Adventures in Entrepreneurship: Freelance Writing

As you might recall, I quit my high pay­ing cor­po­rate job at the end of March 2018 to move in with my boyfriend in a dif­fer­ent state. This meant bye bye ridicu­lous­ly awe­some pay­checks and hel­loooooo stress/anxiety about mon­ey. I’ve become much more seri­ous about find­ing ways to earn mon­ey now that I’m not work­ing for a big com­pa­ny. I’m pret­ty much in the stage of “you want to pay me to do what? .…sure! Let’s try it out!”

So, I’m try­ing pret­ty much every­thing to see what I like doing and what pays the best for my time. I have giv­en myself the grace to try out dif­fer­ent things and see what I like best.

One of the first things I tried was free­lance writing.

Let me set the scene for you:

Scene 1: Gwen is at a spon­sored lunch with 15 oth­er peo­ple at Fin­Con 2017. Some­one turns to her and says, “hey, can you write? I don’t have the time to turn lessons from my book into blog posts”.

Scene 2: Gwen is brows­ing her email in late win­ter 2018. She finds an email with the sub­ject line “Free­lance Writ­ing Gig?” and is intrigued. 

With those two tid­bits of infor­ma­tion in hand, we can now get to the good stuff.

I fig­ured, since I had these offers, I’ll go after the low hang­ing entre­pre­neur­ial fruit first.

I did­n’t fol­low up with the author at Fin­Con as that was a while ago and I’m sure he found some­one else to turn his book into blog posts.

I did, how­ev­er, fol­low up with the offer of the free­lance writ­ing gig from my inbox. One of my read­ers (who also reads my boyfriends’ blog) emailed me to see if I was inter­est­ed in the gig as it was with a local real estate office. Local to my new town, not my old town. Just to be clear.

I thought, cool. I know about real estate. I can write. Why don’t I try writ­ing about real estate?

So after I set­tled in and every­body got back from vaca­tions, I met with the real­tor to chat about what they needed.

It was pret­ty sim­ple. A blog post from scratch every now and then, com­ing soon posts for new list­ings, tweaked con­tent from a real estate writ­ing feed and a few oth­er things here and there. We shook hands and that was it. I was now an offi­cial free­lance writer with my first gig!

I moved some stuff around on their web­site and prepped a con­tent cal­en­dar. They warned me I’d need to fol­low up with them for infor­ma­tion, so I did. When I did­n’t get any­thing back, I decid­ed to write an orig­i­nal post for them to get some­thing out on the blog.

Turns out, I severe­ly dis­like writ­ing arti­cles for oth­er peo­ple. Who knew!? I def­i­nite­ly looked like this on more than one occasion.

It was a seri­ous strug­gle to pump out an arti­cle I did­n’t think was very good. I have pret­ty high stan­dards and that did­n’t fit them. I also knew I did­n’t want to put in the time to make it better.

I was­n’t much inter­est­ed in any­thing I had to write about and I need­ed a dif­fer­ent kind of writ­ing style for the arti­cle. My fan­cy writ­ing skills that I honed in col­lege have with­ered away after focus­ing on first per­son-fun-blog style-writ­ing for so long. Basi­cal­ly, I’m not good at writ­ing well any­more and did­n’t find it an enjoy­able process to revive that skill. Espe­cial­ly when writ­ing about top­ics relat­ed to the busi­ness of buy­ing and sell­ing houses.

(I think I can scratch off real­tor from my list of mon­ey-mak­ing ideas, too. Not a good fit either from what I can tell!)

I was also a lit­tle frus­trat­ed at the low pay for hours ratio too. Added all up over the course of a month, the total would’ve been about $200–300. That’s decent.….. but I would rather do some­thing that would pay me $250 per effort instead of lots of lit­tle efforts that add up at the end. If I’m going to trade my time for dol­lars, I would rather go back to full-time employ­ment and get LOTS of dol­lars for my time.

Hav­ing that gig felt like a moun­tain was sit­ting on my shoul­ders. It stressed me out to know I should be putting stuff on their blog but I did­n’t know what to put on it. The free­lance writ­ing gig just added to the list of things I should’ve been doing. Should’ve been writ­ing for my blog, should’ve been get­ting my stained glass shop set up, should’ve been look­ing for peo­ple for the pod­cast, and more. The more I added to the list, the more stressed out I got.

So I end­ed the gig. I put a call out to my finance free­lance friends and got a few sug­ges­tions for who should take my place. I did­n’t want to leave them high and dry again, so I felt this was the least I could do to make up for being a bad free­lance writer. I sent them an email say­ing thanks, this real­ly was­n’t my cup of tea.….. but here are my rec­om­men­da­tions for a replacement.

I did­n’t hear any­thing back, but the weight that was lift­ed off my shoul­ders felt amaz­ing. Like, bet­ter than eat­ing ice cream with peach­es on it at 10 am.

I feel a lot less stressed out now that I’ve put that gig behind me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still stressed out big time, but I’m a lot less stressed now that I’m only not meet­ing my expec­ta­tions. I hate to let oth­er peo­ple down 🙁

Now I have more men­tal space to put towards the entre­pre­neur­ial things that mat­ter: this blog, my rental prop­er­ty, the pod­cast, my stained glass shop, and my dig­i­tal down­loads Etsy shop. I will con­tin­ue this series in the future by writ­ing about all the things I’ve been try­ing out, so don’t wor­ry if I haven’t been talk­ing a lot about what I’ve been doing since I quit work­ing. It turns out blog­ging about what I’ve been doing takes time away from what I’m sup­posed to be doing! (Maybe this is why I’m real­ly bad about keep­ing journals.….)

So, stay tuned! I’ll be back to cov­er more!

Thanks for read­ing! What have you tried to start lately?