because there are mirages where it would seem like you'd get a high ROI (dropshipping) but because the expenses haven't been factored in, the actual ROI is pretty low.
$/hr
Dollar per hour. Would you rather be paid $1000/hr or $800/hr? Easy answer.
But what if I told you that you'd get 10X more customers at $800/hr? Slightly harder answer.
This curve continues and you generally should pick your rate + the amount of work you're comfortable with. Most of us don't know ourselves as well as we think, so you may want to experiment with your rates.
But also consider if you'd rather be paid $1000/hr vs. $100/hr if the latter had 20X more work? I'd pick the former, personally because I can't work 20 hours a day for $2K/day (unless I have employees). And doing $1000/hr work not only frees me up to do other things, like marketing and finding new clients, but it also gives me a lot more time to work on other $1000/hr projects.
Thus, the final thing to consider in the rate you want to charge is the opportunity cost of time.
High-Level Strategy
This was mostly a 20-day experiment to see how much money I can make freelance writing in the short-term. But this document will be updated over time since I've decided to continue freelance writing.
But the strategy from the outset is to apply and get accepted to platforms that feed me clients and give me work, as opposed to platforms where I need to attract or pitch clients myself. This is mostly due to the short nature of this experiment. Having jobs given to me saves me tons of time, which allows me to:
Apply to more platforms that are similar
Do actual writing / complete articles for clients.
Platforms To Avoid / Apply For
None of these are sponsored and YMMV. I'm just recanting my own experience.
TLDR: Proven Platforms That Paid Me
Pure Content
TLDR: Platform to Avoid
Scripted. I did work for them and connected my Stripe. They said they paid, but never did.
They also take 20% commission, so it’s pretty bad.
I got rejected from all other platforms. So not much to say there.
Maximizing Your $/hr
Writing yourself is not good. You can't feasibly write a ton of articles and compete with people that use AI to write for them, because they can always charge lower than you and complete work quicker than you with higher quality than you.
Thus, not using AI is hurting your $/hr as a freelance writer.
Most writers I talk to that don't use AI are hurting their own finances by simply being close-minded.
Consider the math: I wrote about 20 articles to get $1637.5. Normally, it would take me 2 hours per article on average to write a blog post that I'm familiar with. For these articles, it'd probably take me an extra hour of research per article, and so it would take me 60+ hours to do $1637.5 (or $27.29/hr).
With AI, it took me an average of ~30 minutes per article with 20 articles. That means I spent 10 hours total to get the same money:
or $163.75/hr!
And this $/hr will only increase over time as I add more features to make editing easier (see below).
AI Platforms (Kind of a shill, but it’s how I actually feel)
Jasper: This is a terrible platform for long-form content creation because they've got 50 templates and aren't focus on long-form. You can use the Lex-like editor and keep expanding text with AI, but you could do that with OpenAI's playground with better results. Jasper also has a one-shot blog writer like Wraith Scribe, but it generates low-quality content so you'll need to manually edit a lot of things in the end anyway, which significantly lowers your $/hr since your time spent per article increases.
Copy.ai: Gives you more control on how to write your blog. But the thing is it forces you to go through their article builder and forces you to do an outline. It's quite a few more extra steps and even if it takes you an extra 5 minutes (say, 35 minutes vs 30 minutes), that'll cost you an extra 16% in time and lower your $/hr by about 15.3%.
There are plenty more than are basically clones / copycats of each other and they all are not better than either OpenAI's playground or ChatGPT. Almost all of these platforms just do 1 thing: give you a bunch of AI-generated text to edit.
Yes, editing.
Anyone who has ever written anything knows that writing consists of 2 parts:
Writing the thing.
Editing the thing.
Most AI tools just do a poor job of #1 with AI.
Wraith Scribe realizes that everyone's preference for an article is different, so that's why it does #1 well and uses AI to help you edit / reword / expand large / sprinkle in semantic keywords on large portions of text.
Editing oftentimes take longer than writing, which is why our toolset also allows you to use AI to edit your article.
Simply put, with most other AI platforms you have a lower $/hr because you're stuck manually editing things. With Wraith Scribe, you have a higher $/hr because not only will the AI help you come up with the idea and create an article for you, it'll also speed up the editing process.
Further, almost all these companies are really big and too busy to deal with individual requests. Wraith Scribe's roadmap is to keep the customer base small so features you want is bespoke.
This means if you've got an individual request and want a new feature added or some extra AI magic in the editing toolkit, we can add that just for you.
As an example:
You're making $163/hr with Wraith Scribe right now.
You still need to edit articles per client requests. And this is your biggest bottleneck.
You send us a message to add an enhancement so you can use AI to edit things faster.
Example 1: Suppose your client requires you to write a short blurb to promote their target link, and we add a button where you just paste a link and it'll write that blurb in for you.
Example 2: Suppose your client requires you to add external links quoting a study, and we add a button that'll let you easily research stats/studies--pick the study you click and the AI will write a blurb for the study.
You've now reduced your bottleneck and your time spent per article. Thus, your $/hr has increased (smaller denominator).
Further, reinvest this newly found time to find more clients, rank more articles, and growing your business, which’ll increase your $/hr even more.
Repeating steps 2-5 above will then continuously increase your $/hr when writing with Wraith Scribe. Conversely, all other platforms will probably give you a fixed $/hr because they're too big and have too many customers to minimize bottlenecks for you in a bespoke style.
And if you're too lazy to do step 3 to simply send a message so that we can create bespoke features for you, then you're just artificially limiting your $/hr for no reason.
Conclusion
Good business requires these ingredients:
High upside potential
Low downside / relative expenses
Compounding of profits over time for compounded expansion.
Freelance writing fits this model. #3 is faster and easier the higher your $/hr is.
Writing and editing takes a long time, so you should use AI to do both in order to increase your $/hr. Wraith Scribe's the only thing on the market that lets you leverage AI to do both writing and editing. Other platforms just throw poorly AI-generated text at you to edit.
Further, Wraith Scribe's bespoke approach to creating new features for you specifically means that your $/hr will increase over time since those features are designed to eliminate your specific bottlenecks.
Laziness and failure to provide feedback only hurts your own earning potential and your ability to reinvest newfound time to grow your business.