In August last year, I launched The International Freelancer with the intention of making it a profitable business.
A week later, my husband announced that he no longer had a job.
I hit freelancing hard. I forgot about the novel, about The International Freelancer, about food and sleep. My husband and I hustled like you wouldn’t believe.
Three months later, Sam had a new job and I’d joined a membership community for online entrepreneurs. It was time to stop talking, to stop stalling, and to start taking action. I was ready to go pro.
A couple of months ago, after the first year anniversary of The International Freelancer came and went, I sat down to do my final numbers for the year. In its first year of operation, nine months after I got serious about it, TIF brought in $34,499. Approximately $3,833 per month.
If you’ve been around my work for a while, you may remember that two years ago, I started experimenting with niche websites, with the goal to bring in $3,500 per month in revenue. It didn’t happen with the first website that I built, but I learned so much with that one—from setting it up, from getting to know the audience, from learning about how to write blog posts that get shared, etc., that I was able to take The International Freelancer from zero to cash flow within weeks.
The truth is, making money from a website is only difficult if you don’t know how to do it. It’s like freelancing. There are steps and best practices, but there’s also a learning curve. You jump in, you learn everything you can, and if you’ve made the right decisions along the way and laid the groundwork, you start earning the money.
What I love about websites is that they’re scalable. I didn’t put more time or work into The International Freelancer than I did with my freelancing—in fact, freelancing is still my core income generator. But because the website is scalable (and e-courses are only one of the many ways in which I’m generating an income), it leads to more money for a lot less work in the long-term.
For writers with an entrepreneurial bent, I’m convinced that building websites is one of the most efficient ways to not only scale income, but create communities around topics that you’re passionate about and platforms for the books that you want to write.
Repeatedly, I hear from writers who want to write about their passion for dog training or quilting or coffee makers and can’t seem to find an editor to either buy the story or buy it for anything more than a pittance. They can’t find publishers to put out books on the topic. Yet, you know and I know, that the readers are out there somewhere, looking for this information that we have to offer. We want to write it. They want to read it. But there’s a missing link.
I started blogging about writing, especially about freelancing internationally, because despite the massive interest in the topic, I couldn’t find enough editors to care enough to assign more than one story a year on it. Most of the editors I work with care only about American readers, ignoring globally-minded Americans and the rest of the world hungry for this information. So I decided to dedicate myself to the rest of the world when no one else would.
I cared about a niche and so I created my own opportunities for writing about it. And I know that for writers in the same boat, no matter their niche, similar opportunities exist.
A few years ago, I decided that I wanted control of my career. I wanted to write about the things I cared about and I wanted to make fantastic money—six-figures and more—doing it.
It’s taken time, a lot of learning, and some short-term sacrifices to get here, but I’m learning, I’m doing, I’m writing what I care about and doing it on my own terms.
Who says you can’t, too?