How I made 1,093.33 as a freelancer by persisting long enough

You have to believe you will make it

I tried for 2 years to get a client but I had no success whatsoever. I also applied for over 200+ jobs in marketing without any success. I learned from courses, did projects, and had my website. Nothing quite worked, until I had some good ideas and things started to flow in the right direction.

Don't let doubt bring you down

When I thought about choosing to be a freelancer, I decided to try it, because of how close it would bring me to be able to make money out of my passions. That along with the flexibility it can give you was enough for me to attempt becoming a freelancer.

I couldn’t try to be a therapist with my bachelor’s degree (Psychology) because in Romania you also need a Master’s degree to have the right to practice.

I choose digital marketing because I believed that having a good grasp of psychology, would make me a fantastic marketer. What I realized trying to learn it, was the fact that there is a lot of technicalities about marketing that bore me out of my mind.

I deeply enjoy dabbling into the abstract without any care about the small details, and marketing was all about the small details. I learned and created projects around digital marketing, but I can’t say that I was enjoying doing that.

After 2 years, where I finish a Psychology Bachelor's degree and had an 8-month working experience at a huge corporation as a Customer Service Representative, I failed to find any clients as a marketer even though I offered free services.

I tried to do cold calling and I messaged a lot of people on several platforms, but it didn’t work.

I started to think that it might be to a lack of skills and I tried to get a marketing job to improve my abilities. I didn’t manage to get employed but I was close a few times. To be honest I don’t regret failing those interviews because I wasn’t passionate about the jobs I was applying to.

There are remarkable requirements for despicable low wages as a digital marketer in Romania

After I quit my corporate job, I focused on improving my skills as a digital marketer and I searched for clients with more intensity.

When I managed to get my first client I was ecstatic.

The enjoyment of writing product descriptions on Instagram

My first client was the owner of a small shop from Vienna that was selling hand-made jewelry. My primary task was the creation of an online presence for the shop.

I liked working on that project more than for the theoretical ones I previously worked on because I was paid but also because my work brought value to someone.

I liked the idea that I was helping the owner to get more buyers and to grow the shop. Nonetheless, I wasn’t passionate about all the details around my work.

On one hand, I loved the flexibility around working from home, setting up my schedule, and deciding the promotion strategy. On the other hand, it bothered me that my tasks implied responding to comments on Facebook, following people on Instagram, and deciding the pricing of products on Etsy.

The only thing that I deeply enjoyed was writing descriptions for products and creating posts on social media. It was an indicator for me that I should niche down on content writing and only work on other aspects around marketing if I had to.

Digital marketing is a broad domain and you can choose a particular area to specialize in. That should increase the odds of doing a better job, especially when you start.

We collaborated for one month because the owner only needed someone for creating all the necessary things for an online presence, but not also the managing of pages.

After that, it took a while after I got other clients but Upwork was a gold mine for me.

You don’t need to start from the bottom on Upwork

A lot of people that didn’t even give a serious try to Upwork talk about how hard, unfair and terrible it is.

You need to engage in a race from the bottom to succeed, deal with problematic clients, and accept terrible hourly rates. I believe that might be true for some people who try to succeed by using the wrong angle.

It is true that when I started working on Upwork I already had a Bachlor’s degree with offered me an advantage. But that didn’t mean anything for 2 years, and it didn’t help me get even a simple position as a marketer in Romania.

You can’t say that I was drowning in luck because of my degree. It was close to useless if you tried to promote yourself as a marketer unless you knew how to do it. It took me quite a while to figure that out.

Writing descriptions for my first client, lead me to start writing on Medium and building a portfolio of articles. I used that to promote myself on Upwork along with my degree in Psychology, as a content writer on the psychology niche.

It took me a week and 3 proposals to find my first client on the platform, who paid me 60 dollars for a 1.5k word article.

I thought I was lucky until I had 3 more clients afterward. That wasn’t justifiable by luck anymore. It was an idea that finally worked. A good plan in action.

I am still in my early days as a freelancer, but in 3 months I managed to make $1,093.33. For people who are living in countries with any sense that might be a small sum, but for Romania, it is a good sum. You could cover your living expenses along with rent living in one of the most expensive towns in the country, Cluj-Napoca.

I didn’t have a single client for 2 years, and now I am working with several clients, one of which pays me $25/hour. For me, it is an insane accomplishment, not only for the income part but also for the nature of my work. I work as a blogger and a ghost-writer and I am enjoying the heck of it.

I am full of ideas and I can’t wait to go further with this. I think freelancing can provide a lot of opportunities, especially for people like me who come from countries that have jobs with laughable wages.

You need courage, persistence and to try different things. There is a lot of advice online about what should you do, but you need to find what works for you in particular. I wasn’t enjoying my journey becoming a freelancer until I find the right path for me, which was writing. Now I wake up feeling lucky, but I know it was a lot of hard work involved to get here and there is more to come, but I enjoy the journey.

I love a challenge when is the right one for me.