I started freelancing in 2011. I wrote my first ever piece of content in 2019. In that space of 8 years, I worked for over 60 clients, started two companies, ran one for several years, and sold it.
All that time, I never wrote anything. Not even a blog post. Not even a tweet. Nothing. How come? How much do I regret it? What changed in 2019? And how can you apply what I learned to your own freelancing career?
Let’s answer those questions one by one. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will have a better idea of what content means for freelancers and whether you should be writing some.
Reasons for not writing content
Reason number 1: I was lazy and disorganized.
I could write 500 words right now to rationalize my choice, but it boils down to this. If I must make an argument in my defense, it is this: nobody ever really explained to me the benefits of writing a blog, or of having a professional presence on social media.
Perhaps more importantly, nobody ever explained to me what to write or who to write for. None of this is an excuse. If I was interested in the answers to those questions, I would have found them (from people who do write blogs).
The only upside of not writing all those years is that it provided me more time for other pursuits, which made me increasingly more productive by the year.
But those savings are dwarfed by all that wasted potential.
Sidenote: the article linked above was written in 2020, and doesn’t even acknowledge that I started writing in 2019. That is because I was yet unaware of the impact writing would have on my career.
What I missed out on
Anybody who knows about the compound effect knows that 8 years is a long time to not be compounding. The US stock market has doubled roughly every 8 years historically. In other words, if you invest $10,000 today, after a period of 40 years it will be worth $320,000. Not bad. But if you had invested the same amount 8 years ago, 40 years from now it would be worth $640,000. Massive difference.
But what does that have to do with content? Does content compound? Not on the surface, but the second-order effects of writing certainly do.
Consider your first blog post. It’s nothing special. A few people might read it. A few people might follow you on Twitter because of it. But when you publish your second blog post, a funny thing happens: not only will a few more people read it, but your old readers are more likely to read it. They are also more likely to share it. Now extrapolate this over, say, eight years of weekly blog posts.
Each consecutive post makes you more trustworthy, which makes people more likely to approach you with opportunities. Each taken opportunity, in turn, makes you even more trustworthy through referrals and word-of-mouth.
Likewise, each consecutive post grows your audience, which makes it easier to grow your audience further, which…you get the point.
By missing eight years of writing, I missed out on an incalculable number of opportunities - through increasing my network, finding clients, and selling products. When I say incalculable, I mean it: our minds weren’t meant to deal with nonlinearities.
Consider the fantasy sports company I sold in 2016: if I had established a social media presence, blog, and newsletter, how many more active users could I have had? How much money would those users have spent on the game? How much would that have increased the sale price? Maybe I would be retired right now. Incalculable.
What changed when I started writing in 2019?
I published my first blog post on Medium in December of 2019. Soon after, I joined Twitter.
Since then I’ve written around 80 blog posts, built up a modest following on Twitter, started a newsletter, self-published a book, released an Upwork course, and - most important of all - opportunities now regularly find me instead of me having to go out looking for them.
Among these offers are: freelance writing clients, software development clients, offers to co-found companies, an offer to write a book for a publisher (declined), and an exponential expansion of my professional network.
The total dollar value of writing for roughly two hours a week for the last three years is probably six figures by now. It’s important to note, however, that this is the case mainly because I have knowledge to share. Writing a million blog posts will do nothing for you if you don’t simultaneously improve, experiment, and work hard so you would have something worth writing about.
Sidenote on the topic of Medium: I’ve earned around $6,000 in Medium royalties from around 60 articles I published there. Having this direct monetization is nice, but don’t take this as a recommendation to start writing on Medium. I’ve since switched to publishing directly on my website.
Takeaways
I’m not one to dwell on the past. The purpose of this article is not to ponder over what might have been, it’s to help you take the plunge into content creation (whether that’s writing or recording or streaming) early. Early means before you’re comfortable doing it.
Remember: not all content is created equal. I’m not talking about churning out memes on a daily basis. The above refers to useful content based on lived experience.
Otherwise, you’re just part of the chatter.
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