An Open Letter To Every Freelancer On This Board

Hello,

This is a new profile, that I've created a few months ago for a WSO but I'm not new to Warrior Forum.

Since 2008, I've been freelancing full time. I was also good at it as it brought me a nice income and a life full of freedom and flexibility. I've meet some amazing people that changed my life forever in this field.

I never traded my time for pennies. While $2000 - $3000/month is not such a big deal, this is more than most freelancers earn, especially writers, like me.

However, now, I must say STOP to freelancing and I must warn you, the reader, to step away from it too. Why?

Slowly, I've seen this field go to hell. A few years ago, as a talented writer, you could make a decent living in a place like Elance.com. Even if I am not a native English speaker, the fact that I could sell made people respect me and pay me accordingly.

Slowly, things changed. Fewer and fewer projects paid a reasonable fee. The expectations of the clients increased dramatically. Good copywriting and bad copywriting became the same in the eyes of the many. While at some point, being paid $100 per hour was the status quo, slowly, it decreased to $75 ... $50 ... $25 ... and now to $10/hour or more.

Now some of you may say "You don't know how to sell yourself". Well, maybe I do or maybe I don't. However, looking at the field of freelancing from a pragmatic point of view, the barrier to entry lowered, the competition increased and the value of our services dropped dramatically. This is pure economic theory.

I'm not blaming the customers. I'm not expecting the customer to know the difference between a good and a bad copy. He judges it by a subjective filter. However, just because he doesn't know it means that justifying paying $1500 when the next bid offers to do it for $150 is a big stretch.

This started about two or three years ago. Fortunately, for me, I wasn't affected that much. By this moment, I had a client base for which I generated results and which kept hiring me. The same three - four people paid 90% of what is my income since 2013 or so.

But slowly, these people went away too. Some retired. Others changed their field. Others saw no more need. After all, how many controls, how many scripts and how many reports can one need?

So here I am, a freelancer that was earning even $5000/month a few years ago, almost begging for work. Here I am being rejected because I ask for $300 instead of $250 for something that in the past was $1000.

And in a way ... you know what?

I think this is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Because I've realized that I'll never accept to be at the mercy of someone else wanting or not to pay me. I'll never accept for other people to decide if this month I'll have money or not or for someone to consider my services so low value.

So I've decided once and for all to go into internet marketing.

Being a freelancer for almost a decade taught me a lot of things. I've seen every business model possible. I've seen every sales funnel that can exist. But most importantly, I know what works and what doesn't. I've had access to the conversion, not to generalities.

I have a client who is earning $1.000.000 per year, give or take. He paid me almost every single month last year and he hardly even used what I've wrote. He just paid me because he knew that I needed it. He told me several times to go into business for myself and to just apply what I know. He gave me practical advice to do it.

I've rejected his offer.

I have a client who offered to finance a business - entirely, hire people, help me in any logistical manner I can, as long as I work on it. Again, this client doesn't need me. I just worked with him for years and he trusts me. I've rejected his offer.

And I've rejected not because it was a bad offer. If I took it, now I would have a few tens of thousands to use instead of searching the Internet like a bagger for some kind of work. I've rejected it because I was afraid of failure, because I was afraid of wasting his money and because I was more comfortable trading time for money.

But this insanity must stop.

Freelancing is not what it used to be. If you average the time spent looking for clients or doing revisions, you're better off flipping burgers.

If you are a freelancer, please, go into business for yourself. Find some stuff to sell. Sell t-shirts online. Sell eBooks. Sell something.

This is especially true if you are a copywriter. You know what works. You've been inside the castle of many businesses. You've seen their models and you know how money is made. Maybe you don't know how to get traffic but you can convert and that's 50% of the battle.

Stop trading your time for money. Stop trading your time for pennies. Copywriting is not what it used to be. For most people, you, who worked hard, for months, years, read tens of books, hand-wrote tens of letters, analyzed tens of promotions ... you are equal to someone who just got into this field and couldn't sell to save his life.

It's not worth it. The tulip mania is gone. The few clients that are worth it, be it 1%, 5%, 10% have 3 - 4 - 5 copywriters to pick from, all working at a high level. For every customer that can afford to pay $5000 or $10.000 for a promotion, there are five people who are qualified to do that and only one will get the money.

And for every customer who can and will pay, there are 100, 1000, 5000 who will pay peanuts. This is true in most fields - be it that you are a coder, a designer, a copywriter, a content creator.

I've seen this especially when it comes to content creation. I haven't done a lot of it but when I've did, it was very well paid. We are talking about $1000 for 100 pages and keep in mind that English is not my native language. It was for the ideas alone. Now, I've searched Upwork and they pay $100 for 300 pages. Or $250 for $200 pages. Prices differ but they are a far cry compared to what they've paid before.

So why bother?

If you know how to create products, create products and partner with a copywriter and a traffic guy to sell them. 33% from something you create for yourself and is an asset is better than 100% of trading your time - once. If you are a copywriter, find a product creator and create a product. If you are a SEO person, find a website that needs traffic and get them traffic instead of selling backlinks for peanuts.

The leverage is in having assets that don't scale based on how much time you pay. Yes, there's a risk. And yes, it is slower. But after a while, you're going to earn a lot more than you were earning as a freelancer. Plus, you create it once. It pays you for a long time. If I trade my time now for your money, even if you pay me $250/hour, once my time is delivered, that's it. I'll never get anything out of it again.

But if invest 10 hours and it brings me $250/month, that's $250 each and every month.

A lot of beginners here are clueless about how to earn money online. They have no specialized skills and because of this, find it almost impossible to earn a single penny. Some break through and do but the truth is that most people don't earn a single penny on the Internet.

But YOU ... the freelancer ... you are already specialized in a critical part of what makes an online business tick, of what it makes it work. What you are doing for other clients, you can do for yourself and then not a single person will reward you, but the marketplace.

I've took a decision. In all honesty, f**k freelancing. I'd rather teach kids English for $1800 per month and play with them, make them laugh than have to do with a marketplace that rewards incompetence just because incompetence is priced cheaper than competence.

And I hope that if you're a freelancer, you'll do the same thing. Just because you've done this forever, this doesn't mean you need to keep doing it.

Best regards,
AndrewM123