One thing that many people won’t talk about in their freelance journeys is that they have been rejected or ignored 10 times for every one response they’ve received.
I do not take this personally – I don’t know how anyone could and still persist in this career path! I know I am busy and lose track of cold emails from strangers occasionally; it only makes sense that others might do this to me as well.
However, it only takes one person to say “yes” to change things. My first recurrent client was a mid-sized company (had barely graduated from start-up, honestly) in the health/fitness sector. I had used their product and reached out to see if they would be interested in paying for weekly blog posts.
And they said yes! My price was above content-mill standards but not very high, and the posts were low on research and time involvement, so I was really making a pretty decent hourly rate from them.
My rhythm was what I loved most: I’d submit one week’s post with a list of ideas for the next post; the editor would send back her edits for confirmation, and she’d assign me a post topic for the next week. I dream of such efficiency with every client!
This arrangement worked for about 10 months; the marketing team on her company eventually went in a different direction (they’ve since hired full-time copywriters!) but I have never stopped being grateful for that work.
That first private client was my taste of what it was like to have no middlemen between me and my client. It worked really well, but obviously, there are a lot of people vying for that space. You never know when you’ll email someone who just hired a full-time writer, who has a faithful copywriter already, or who simply aren’t big enough to invest in a blog.
That doesn’t mean you should stop pitching the companies you are already loyal to! You, as a dedicated customer, are a pretty great asset to them. This was my first big bump in my freelance income, from occasional article to 4-5 articles a month.
To Be Continued…