Working From Home: Episode 26: From 13 year old blogger to out-earning surgeons with Elise Dopson
Nelson is joined by Elise Dopson to discuss breaking into the copywriting market, being your own teacher, and taking advantage of the opportunities available to you as a freelancer.
Topics Include:
- Increasing your rates
- Niching in a particular skill
- Differences between freelancing and traditional jobs
- Work-life balance
Resources Mentioned:
www.peakfreelance.com/membership
www.nelson-jordan.com/newsletter
www.linkedin.com/in/nelsontjordan
Timestamps
[2:51] – Nelson prefaces one of today’s topics–money, and talking about money as a business owner. Elise shares her story with listeners.
[8:41] – Developing your skill as a writer. Can universities effectively teach copywriting for marketers? Do you need a degree to get started as a writer?
[15:13] – How to transition from a job into freelance work.
[21:10] – Focusing on a specific niche that you enjoy working in–becoming an expert.
[30:10] – Thinking about money as a freelancer. Why freelancers SHOULD earn more money than their employed counterparts, and why freelancers should think of their work as a business.
[35:35] – Understanding your value as a freelancer and finding ways to communicate that value to potential clients.
[50:37] – Raising your rates as a freelancer or business owner.
[57-16] – The “get it while you can” attitude. An opportunity today doesn’t mean an opportunity tomorrow!
Transcript
Nelson: Hello. And welcome to the working from home podcast with your host me, Nelson Jordan. Today, I’m joined by Elise Dopson, who is a freelance B2B writer, and one half of the brains behind peak freelance. Elise, thank you So, much for joining me.
Elise: [00:01:04] Thank you So, much for having me on. I’m excited to be here and talk everything working from home, freelancing, money, everything! I’m excited to dig in
Nelson: [00:01:11] Me too, me too. First, I’ve got to say it’s nice to have another English voice on the podcast. I have to say the majority of people that I’ve interviewed So, far have been not necessarily American, but they’ve been kind of North American and tend to be living in somewhere like Bali or Australia or somewhere like that.
But we’re both in the UK right now. We’re both kind of struggling with snow and fog and mist. So, it’s nice to be speaking to a friendly face.
Elise: [00:01:42] Yeah, for sure. I had a client call, yesterday I think it was. And they were in, I think it was Mexico, Costa Rica, and they show me the outside of that window and I showed them mine and the difference was just incredible. It’s like one degree here, freezing cold and hers, I think she said it goes down to 18 degrees at the lowest. I’m like, do you want to swap?
But yeah, it’s very unusual to have someone from the UK in this world because I don’t know many. So, thank you for having me on and excited that we can connect over this.
Nelson: [00:02:16] Yeah. Brits have to stick together. I feel like the copywriting and the content marketing world is dominated by Americans for the most part. You know, the majority of my clients are American. I’m not sure about yours.
Elise: Yeah, me too.
Nelson: Yeah. Okay, cool. So, I mean, these days, even when I work with people in the UK or at the moment I’m working with a startup in Belgium, but I always do my quotes in dollars because it seems to be like the currency for copywriting, for content marketing and things like that.
So, one of the things that we’re going to talk about through the podcast today is money. Which is why I started blathering on about currency. I feel like money as a freelancer, isn’t talked about enough and when it is, it’s not talked about in the right ways. Just before we jumped on this call, we were both talking and I mentioned that I felt like normally the people who mention how much they earn normally do it in this really kind of obnoxious self-promotional way. Normally when they’ve got some sort of course to sell or some consultancy. And then it’s normally like: “you too kind of a million dollars this month with working four hours from a beach”. It’s normally that sort of like, I don’t know, it just feels like they’re trying to sucker people in through lies basically.
So, I’m really looking forward to getting into that. First though, what I thought would be really fun for us to do, and it will give people more of a flavor of where you’ve come from and the sorts of experiences you’ve had in the past is almost how you got into this industry in the first place. So, where did it all start for you?
Elise: [00:04:10] So, this is a relatively long story considering I’m only 22. I started back when I was, I think I was 12 or 13, and I noticed there was two kinds of crowds back then there was a Facebook crowd and a Twitter crowd. And I think this was just before Twitter became the thing it is now. And I was always in the Twitter crowd. I wanted to make friends with people that I didn’t know, even though it was like 12, my mom was like, Elise you really want to be on Twitter. What is it? Like, send me all the information before I can approve it. But I was on Twitter and I noticed there was a lot of people talking about similar things to me, but they all have blogs. So, I was like, okay, well, I’m just going to make a blog. And so, I made a Tumblr blog – looking back it was not the best option, but then I moved over to Blogspot, which was all the rage back then. I started writing about stuff people, no one, would care about unless they were me. So, I was writing about what kind of makeup I liked, what I thought about my teachers at school. Nobody cared about this, but me. But then I started to basically learn how to write for the internet because in English in school, I hated it. I hated writing essays. I thought I’m never going to be a writer too, because I can’t stand this. But then I realized there’s two types of writing in this industry and I’m like the second one, which is more conversational writing for the internet.
I probably would never be a journalist, would never be an author or anything like that. It’s just not me. So, I made this blog and then I started to learn how to drive traffic to that website. So, over time I began thinking nobody’s reading this. If I want to make this something big and something that people are actually going to read, then I need to write stuff that people want to read and find. So, I started to learn the basics of SEO at that time. It was literally just find a keyword and shove it in wherever you can. I feel like, yeah, So, glad we’ve moved on from those times. But yeah, after about, I think it was four years, I actually got that blog to, I’m not going to say like anywhere near famous, but I was getting like, I think it was about 5,000 views a month from Google and to me at like 14, this was mind blowing. So, I spent another two years doing that. And then I got to a point at 16 and 17 and thinking I’ve learned all I can by myself now. I’m very much a self-learner. Like I homeschooled myself and I got an apprenticeship. I learned how to do this blog by myself.
So, I ditch school off and did this blog for the year I left and then, like I said, I got to that point where I just thought I’ve learned everything I can myself like to really up level this now I need to get a job doing this. So, I applied for a job in Manchester at an SEO agency. I was quite lucky because there was a tiny agency there, So, when I got the job, I could move around into different areas. So, I started off as, I think it was a marketing executive, but then I moved into Facebook ads. I did copywriting. I did blog posts. I did basically anything you can think of, paid ads, tried it all. And then I’ve realized copywriting is the one thing that I love to do.
But then again, I run into a dilemma where again, there’s two types of content writing B2B and B2C, the agency worked with B2C clients. So, I was writing about pet insurance, wall cladding, and I was like, nah, this isn’t for me. I don’t like it. So, I said to my boss at the time, I think this is 2015 or 2016, I said to him long form content is the way to go.
So, I think I’m an early adopter of that. Cause back then it was 500 words and that was it. So, I said, let me try it for the agency website first, if it works, let’s roll it out to our clients. And then it got to the point where I liked doing that more than I loved doing the client work. So, I thought maybe this job, isn’t the one for me anymore.
Thought about going to university again, because again, I felt like I learned everything I could that was…
Nelson: [00:07:54] what age was this now?
Elise: [00:07:57] Oh, this was, I think I was 18 when I got this job and I was saying, look, I think I’m going to go to university. I’m going to do a marketing degree. And my boss at the time, this was in the January of 2017. So, it would have been, yeah, I’d been 18. And he said, look, why don’t you start freelancing on the side So, that when you get to university, you’ll have a bit of money in your back pocket, some things to do, you don’t have to get a retail job. So, I did, he gave me my first client, which was his friend. And then about six months later, I said, look, I’m not going to uni anymore. I’m quitting my job. I’m going freelance. And that was it.
Nelson: [00:08:30] Amazing. Okay. I think there’s So, much to unpack there and So, many different directions that we could go and to be honest, so, So, much of it resonated with me.
I feel like I got incredibly lucky as well with the agency that I selected. Well, I say selected, makes it sound like I actually had like the opportunity to pick anybody I ever wanted. You know, I had a masters in marketing at that point. But it was still really slim pickings in terms of like, I just applied everywhere within Birmingham. And I finally got into an agency called WPR and I was quite lucky in terms of they were a PR and digital agency, but they say digital, they were basically just doing social. And then there was a small, small team that kind of doubled over the time that I was there.
Then, I got the opportunity to do PPC and SEO and conversion rate optimization and learn about all of those things at the same time. And then those skills fit really, really well together. So, I feel way more confident about like the place of content and the place of copy in the marketing funnel in general, having been the person designing landing pages or creating the paid campaign on Google shopping or search text ads or something like that, you know, So, all does fit together really, really nicely.
The university thing is really interesting to me. I feel there are certain subjects in particular, the universities do not teach in the right way. Or they don’t teach in the most appropriate way for actually using that out in the real world. And marketing is one of them. I did, as I said, I did a master’s in marketing and I learned So, much more in a month, two months of actually having a marketing role than I did during the entire year of doing the masters, you know, there’s something about actual execution versus theory that means you question about everything that you learned in the first place. That’s super interesting.
I think there’s a lot of, I think the best marketers, are self-taught and I don’t mean that they isolate themselves, but they’re very much in charge of their own learning. Do you have any structures for that? Or was it just you’re quite a curious person and things caught your eye and they were like, I wonder how that works, and stuff like that.
Elise: [00:11:16] I do think I’m just a curious person. Like I see campaigns all the time and I try and dig. I think there’s a website, I can’t remember what it’s called, but it basically takes you under the hood of a popular marketing campaign. And I would read them and soak them in and I’d be like, right, this is what I need to do to do that.
But on the university stuff, one thing that changed my mind was not just the money that I was making from being freelance. It was the fact that my partner has friends that are older than me and a lot of my friends are older than me. So, by this point they were just coming out of university, they’d spent what, 18 years in education, and they were basically getting the first job, the first real job ever. Whereas I had been doing this for technically like six years already, and I know it’s not a race, but I was just terrified of getting into like 22/23 and starting from scratch again. So, yeah, that is a huge reason why I ditched the university idea.
And I’m So, glad that I did because even now, if you do a marketing degree, you’re never guaranteed to get a job in that role anyway, So, it’s for me, the risk of going to uni and potentially wasting that money, being in debt, not learning the things that I need to do versus going freelance for six months and just seeing if it worked out. That risk was like a no-brainer.
Nelson: [00:12:34] No, that makes a lot of sense. Marketing in particular, like copywriting and content marketing, have you ever been asked by somebody if you’ve got a degree in it, like anybody who’s ever hired you?
Elise: No
Nelson: Me neither. Like nobody ever cares.
The only thing anybody ever asked for is samples of my previous work.
Elise: [00:12:57] Yeah. I was having this conversation actually a few weeks ago and they were saying that resumes are basically non-existent anymore in this industry. Like nobody cares if I went to college, how many GCSE grades I got, what I did when I left school.
Nobody cares as long as you can prove that you can write and you are trusted, a person feels like they can trust you with them wanting to write something. You’ve got it down to a winner, I think.
Nelson: [00:13:19] But that’s it, it’s So, different. And also, I don’t think you need a three-year degree for somebody to teach you how to write or how to manage clients and stuff like that.
It’s very much the sort of thing that is learned through execution and through getting it wrong and just repeated effort and slowly, slowly getting better at what you do, slowly learning different frameworks and stuff like that. I feel like there are certain industries that are right for university and certain industries that that are not.
I feel like marketing is, is part of the latter, right?
Elise: [00:14:00] Definitely a hundred percent.
Nelson: [00:14:01] So, let’s talk about once you actually started going freelance, was it all plain sailing or were there a few obstacles to overcome.
Elise: [00:14:13] So, my first ever month that I quit my job and I was freelancing for the whole month full-time I earned something like £200.
So, that was the biggest hurdle to get over. Because up until that point I was making, well I mean, I was on minimum wage at this agency anyway, I wasn’t getting paid much. So, it wasn’t like I had to earn a load from wanting to replace that salary anyway. So, I earning pretty much the same salary on the side in two days because I dropped my hours towards the end just to reduce the risk a little bit more. Basically, it didn’t work because the first month I left and made £200 and I was thinking, oh my God, what am I doing? I’ve made the biggest mistake ever. But I think looking back that was just timing issue.
So, I’d spent September getting excited and leaving my job and mixing with my coworkers for the last time, and then when I quit, I was like, the month before my activity and the month before has led to this. And also, it was around Christmas. So, it was like October, November, December, nobody wanted to hire new freelancers at that time, they were thinking we’ll just wait until we get anew budgets in January and we’ll start from then.
So, I did, I spent those three months pitching like a mad woman. Some of them didn’t pay off. I think I had like six calls a day. At one point I was just trying to get myself in front of everyone. Say, look from January, you can hire me to do this thing. And then I think from January, I was earning at least £2,500 a month.
So, it’s a big jump from £200 to £2,500, but it was scary at first to basically have nothing to rely on.
Nelson: [00:15:47] Sure. So, something’s interesting there though, to me it sounds like you tried to mitigate that risk a little bit by keeping some of the hours with your previous agency, which just seemed super smart.
Again, with myself, my very first client as a freelancer was my previous agency. They needed somebody; they haven’t managed to hire somebody in time to replace me. And that was kind of just a happy accident. I obviously stopped working for them on really, really good terms and they knew that I could do the work because I’ve been doing the work for the previous four years. So, I think like people think, especially if they’re in a job at the moment that they have to kind of sever ties and almost go straight away as a freelancer, whereas I’d actually make the argument that you could remove a lot of the stress by freelancing in your spare time and just trying to get one freelance client. One small freelance client while you still work in-house or at an agency or whatever it is you’re doing, or while you’re at university or even during school, you know, one thing that’s great about the internet is that a lot of the time, even when you’re doing kind of content writing, like I hire people at the moment that I’ve never met. I’ve never seen a photo of them. I don’t know how old they are. And quite frankly, I don’t care. Like they produce great work and they fit within the budget. So, I kind of feel like anything that you can do to mitigate that risk is a good thing. If you’ve got any other tips or any things that you managed to do to make it a less risky enterprise going out on your own?
Elise: [00:17:36] I think that was it. But I do think it’s worth mentioning that at this point I did not have a mortgage. I didn’t have a car. Well, I had a car, but my insurance payments were barely anything. So, basically, my outgoings were nothing. So, to me it wasn’t as big of a risk as it would be to anybody else. And also, I didn’t have much of a risk anyway, because my boss, at the time we had a really good relationship and he said to me, “look, if this doesn’t work out, I’m sure it will work out for you. But if it doesn’t, you’ve got a job to come back to.” So, for me, I’m not going to say there was no risk because obviously there was still some, but it was very little to begin with if that makes sense.
Nelson: [00:18:13] Yeah, that definitely does. I mean, obviously things are So, different depending on your circumstances.
You know, if you’ve got a mortgage, two kids in a private school or something like that, your freedom and the sort of things that you’ll need to have in place to avoid being in the world’s riskiest situation are obviously very, very different, but even then I think the main way around that is by getting things lined up while you’re still working and while you’ve still got other income coming in and then not having this thought process in your head that if I want to go freelance, I need to almost just be a freelancer straight away. You can be both, right. Nobody knows exactly what you’re doing and you can keep your nine to five. You can even you know, go and work in a different kind of job that is actually a nine to five, rather than So, many jobs that you end up doing ridiculous hours when you’re not supposed to, there’s something to be said for just getting a job in retail or in the restaurant industry or something like that. Anything that you want to do, if you know that freelancing is.
Elise: [00:19:28] Sure. Yeah, for sure. And my dad was terrified when I told him all of this. He’s very much old school, get a job and then work that job every day until you’re 60. And I was like, damn, I don’t want to do that. I want to live my life in between. So, he was saying, look, what are your contingency plans if this doesn’t work?
So, he basically made me save like three months of savings to make sure I had enough to live on by the time I quit. And that was lucky really, because I said, my first month was £200 pounds. So, I thank God for my dad for telling me that. What I was saying, the support system you have is another reason why I had such a big privilege to do this anyway, because by no means in my family like rich. But if say my mom and dad had no disposable income, I didn’t have a rich uncle out living his best life in Spain somewhere. It would be a completely different story. Like if I needed the financial backup, I had it. And I’m fully aware that most people don’t have that. And that is a massive privilege that I think it would be remiss of me not to mention.
Nelson: [00:20:29] Sure. Yeah, it was totally, it’s very useful for people to understand the context behind your decisions. Otherwise, there’s no value to that story and that advice. Right. Because everybody is in such a different situation. But yeah, thank you for mentioning that.
So, once you’d actually become a freelancer, obviously you were known for your B2B or your SAS work at the moment. Have you always been doing that or did you kind of explore a few different industries?
Elise: [00:21:04] At first, it was just B2B. But like I said earlier, I knew that I liked writing for the agency more than I did the clients. And I think that was because I was writing about the things that I’ve taught myself, if that makes sense.
So, I was teaching myself marketing all the time. I was teaching myself how to send the marketing proposal, how to do all those things and then So, to write about what I had learned. I just decided it’s So, much easier. I mean, I’m not a good researcher, like I cannot spend an hour researching what different pet insurances mean. That’s just not me. I’d prefer to know something inside out, back to front and then write about how I would do that thing rather than saying, this is a combination of the things I’ve found on Google, I’m mushing them all together. I’ve never done this myself. This is what you should do. That doesn’t sit right with me.
And so, yeah, I think a lot of SAAS… why I like SAAS So, much is because they have a need for regular content. So, they need new members coming in every month, they need new people signing up for trials, and then you get all of those people in their funnel they need content to get them there.
So, I found like this was a pure business decision. Software companies have lots of marketing budget. They have lots of money to spend on freelances and content. They already know the value of content, So, I’m not educating them on that. It’s not a hard sell. So, yeah, it was very easy for me to sell to them versus, you know, a marketing agency down the road who are paying pennies to their freelancers.
I feel like that again was a no brainer to me.
Nelson: [00:22:33] Sure. So, that sounds like a combination of two things then. Firstly, that they actually have the budget to pay you what you wanted to earn to support your lifestyle, to meet your earnings goals and those sorts of things. But secondly, the fact that you also felt that you could confidently and competently talk about that market without this fake it till you make it sort of mentality, which is quite interesting.
So, yeah, I’ve written personally about like a lot of different subjects, but I found this year in particular I’ve taken a similar path to you in terms of this is the stuff that I know because I’ve been doing it. Like I’ve been in marketing for 10 years and I’ve been involved in paid social SEO, PPC, CRO, what have you. I can talk about that stuff without needing to research it. A lot of the times the article was already in my head and then I would just need to go and find stats to back up the points that I already want to make the arguments I already want to make. And like the difference just in time that it takes, but also the energy that it takes out of you to produce those things. That’s where I’ve noticed the difference. Is that something that rings true?
Elise: [00:23:52] Yeah, for sure. And I think it’s worth mentioning here as well, is that once you do know something inside out, you become the expert in that thing. And I know freelancers all the time get told to pick a niche. And I do think that is true.
I do think you need to be known for this one thing, but if you’ve been doing something inside out for 10 years, in some situations you are the expert in that already. So, you’re not starting from scratch when you do go out and play.
Nelson: [00:24:17] Yeah. I’ve found that as well, because I’ve been involved in content and copywriting, purely those disciplines, for a lot shorter time period than you have, like significantly shorter. And I’ve found that it’s almost been a bit of a shortcut for me because yes, other people have more experience in those areas than I do in terms of the actual execution on the writing side. But I’m an expert in those areas myself. So, now I just need to learn how to actually write about those areas. More than any other freelancers and stuff within that particular area, when they’re writing about marketing, I know those subjects because I’ve been the one creating the marketing strategy. I’ve been the one interacting with content team and doing the keyword research and creating the PPC campaigns. And just the difference there, I think is monumental. I feel far more confident that I know what I want to say rather than, as you said, Googling and talking to experts and interviewing people to find out what is the layer that’s not the immediate surface level, that’s visible to people.
So, I find that’s like super interesting to me, for sure.
So, once you’re getting a few clients coming in and you’re starting to build your name, and obviously you’ve been doing this for a while, did you find kind of like a flywheel effect with referrals or how did you go about winning business?
Elise: [00:25:58] So, I’m going to be totally honest. I did not pitch much after those first three months. I just found I couldn’t figure out how to do it right. And the time it would’ve spent for me to learn how to pitch, I could have done other things that I thought would’ve got me more clients. So, one of those is guest posting, I guest posted like a madwoman back then. I basically found all the publications that my clients were reading and pitched a topic to them. Because this was like, well, a three winner for me. I could use that logo to say I’ve been featured in this publication, which does a lot for credibility and social proof because clients think if they worked with editors at Content Marketing Institute, for example, they must know how to write.
And then secondly, I had a ton of writing samples to send to anyone. If I did want to pitch I could say, look, I’ve been featured here, here, and here, go and read my work. It’s very different than sending them a link to a website that no one’s heard of. It’s not as impressive. So, yeah, that was the second one.
And then also, the third one is that I built relationships with those editors because I basically treated them like my client. Like I would reply to their emails on time. I’d meet deadlines all the time. I’d do revisions for them and basically treat them like my best client. And then in some cases that paid off and they said, look, we’ve got budgets to hire freelancers. You’ve already done a post for us already. We know you’re good. We know you can write. It’s easier for them to hire someone that they know can do the job and has done it before, even for free. So, a few of my clients back then actually came back three or four months later and said, we’ve got budget now, can we hire you to do this thing?
And because my name was attached to all of those things, it meant clients began to know my name, which is a big thing. I feel like there’s So, many staff writers and B2B writers out there, but if you can get bi-lines on these huge websites, if your name is constantly popping up on the things that they read, they’re going to get to know you now.
Nelson: [00:28:00] Awesome. Well, here’s a very pointed, specific question for you. Do you have different rates for bylined articles versus kind of ghost-written articles?
Elise: [00:28:11] So, for byline content I just charge my standard rate and then if my name is not being attached to it, I charge 25% extra and basically I say to the client, “look, I’m not getting the benefits of this piece. I’m going to need to charge you more for it. And you’re paying more because you look better by publishing this content under your name.” So, I’ve never had an issue with charging the extra money.
Nelson: [00:28:34] Interesting. Yeah, I do something similar, but it’s not 25%, So, I might need to increase it.
Elise: Yeah do it.
Nelson: Yeah. That’s what I’m going to do straight after this call. Just like whoop, amazing.
There’s So, many people that have echoed that advice, to be honest by the time that this episode comes out the episode with Dyanna Mayfield, who is also, in the SAAS industry, that will have come out as well. And she, I think more than any other person that I know contributes her success to her knowledge of how the media works, how she’s been able to secure not just for herself, interestingly, but how she’s actually been able to package the service up for clients in terms of how to get them featured in the publications by using very, very similar principles, but she’s taken them kind of one step further, she gets herself regularly published and then is able to do the same thing with her clients through the relationships that she’s built up with those editors as well.
So, that, that’s really fascinating.
One of the things that I want to make this podcast about, we’ve already touched on it a little bit, is the concept of money. Now can you explain the situation that you’re in with regards to your income versus the people around you?
Elise: [00:30:04] Yeah, for sure. I love this topic because I think we mentioned this on the discovery call. I out-earn a lot of people, I think I out-earn my mom, my dad and my partner put together, which at first that makes me feel, it makes it feel disgusting, like to be blunt. I think sometimes like a surgeon can perform lifesaving surgery and I earn more than them sat at home in my bedroom sometimes on my computer just typing.
But I think I was speaking to Mike about this topic and he was saying, look, they chose that job. When you chose this job, you don’t have to feel guilty about the amount of money that you earn. But yeah, I think once I got, I think I was on about £60,000 a year and that’s when that started kicking in for me. And now I’m like almost double that. So, it’s kind of like double the thoughts, if that makes sense. It is tough to get your head around. But yeah, I just think I chose this job and I’m good at it. Anyone can start doing this if they wanted to earn the same money as me. But yeah, it is tough, especially comparing.
Nelson: [00:31:07] Mm. Have you found that anybody has gone out of their way to make you feel bad about what you learn?
Elise: [00:31:14] No, I’m quite lucky with that. I mean, in my friendship group, a lot of them have just left uni to get in their first jobs, or they’re doing like an apprenticeship style thing. So, they’re on, maybe I’d say maximum like £30 grand a year.
And So, I feel bad sometimes bringing up how much I earn, because I don’t want to make them feel bad if that makes sense, because I don’t want to put them in a situation where it’s like, “Oh, let’s do this thing as a big friend group and I can’t afford the things that Elise wants to do.” I never want to do that.
So, I try not to talk about money with my friends, just because of that. But like online, I’m pretty open with it because I feel like a lot of people can earn decent money in this industry as well. So, I don’t have to make people wish that they could understand well, because they can.
Nelson: [00:32:00] Yeah. I think this is a weird one within content marketing within copywriting, and just it’s freelancing in general, I’m going to say having kind of experienced different freelance industries within the marketing spectrum, I suppose you kinda earn a ridiculous amount of money, especially when you compare what you’d be doing the same work for an in-house or an agency.
That’s one of the things that it’s quite hard to get your head around, especially if you’re coming from that environment, you almost have this self-imposed “Oh no, that’s silly. I couldn’t be earning that.” Like, “Oh God, maybe I should like lower my rates or something like that.” Or “wait, how can I be working like a day a week or two days a week and be making the same salary as I was before” and stuff like that.
But one of the ways that I’ve kind of got around that thinking in my head. Some of it is just time, right? If you’ve been sitting with that problem and that feeling long enough, you start to get better with it. You start to get more okay with it. But the thing that I helped me a little bit and hope it helps other people is understanding that you’re taking on the risk.
Like if you work for a company, you’re going to get a salary each month, you’re going to get a pension paid each month. You’re going to get holiday paid. You’re going to get perhaps medical and stuff like this and all the other benefits. You don’t have to pay for your own equipment or anything like that.
You don’t get any of that when you’re freelancing, you have to pay for your own equipment. Yes. You can write it off as tax, but that’s still money out of your pocket. You don’t get paid holidays. If you’re not working, you’re not earning money. And a lot of the times you also, have to take on all of these other responsibilities. Like you have to make sure that your accounting is in order, which you don’t have to do when you work for somebody. Like you have to do all of the client management, you taking the risk in terms of putting stuff out in your own name. And you’re not some anonymous person behind a company that could hide when everything goes wrong.
There’s So, much involved there that yes, you can make a lot, a lot more money, but at the same time, it takes a special kind of person, I think a special type of person, to be able to be a successful freelancer because you don’t just have the skills that are in front of you. Right. You don’t just have to be a good writer.
You also, have to think of yourself as a business owner. So, one of the things I want to get to, is this something that you’ve done or a big insight that you’ve had with regarding yourself as a business owner and those sort of freelancing skills versus just improving as a writer?
Elise: [00:35:00] Yeah. So, I would say, I think it wasn’t that long ago at all, someone said to me, you and your client are not in an employee employer relationship. You are a business owner and a business owner working together to help them meet their goal. And that was a massive mindset shift for me because I was thinking they just hire me to do this one thing. It doesn’t really matter. They’re just software companies with more money that they know what to do, where they’re just wasting it on people like me.
But then I thought people are doing this because it works. And I got to a point where I was looking in Ahrefs and seeing what my work was actually doing for them. And sometimes it was like the traffic value. They would pay like $10,000 just to get that traffic in ads. I’ve done it for what, £500 at this time.
So, I was thinking the business value here for them is they’re taking advantage of me kind of and I was like, I don’t stand for that. I feel like to do this long term, to make the life that I wanted. I needed to up that and just touching back on what you said about you taking all the risks and factoring that in your rates.
I think that is twofold because if a client cannot hire someone full time, they don’t want the risk of hiring someone, and say look two months there’s not got enough work for you. They need to pay a premium to have that. Now I won’t work, now I don’t service. So, by adding that on and again, just thinking about the value that I gave them, and this does come with time, I’m no stranger to imposter syndrome. I get it all the time, but I just make a notion template of all the stuff I’ve written, all the results I get from that. And then whenever I’m feeling like, Ugh, this is a lot of money for this one thing I look back at that and say, look, no, I am worth it. This is what I’ve done. And this is the value that my client is getting. And this is probably gonna make thousands off this one piece and I’m charging them a thousand. So, the ROI on their side is huge. So, I need to take as much of that as I can for the work that I’m doing.
Nelson: [00:37:02] Makes complete sense. I love that. And what you said there about writing down your wins and what you have achieved reminds me of something. I think in Copy Hackers, the 10X Freelancer and stuff like that, they caught it “the wholesomeness cheat sheet” or So, something like that, right? It’s something that you keep on your desk and every time you deliver something stellar, you just write it down.
For me, there’s two standout things that I worked on that I use in every sales call, because they can see how proud I am of it. And it’s just like these great results. There’s one that was like 242% increase in revenue through one of the CRO pieces of work that I did. I took a company from six figures to seven figures and the other one is doing something very similar but through organic search. I won’t tell you the companies, don’t need to go into it, but the important thing is to know that I know those stats off by heart because I use them in every single sales call because they get the same reaction that you just did, that you go, wow okay, I want to work with you because of that.
That also works for you, having something to look at when somebody questions and queries your rates, when somebody makes that awkward face, when you drop your price and there’s just silence on the line, you know it’s something nice to look at just to reassure you that you’re like, no, that’s why I charge that much because my clients get this as a result.
How can content writers specifically get better at understanding what results they actually deliver? Cause I find like with a lot of article writers, for example, they’ll do one-offs for clients or the clients won’t give them access to Google analytics. So, have you got any insights there?
Elise: [00:39:00] So, first of all, I would say this depends massively, and you have a huge privilege if the site is strong itself. Cause I positioned myself as an SEO copywriter and in the beginning, I was working with tiny websites and they were going after terms like how to work from home. And I was like, you never, ever gonna rank from this. I can create the best piece of content in the world, but everybody else is going to outrank us because of the power of their site. So, I do feel like if you are in the early days is extremely hard to prove that you can write SEO content. And So, in that situation, I would say, go to your client. You say, what is the average, what percentage in traffic have you had since we published this piece?
And that could even be like how many search traffic? Cause I think using numbers is hard because, it may be misleading this, I don’t know if it is, it probably is. Now I’m saying out loud, but if it’s from 500 to 600, 600 is not as impressive as the percentage increase extra that you’ve got. So, I’d say in those early days, use percentage increases, don’t use actual numbers.
And then once you do get to working up to those bigger sites, when you are ranking for those keywords, take screenshots of you in the top, in the first page, in the feature snippet, because those can change a lot and by having the screenshot, then you can prove that it was once there, even if it’s not now you did get it at some point.
And then I would say, grab the URL and plug it into a tool like Ahrefs. I’m choosing Ahrefs because I know for a fact that they do traffic value. So, you’ll be able to say if the client paid this much money in ads, they’d get the same result. So, you can say, look, you’re hiring me to write this blog post for a thousand pounds, but this example got 200,000 pounds in traffic value that they could have spent on ads and they’ve just spent it on me and profited the rest. Does that make sense?
Nelson: [00:40:51] Yeah, definitely. I mean, one thing, if people are looking for tools, SEMrush also have a free version and they give you the equivalent of traffic value, they might call it PPC value or something like that, I can’t remember.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I will push back on you a little bit, but not in a bad way, just to say I don’t think it is disingenuous to use a percentage versus an absolute number in most cases that’s the right thing to do for a couple of reasons. Number one, it doesn’t mean something to a different size of company in a different industry to say that you got 5,000 extra people to the site per month. Because that could be far more than that total search traffic, or that could be a tiny, tiny proportion of their search traffic, depending on the size of their company, the size of their content strategy teams and that sort of thing. And how long they’ve been established for. The other thing I would say is quite a lot of the time companies are squeamish about you revealing absolute numbers. So, I know for certain companies that I signed NDAs with and use for case studies, they’re more than happy for me to use percentages, but they really don’t like me using absolute numbers. So, yeah, I’m with you. I think it’s totally fine to be like, yeah, I did that by 20%, rather than it’s a hundred extra people per month.
Elise: [00:42:27] Yeah and I think that data, you need to talk to your client to get anyway. So, I feel like if you’re asking for that and they say, no, we’re not sharing that. It’s a great segue to even ask for a testimonial, basically just waving yourself in and making sure you get that feedback. Obviously, numbers would be great, but if you can’t get numbers, even a testimonial will be fantastic to say we doubled this or we got these results from this content is a great way to show off that you can do what you’re trying to get hired to do.
Nelson: [00:42:56] A hundred percent and I would add to that and just say, it’s also a great way to extend those relationships and to turn them from short-term relations into long-term ones, because you can say things like, well I’d like the data here because that will help us decide which article to create next, because we’ll be able to see which ones performed really well.
It will also, if you ask the client or you can install it yourself using… Gosh, I can’t remember what it’s called now, but it flags an event every time somebody hits like 25%, 50%, 75% of the article. What are those called?
Elise: [00:43:34] I think Hotjar does a similar thing.
Nelson: [00:43:37] Yeah. I can’t remember what those are called, but it fires an event anyway into Google analytics when somebody’s read a certain percentage of the page and you can understand like which parts of your articles are really hitting home and which are kind of losing people. And when you phrase it like that to your client, the benefit to them is that you might even be able to go in and do a short rewrite of the particular section where you’re losing people and that impacts their time on site, which obviously impacts their overall rankings and stuff like that. So, there are lots of ways when you really think about it to be a little bit smarter about how you actually are able to get results. And you’ll be surprised how many freelancers don’t do that.
They stop and think their job is finished as soon as they’ve delivered the article and there’s no more amends, but actually this is where people like you, I think, kind of out shine and get known for doing specific things. It’s because you go not just one step further, but two or three steps further to make sure that the article is a success and you do everything you can for your clients, So, that they want to pay you more. They want to give you more work and they’re quite happy when you say guys I’m increasing my rights at the end of this three-month period.
Elise: [00:45:01] Yeah and I would add that it makes you become more of a strategist. Even if you are only writing. If a client was say to cut their budgets in the worst-case situation, they would always call the freelancers who don’t give as much value to them.
So, if you’re just going in and writing the article, doing the revisions and backing out, you’ll be first on the list to go. You’ll be first on the list, to say avoid these people if anyone asks for a recommendation. I think the biggest thing that’s helped me demand these higher rates is positioning myself as a stronger asset to them.
So, yeah, I’ll come and do the writing, but if you’re not sure what you want to write about, I can come in and do the SEO beforehand. I can help with distribution. I can help tie that content into the other content that you’ve got and basically treating my business as an extension of their team. And that is So, much more valuable to them and they’re much more likely to keep me on board if there was a budget cut, than another freelancer who’s just coming in and doing the work and leaving again.
Nelson: [00:46:01] For sure, yeah. So, it’s thinking for yourself as what are the extra kind of things that I can add on that increases the value of my service?
Like I’m not just being hired for like a content writing position. I almost need to think of myself as like the content person, right. Or even the marketing person, always looking for opportunities to add value, maybe that is optimizing for search. Maybe that is going for doing some extra work on internal linking. Maybe that’s just a simple as by the way, I’ve noticed that you mentioned this in another blog article, maybe you could link from this to this pillar post or something like that. It’s find these just tiny things that you can do in each interaction that kind of show you a value, right?
Elise: [00:46:54] Yeah and the best thing is you don’t even have to do the things you recommended them to do. Like for example, I’ve been in a situation where I’ve been writing a blog post and I do not design graphics, I’m not a graphic designer, I can just about put together something in Canva and that’s about it, but I make recommendations in the content to say, look here, we need a picture for this I can’t do it, but I’m recommending that you should. Another situation is I was doing a refresh of a piece of content that our client already had and I said, I really do think we need a video in here. Can you get your video team to do this, embed it here in this section that I’m pointing out, obviously just even by making those recommendations, you cement yourself as someone who knows what they’re doing, even if you don’t do it yourself.
Nelson: [00:47:38] I love that. Reminds me one of the pieces that I wrote last month, I think, I just used something that I thought was fairly simple to me. I didn’t have to actually do it. I’ve started using a lot of embedded tweets in like articles. So, this isn’t even content that I’ve produced. This is me remembering something or saving something away or doing a screenshot and finding it again later, or literally just searching on Twitter, finding somebody that said something like an industry expert in a tweet and just copying and pasting the embedded code. And So, access another graphic, another kind of piece of social proof and clients love it. And it’s like, if I put one or two of those in an article and find some bespoke graphic or, as you said, just be like can you have your designer create this and this? I think the proactivity is what a lot of clients love. And I know when I hire people, that’s what I look for. Somebody who’s always making those extra suggestions and doing more than what their job is. They’re the people that I want to hire. So, I figure that’s who I should try and be for my clients as well.
Elise: [00:48:52] Yeah and it feels like you’re giving the client more value for money because you are quoting them based on I’ll write this piece for you and that’s it. But if you can suggest videos, suggest images, put together internal links, it makes the client feel like they’re getting a really good deal. Even if the price that you quoted them is really expensive., it doesn’t feel as expensive when you’ve got all these extra things bundled in that nobody else will do. And even if they don’t take your suggestions, at least they’ve got the choice of whether or not they want to. Because sometimes these massive software companies you think from the outside, their marketing team is on their game A-plus, but then sometimes when you recommend these things they say, Oh, I never thought of that.
So, even just by mentioning it, they don’t have to take the suggestion, but wherever you think, or you see an opportunity, you don’t have to do it yourself. Just mention it. And it will go a long way.
Nelson: [00:49:42] Definitely. Right. Given that we’ve talked about money, I think we’d be remiss if we left without talking about increasing your rates, which is the big thing, right?
You’ve only got a certain amount of time in a day. There’s a limit to how much client work you can actually take on. So, at some point you’re going to have to raise your rates. Can you take me through firstly what you did to increase your rates if you had any specific targets and things like that.
And then I think after that, we’ll dig into the mindset behind that.
Elise: [00:50:13] Yeah, for sure. So, the first rates I ever gave, I think it was £50 for a long form blog post. And this client was a nightmare. Like I would have to do five revisions of everything and have to have the exact keyword in there every 10 sentences or something stupid and I hated it. And I was thinking I’m never going to make a career out of this, if this is what I’m doing, because averaging out over that time, I think I was spending 10 hours on one shitty, really awful blog post. And I was getting paid £50 and I was thinking, this isn’t even minimum wage. How can I make a living doing this if this is what I’m starting with? So, what I did was I was again, comparing it back to my full-time job. And even though I wasn’t earning a lot there, I was thinking I need to earn more than this. And what did they charge? So, I set myself, I think it was £150 pounds I got up to and even that at the time felt ridiculous to me. I was like, no one’s going to pay this. This is stupid. I’ll just try it anyway what have I got to lose.
Nelson: [00:51:11] Did you ever just think, this is just words. Why would people pay? I’ve had that thought once, I’m like I’m just literally taking words and putting them into different order. Is anybody going to pay me for this?
Elise: [00:51:24] People are paying me for a Google doc that’s another one, but yeah, after that point I remember quoting just out of the blue £225 to a company. I was like, I don’t really want the job, I’m just going to say it anyway. And they said yeah, So, that was kind of a massive turning point for me.
I was thinking people are actually paying for this. And then again, once I started getting more inquiries coming to me and I wasn’t pitching all the time, I did this thing. I think I remember it being every three inquiries I would up my rate by 10%. And if one of them said yes, straight away, I would up my rate straight away. If they came back on my rate and said yeah that’s fine, we’ll take it now. I would do that to the next client add 10%. That was in my mind the easiest way to do that because I was trying to figure out what my ceiling was and I was nowhere near it back then, but I thought I was, I thought no one’s going to pay more than this. So, I was thinking that if I dropped by 10% in that way, I’m not scaring away all the clients and I’m growing my rate as I grow my experience also.
And then I remember speaking of like, I call them “fuck you rates”, I don’t want to do this project So, I’m just going to give you an absolutely stupid, ridiculous ludicrous rate and that will make it worth my time if you do say, yeah. And I think two years in, I got an email to do a white paper and it wasn’t even on a marketing topic. It was just a random B2B topic. And I was like, yeah, five grand and I’ll do it. And they said yes straight away. So, I was like, Oh shit, people are actually paying this much money to do this.
So, after that I was thinking, well there must be more people paying this amount. So, I gradually increased, increased, increased using the same method. And then I got to my rate now, which is 1250 for a blog post.
Nelson: [00:53:07] Is that pounds or dollars just for…
Elise: Pounds.
Nelson. Okay. So, that’s like 15, no, probably like $1650 in dollars maybe.
Elise: [00:53:19] Yeah, I do all my invoices in pounds just because it makes sense to make my client’s life difficult.
Nelson: [00:53:25] I think it’s around that. I think at the moment, it’s like 75 Pence to every dollar. So, I think we’re looking over roughly that anyway. Okay, cool So, you’ve obviously just kept that thing in your head.
I quite like that because I hear a lot of people like pick a time in the future to like, Oh, in three months I’m going to increase my rates by this much. But obviously that depends on a demand right. So, yeah, if there’s like a market downturn and you don’t get anything for a long time. That’s why I really like your way, because it’s more like, okay, well, these people are interested and then I can just understand how many of them basically like recoil and run away versus how many, like instantly take me up on it.
Elise: [00:54:16] Yeah, I would definitely recommend that to other people as well. I would just say, be wary that you will have clients on different rates. I let this get out of hand more than I needed to. I think my rate at the time was about £800 and I had one client who was still paying £200 to £500. So, it’s for exactly the same thing and I was like, this isn’t right. I can’t be charging nearly three times more for exactly the same thing. So, I either need to bring that client up to my new rate, which was never going to happen, but I offered it anyway. I just say, look, my rate is I’ve kept this rate because I like working with you now, but it doesn’t make any financial and business sense for me to carry on doing this. This is my new rate. If you don’t want to take it, I’m happy to recommend a freelancer who works at your budget. And So, that’s what I did, but just be careful that you will have clients on different rates and don’t let that gap become too big.
Nelson: [00:55:04] No, that makes a lot of sense. What sort of time period do you think you can keep up?
That sort of thing. If you have clients on that, again, something like that obviously is probably too out of hand in general, but if you were going to say you had one client on 750 and another on 400, what time periods would you give for that person to be able to increase their rates to your, to your new one?
Elise: [00:55:37] I would give them at least six months at that rate. It depends how much you increasing the rate by, if it’s like three times that amount, then obviously it would be a lot longer. But if it’s say, if you’ve been working with them for six months, you can up your rates by at most 25%. But again, if that rate is a lot already adding 25% on extra is a lot again to add. So, I think the percentage difference, it’s something to think about, but I would do at least six months on the rate that I agreed, because that gives me enough time to prove I am good. I am going to be aware of the way that I’m going to charge you in six months’ time.
Nelson: [00:56:17] Sure, it makes a lot of sense.
Let’s talk about some of the mindset issues that you encountered specifically around praising. What were your instant feelings? Did you ever feel like kind of icky?
Elise: [00:56:34] Yeah, for sure. I was thinking, I mentioned earlier, I compared everything to my job and also I compared everything to an hourly rate of everyone that I live with that I spend time with because my only way, I’m quite a fast writer and everyone’s always surprised by this, I can write a long form blog post in six hours. So, if I’m being paid a thousand pounds, I’m not good at math So, you have to bear with me. If I was dividing that by six, it would be obviously a lot more than everyone, everything that my friends are on
Nelson: [00:57:07] £163 or something like that. I don’t know.
Elise: [00:57:11] Yeah. So, compare that to like £10 pounds an hour.
It was just crazy. I really struggled to get over that. But then, like you mentioned earlier, you’ve got to add in the fact that you don’t have a pension, you’ve got to put money into your pension. You’ve got to pay for insurance. You’ve got to pay for your equipment. You’ve got to pay for your house, your electric, that all needs to go into that price.
So, even then I’m still not a hundred percent comfortable with it, but I just know that I’d rather get the money while I can, if that makes sense. I’d rather take advantage of this situation now while I can, because this might not be my job forever. You know, the internet might have some brand-new magical creation or artificial intelligence will come and take my job.
So, I’m thinking I’ll collect all the money that I can while I can. And I’ll just think about the rest later.
Nelson: [00:58:00] Yeah. That, that makes a lot of sense actually. It’s totally different context, but I can just remember watching an interview with a really accomplished poker player. I think his name is like Fedor Holz or something like that. And he was coaching some younger player who was earning plenty of money, but they weren’t really taking posts seriously, or as seriously as they could have been. And he said, look earn money while you can. You don’t know first if the government, for example, is just going to stop people playing poker, which is your income stream. God, you don’t know if suddenly one day you’ll just stop liking poker and you won’t want to play, or other people are going to catch up to your skill level and stuff like that. So, just, you should earn as much as possible while you can.
The counterbalance to that though is it’s easy to go on overboard and find yourself working all the hours under the sun. And that’s not what work should be for at the same time. So, do you have a limit in terms of the number of hours that you will work per day or number of clients that you’ll take on and how, if those numbers developed.
Elise: [00:59:20] So, this is a really tough one for me because I, especially with the situation now, like we’re in lockdown, we’ve been in, as we’re recording this, now we’ve been in the third lockdown for three days, and this is due another two months at least. So, I’m thinking my mindset at the minute is I might as well work as much as I can while I’m not doing anything else, but I was doing this in December, lockdown also and then I got to Christmas and I was like, I’m just completely exhausted. I can’t do this all the time anymore. And So, it’s kind of a mind battle. Cause I sometimes sit and watch TV, I read a book and I think I could be working now. And it’s So, hard, especially when you’re working from home and there was nothing else to do to get out of that.
But I just keep reminding myself, I nearly burned myself out last year by doing this. Early last year I was working all the time, but I had a life at the same time. I could go out, I could go on holiday. So, it didn’t feel as big of an issue. But now with there’s literally nothing else to do, but work So, I let myself carry on with that and December was a great month for me money-wise but there comes a point when, what is worth more to you, having an extra five grand in the bank or actually having your sanity? It’s very hard to answer, it should be a simple question. It should be a simple answer. Like of course I choose my sanity, but when that five grand is sat in front of you and you’ve got nothing else to do, except relax, it’s hard not to do that. I don’t know if you felt the same, like you have to work all the time during this.
Nelson: [01:00:50] Definitely. I think there’s a couple of things there that I want to unpack, like the working, that kind of blurring of boundaries, is something that I think has come up in every single podcast episode.
Probably just the fact that like you used to have, I had two distinct places where work used to occur. Right and even if you didn’t, even if you did work from home and you didn’t have a commute, which is a physical thing to break up your day, you still had people calling you up or saying Hey, you want to go do this? Let’s go to the park or fancy the pub or let’s go watch football or whatever that thing is for you. That thing existed, but it doesn’t exist now. So, it’s almost like if you want to work all day, then in theory, you could, and too many people get sucked into answering emails at 11 at night on their phone when they’re in brackets “not working”. You’re sat there and you might be with your partner and you’re not giving your partner your full attention, you’re kind of half having some conversation, but not really because you’re checking emails or going back to somebody and stuff like that.
So, I feel like my wife is the perfect counterbalance to that. I’m always somebody that has multiple projects on the go. Even if I don’t have any client work, I’m always thinking about other things I could be doing. And she’s very good at being, very rarely will I work after dinner. For example, when we go down for dinner, I’m very fortunate now that we’re back in the UK, instead of Valencia in Spain, where we used to live, that was a studio apartment So, the laptop was there, the desk was there, TV was there, the bedroom is that. And I was like, wow yeah, what are we doing? Versus like here, I’m fortunate enough to have an office and when I’m done, I can close the door to the office and literally not see my laptop, that has been really, really good for me because it’s not even on the same floor, So, we’ll go downstairs, that’s where the lounge is, it’s So, far removed then from my brain. And with my phone and stuff, this is something that I’ve had to do purposely. Cause I found myself really getting sucked into, not even, I don’t even know why I feel the need to check emails because with the nature of my work, there’s nothing that comes in that I couldn’t answer in three days’ time and it for not to be okay.
It’s not like people need direct responses for the sort of stuff I do, but still, I’d be checking emails on night checking to see if like there are any mentions on Twitter or whatever. Some things that I could respond to. Just not necessary. So, I’ve actually started not even having my phone on the sofa, I just leave it charging all the way across the room on the table and just leave it there.
So, anytime I want to check my phone, I at least have to make the purposeful effort to stand up, to go over there, to stand up while I check things and then go and sit back down. But yeah, there’s not a perfect answer to these things, right? We’re always trying to figure it out.
Elise I could keep talking to you all day and there’s So, many similarities there, especially like both being British in this dominated world, which is dominated by a lot of people who have perhaps different backgrounds to us as well.
But yeah, So, I want to know where can people find you online? What sort of things should people get in touch with you? So, I want to know about the writing business, but alSo, about Peak Freelance as well.
Elise: [01:04:43] Yeah, sure. So, you can find me on my website, which has just my name. It’s quite hard to spell, Elisedopson.co.uk and the same just my name on Twitter.
That’s probably the best way to start a conversation with me, to be honest, my DMs are open So, if you’ve got any questions about anything I’ve talked about, just drop me a DM and I’ll get back to you. But also I run, well I co-run, a writing community with Michael Keenan. He is a great, fantastic freelance writer, similar position to me. And we basically created Peak Freelance to teach people not just how to write, but how to be a better freelancer because I know Nelson you and I talked about this briefly before this call. We were mentioning that you can be a fantastic writer, but if you don’t have the business mind and the freelance mind behind that, it’s really tough to make a living out of.
So, that’s what we were trying to do at Peak Freelance. We have tons of resources at private Slack group. We’ve got a bunch of email templates, that’s all included in a membership, and of course you get unlimited access to me and every member in there, like I know Nelson, you’re part of the group and we have So, many great conversations in Slack, but what I love about it is it’s not just me giving these answers every time.
There’s a lot of freelancers in there who will reply to other freelances questions. So, you get a lot of feedback and make a lot of friends. I just wish I had this back when I started. So, I decided to make it.
Nelson: [01:06:02] Yeah, that’s what I found. Life has been more kind of writing communities spring up and that’s the thing, right, everyone’s trying to create the thing that they wish they had like three or four years ago. But I love what you guys are doing there. Mike is one of those annoying people who I think actually does live in Mexico. So, he’s like great weather while we actually battle through snow. But they’re great people.
I don’t make any money recommending it to you, but I honestly would check it out. It’s a great place to be.
Elise: Thank you very much.
Nelson: No worries at all. Elise it’s been fantastic having you on.
Just remember to like, and subscribe and we’ll see you next week, the next interview.
And that’s it for today, you’ve been listening to the, working from home podcast with me, Nelson Jordan.
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