The Long-Term Career Strategy of a Freelance Writer
I’ve developed my long-term career strategy by asking myself, “What will I want to be doing in five years and ten years from today?”
I’m a content writer, and I love what I do. I work Monday through Friday, with 2–4 B2B SaaS clients at a time to create content for the website. The content acts as a lead magnet to attract people who are interested in their product and builds brand awareness and motivates people to sign up for their lead magnets.
When Saturday hits, I always feel a pang of, “Aw, man. It’s already the weekend.”
Like I said, I love what I do. But, that doesn’t mean in 5 years I’ll want to be hustling the way I am now. Grammarly sent me this reminder of how many words I’ve written in the past six months. This is about half of what I’ve really written (I don’t run everything through Grammarly).
In five years from today, I don’t see myself being able to sustain this amount of writing. I see myself being a really good at what I do, but totally burnt out.
So, I developed my long-term career strategy. This is based off of Robert Kiyosaki’s finance books. He has a simple (but hard to execute) concept for creating financial security.
Step 1: Being self-employed or being a freelancer. Think of a service-based business, like the one I have now. I make money by writing (service) content for B2B SaaS companies. I’m a freelancer, finding my own clients, filing my own taxes, etc.
This is the career that will burn me out.
That’s why there’s a Step 2.
Step 2: Become an entrepreneur. If my income stays tied to the amount of words I write, then I’ll never be able to really scale my business. While I can keep raising my prices, there is an inevitably cap on how much I can make. Yet, there’s no cap on how much product I can sell. I’m creating a Writer’s Guideline for new content writers who want to know how to write online content and for B2B SaaS businesses who can’t afford an experienced content writer but need content in their marketing strategy.
This is a product that I can sell 1–100,000+ times, and only have to write one time.
It relieves me from the burn out of having to invest my time to get a paycheck and replaces it with a scalable business model. This means I can travel, while still making money.
Yet again, there will be a time when I don’t want my income tied to selling products. What happens when AI takes over content writing and people don’t need to be trained to write content?
And that’s why there’s a Step 3.
Step 3: Become an investor. My goal is to be an angel investor in new companies, over a public stock investor. With that said, I’m far from this goal and it’s hard for me to say what I’ll really want when I hit this stage.
What I do know is that investing doesn’t tie me to selling a single product and hoping that it never goes out of style. It ties me to several products that are all suited for the market they are coming into (whatever the market in 2029 is).
This long-term strategy all came from asking myself,
“What will I want to be doing in five years and ten years from today?”
And then, most importantly, executing to make those dreams come true.free
