To earn more as a content writer, the key is to solve the most pressing problems of a business.
What are the most pressing problems of a business?
You must understand that there are two parts to building a business that makes money and keeps growing.
The other is a revenue generation engine, which ensures there is a steady flow of work or buyers coming your way.
The other is a delivery engine – which ensures clients get what they paid for.
If a business fails to build even one of them, it will not succeed.
The business problem could be generating leads (through a website, blogs, webinar, ad) or nurturing them through email funnels so that they convert, or converting them through sales call scripts.
There are 3 most important universal business problems that you need to solve:
- Lead generation,
- Nurturing leads so that they convert faster, better, buy higher priced products
- Onboarding customers smoothly and creating delight – this reduces churn rate, refunds, and increases referrals
Bonus: Customer success, i.e. generating more conversions through upselling and cross-selling to delighted customers
All content that you write must serve these purposes.
There are some other business problems as well, such as building a personal brand of founders, employer brand so that they can attract top talent, etc. but we will not get into it here.
If you can solve even one such problem really well, through your content, probably nothing can stop you from becoming insanely rich
If your content serves these purposes, clients will be happy to pay you 1000 dollars or more for a few hours worth of work.
You will never get there though, if you charge whatever rate per thousand words.
This kind of business problem v solution through writing approach must reflect on your Upwork and Fiverr profiles too, right from the beginning!
For example, here is one of our students from Kanpur, Srajika Gupta, who has done a lot of copywriting on Upwork around these challenges.
Here is her Upwork profile:
While her Upwork earnings are only 3K, she has been working for a Missouri based digital marketing agency for professional services firms in a remote job for 18 months and she earned 20 lakhs working 20-25 hours per week outside Upwork!
I hope you get the point.
Here is a freelancer who is our student (still studying in college) who does content writing assignments on Fiverr.
Bikramjit Chatterjee, took up our course as a second year college student from Amity, Kolkata, and has done more than 120 projects on Fiverr, and earned more than 1.5 lakhs as a college student! Here is his Fiverr profile.
Even though he does a lot of commoditised work, this is great. Since he is a college student, so he doesn’t mind an extra buck.
He can later move on to solving complex problems.
What if he could offer services for “high conversion landing page”, “lead magnet to capture 1000 leads every month”, etc.?
Do you think clients would pay him more?
And he doesn’t necessarily need to offer these services within Fiverr alone.
He can do a low-paid gig for 1000 bucks, and that gives him an opportunity to get on a call with the client, impress the client, and find the 1000 dollar business problem, make a pitch to solve it, and get the work.
Nobody on Fiverr will even know that he is making all this money!
Therefore, be very careful of people who tell you that there is no opportunity on Fiverr or Upwork, or people who say that these are crowded markets.
Some people stay married to Upwork and Fiverr and earn very little through low-paid assignments. There are others who use these as gateways to another dimension of success, and do custom projects directly with clients to solve their business problems and earn thousands of dollars every month!
Here are some valuable offers that people would like to pay you for:
- I can rewrite your landing page and ensure at least 50% better conversions. Will you like me to try?
- I can write an email funnel for you for this product. Last time I did this for X, their conversion went up by 650% and INR 7,60,000 of extra sales was generated. I can see massive opportunities for you. Want me to try?
- I will help you to publish very high quality insights on your Twitter every day related to your startup’s stories and business so that you can get to 10k followers on Twitter in next 12 months
- I will help you to reach 50k followers on Linkedin and Instagram by helping you to write viral stories about you and your business
- I will help you to regularly update your YouTube channel and blog with refreshing content that will take your industry recognition to next level and help you to grow faster in the industry
- I will launch a weekly newsletter for your law firm/ SaaS company/ YouTube channel so that you can create a deeper relationship with your existing and potential clients
How is this different from the services that you typically offer?
Hit reply and let us know in chat.
Some of you may have the question that you do not know how to do these things. Don’t worry about that, you can learn in a matter of a couple of months.
However, learning skills is not enough.
You must also learn how to pitch and also build a track record that shows to potential clients that you know how to do the work.