Courtesy of Andrea Anderson
In 2019, I had been a middle and high school English teacher for eight years. I also had two young children. Even though I truly loved my job, I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, so at the end of the school year, I quit my teaching job in order to stay home full-time.
I knew that I still wanted to be able to contribute financially while spending the majority of my day with my kids, and frankly, I had no idea how to do it. So, I went back to the thing that I've been doing my entire life — writing. I started freelance writing in the spring of 2019, and by the end of 2022, I had replaced my teaching salary with my freelance earnings. It was a big moment.
Fast forward to 2024, and I make more than I did as a teacher and get to write about a range of topics that include home improvement tips, product reviews, design-inspired pieces, personal finance, and more. My clients have included Real Simple, Popular Mechanics, Apartment Therapy, and US News & World Report.
As I look back on the early years and the years that followed, there are a number of things that contributed to that success and that I will continue to do to reach future goals.
If you wait for conditions to be perfect before starting something, it may never happen. I started my freelance writing business with a school-issued laptop and an hour in the mornings. It wasn't ideal, but it was what I had.
When I quit my job, I bought a $175 laptop and often worked from my bed with a baby sleeping next to me (or on me). Now, six years later, I have a little office nook and a computer with two monitors, but this never would have happened if I hadn't started when I did.
I also had no idea how to find clients, so I made an Upwork account, which at the time allowed you to connect with clients for free. I started sending proposals to any assignment that looked interesting or I had a passing knowledge of and got a few clients. I wrote for an affiliate beekeeping website (we had bees at the time), a property finder in Spain, and a luxury countertop brand.
All of my kids are in school now, so my days are much more flexible as far as work is concerned. But when I had the kids at home with me, the only time that I truly had to work was when they were sleeping. For me, this worked out ok because I'm naturally a morning person, but some days I was waking up at 3:30 or 4:00 am to get my writing done. I did what I had to do to get the hours in and my assignments completed.
While I definitely don't think that everyone has to get up early to be successful, it really paid off (literally) for me to zero in on the fact that I work best in the morning. That knowledge was even more solidified when all of the kids started school this year. Even though I have the option to work at other times, I still get up before 5:00 because that's when I'm the most focused.
In 2019, I chose "relentless" as my word of the year, and I've chosen a word every year since. I really did feel relentless that year and in the years that followed. Every time I wanted to sleep in a little later or I was feeling discouraged about the progress (or lack of) that I was making, I reminded myself that I needed to be relentless. Often, that was the push I needed to reach out to one more person to pitch a potential story or get up and finish an assignment.
I focused on writing about building materials and real estate during COVID when the housing market was exploding. When that started to cool off, I moved into more home improvement topics. Being able to pivot when necessary, while not always easy, keeps your foot in the door even as it revolves. When I lose clients, my immediate thought after I get over the disappointment is to look towards the next thing and evaluate if I should continue doing what I'm doing or pivot to something that can lead me down a new path. Now, I'm also focused on writing "The Simple Freelancer," my Substack newsletter that offers simple tips for freelance success.
I read James Clear's "Atomic Habits," in 2022, and it shifted the way I did a lot of things in my life and business. In it, Clear talks about the importance of systems and routines. Once I started to set up systems for different facets of my business, like my morning routine and how I track assignments, things really started to take off. A lot of times, it seems really difficult to reach a goal, whether it's to replace your current income at a new job or something else entirely, but the systems that can help you get there are much more manageable.
