How I Built My First Online Writing Business
Once you get started, the possibilities are endless.
The year was 2021.
I was a 23-year-old who had recently graduated from college. I was good at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but apart from that, I had no skills or experience. I’d started a blog on a site called “Medium.com” a few months earlier, but still nothing had come from it.
I had made 89 cents in my first 2 months. I was averaging about 10 views per day.
I had about $1000 in my bank account. I had one part-time job writing social media content for a lawn care company. I taught one Jiu-Jitsu private lesson per week.
I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I was unhappy, lost, broke, and most of all, anxious — all the time.
But I worked my through it.
Here’s how I used writing on the internet to completely restructure my life and build my first online business.
All you need to get started is some time, some hard work, and maybe some caffeine.
Let’s dive in:
Step 1: What will you offer?
Most people never make it past this stage.
I know that I struggled a lot to figure out my offer. It took months and I was honestly shooting in the dark in the early days.
So how do you figure out an offer?
You either build a skill or you offer a skill you already have.
These are the only 2 options.
At the time, I already had the skill of social media content writing, and I was also working on developing the skill of article writing. I was offering one skill and building another.
Remember that for later.
Either way — before you can make money, you need to make an offer.
Step 2: How will you get clients?
This is the hard part.
You spend all this time building an offer or building a skill, but then once you get the skill, you can’t actually get anyone to pay you for it.
You feel lost, sad, and probably even angry. You feel like Bruce in Bruce Almighty when Evan “Back-Stabber” Baxter gets the promotion to anchor instead of him.
You see these gurus on Twitter upselling clients for thousands of dollars and tweeting with spelling errors, and you can’t get a single client. You’re cursing the world. You’re cursing God. You’re driving around town looking for “a sign”.
But what if you just... knew how to get clients?
There are really 2 main ways:
referrals (they come to you)
outreach (you go to them)
Pretty much everything else is some extension of that.
Unfortunately, however, cold outreach is probably going to be better. This is especially true in the early days.
This means that you have to get over the fear of rejection. I spent a lot of time in my 20s emailing local businesses about possibly writing for them and never hearing anything back.
When I “retired” from freelancing, however, I had 11 clients. 8 had come from cold outreach. 3 had come from referrals.
Lesson in there.
Think about it like dating.
You see a pretty girl or boy and you want to ask them on a date.
Most of the time, they will never know you exist if you just sit there and look pretty.
This is the equivalent of writing a good blog or newsletter.
It’s still important. Looking good or writing well is an important part of a writing business. It shows dedication to the craft.
However, if you want to get writing clients, most of the time they’re not going to find you just because your blog exists. You need to approach them.
When trying to build your business you 2 things:
credibility
experience
The way you get those things is by going out into the world and getting them.
This isn’t just about writing anymore. It’s about life.
Step 2.5: Do you have a library of content?
Whether you’re trying to build through cold outreach or referrals, a library of content is an essential part of building a writing business.
Do you have a blog? A newsletter? Do you publish writing online consistently?
Put yourself in the shoes of a possible client…
Are they going to go with the person who writes every single day AND cold DMed them, or are they going to go with the person who just cold DMed them and has “writer” in their bio?
Your social blogs (Twitter, Substack, Medium, Quora, LinkedIn, etc) are what make up your digital writing resume. Constantly build that content library — this is the foundation.
Plus, who knows, eventually you might just get to write your own content full-time. Wouldn’t that be cool?
That’s the dream.
Step 3: How will you scale?
This is a good problem to have.
I got here toward the closing days of my first freelance writing business. At one point, like I mentioned earlier, I was writing for 11 clients at once. I was doing newsletters, social media content, blogs, and more. I was writing thousands of words per day about random things and I was making money.
Life was good.
But not entirely.
I was still stressed. I was still anxious. My wrists hurt because I didn’t have great writing systems and I’d just sit at my computer and tell myself to “write the article” or “create the content calendar”.
There are a few ways you can scale a small freelance writing business and most of them don’t require any help — from people.
Here’s what I did:
Batch your writing. I’ve started to do this with The Grappler’s Diary, my other main writing project right now. I also did it with my other client work back in 2022 before I quit freelancing and went all-in on ghostwriting.
Use ChatGPT. ChatGPT still sucks at writing, but it’s not as bad as you think at generating writing ideas. If you’re trying to manage a business, create content, and do outreach, one of the best things you can do is ask ChatGPT for help. Don’t have ChatGPT do the work you should be doing yourself, but use it as a tool to do your work better.
Charge more. This is basic business. The more people you have interested in your product or service, the more valuable it is. If you don’t charge more for your services as your writing business grows, the only person who is going to pay the price is you.
Closing Thoughts
In the modern writing world, it can feel like you’re swimming with the sharks right away. Social media makes this especially true.
You’re starting out with essentially no business, no clients, and not even any writing experience. You’re dipping your feet into the same industry that contains people who have been writing for a decade. It’s intimidating.
To put it in Jiu-Jitsu terms, it can feel like you’re a first-day white belt who has to spar with a world-champion black belt on your first day.
So what do you do?
Well, if we were on the Jiu-Jitsu mat, I’d tell you to focus on yourself, build yourself up step by step, and focus on the fundamentals. To put it bluntly — try to survive.
Modern writing is the same way.
In summary, here are the main steps to building your first writing business:
Figure out a service.
Figure out a funnel to get clients.
Build a library of content.
Scale as you grow.
You can get started on this in a weekend. In a few years, you’ll completely change your life.
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for reading :)