The $7K/Month Side Hustle Most People Think AI Killed

I'm charging anywhere from $900 to $1,200 per blog post. Takes me about 5, 6 hours.

Holy cow.

And they're paying $90 an hour. I'm not a technical person. I got hired by Biggie Smalls' son.

What?

Notorious B.I.G.'s son. I have no coding background.

Who's stopping you?

No one is stopping you.

What is the playbook to finding companies that will pay you a lot of money? So the other day I saw this chart on Google Trends that stopped me in my tracks. This is the phrase, Hire a writer and its popularity over the last 5 years. Would you believe in 2023 when ChatGPT came out, it started dropping? People didn't need writers as much, obviously. But now over the last 2 years, it's been going straight up and to the right. Believe it or not, good writers are in more demand than they ever have been, and companies are paying $900 to $1,200 per article for people to write AI-assisted articles. I ran into Steph Spector. She drove up here. from Austin. We're about to take a ride in my Cybertruck so I can ask her, how can we get paid $1,000 per article? Let's go pick her up. So Stephanie in Austin, Texas, this is 2026, the age of AI. No one is writing by hand anymore. Everyone has 100 blog articles all written by ChatGPT, but you make your money writing, like for real writing.

For real writing.

Right?

Yep.

How did you get your start? What led you to that? ChatGPT comes out in 2023. What are you doing at that point or before?

Around that point, I I started working for Apple. I had a contract with Apple as an editor, and I was editing sales enablement materials for them. Just a fancy way of saying stuff that their salespeople would read to help them sell Apple products.

Okay.

I've been writing since 2016, so I can spot little tells that make it seem, I don't know, like it's a little more robotic or a little safe. Started improving the way I would prompt. AI, tested out Claude once that came out, found that that was much better at adapting to my voice. And then I started using all these other AI tools and I was like, oh, okay, everything has its strength, right? Like, I don't know, you know, like I'll use Gemini for processing video and audio. I think it's particularly great at that. Claude for marketing content, ChatGPT for writing and research. So I found that the more that I experimented and the more that I used these tools coming up with a 2-hour course that I would deliver on executive writing. So how salespeople, how sales leaders across the world at Apple could write stronger briefs that would be read by the CEO, Tim Cook.

Okay.

So I put together that as well.

Okay, so that was to teach the salespeople on how to talk to executives better?

Yeah, how to write to executives better. Yeah.

Okay. All right, so when you say train the model or like train ChatGPT on Apple style, is that just a matter of like uploading a bunch of Apple writing so it learns?

Yeah. So with Apple, I wasn't, we actually were not allowed to use AI at the time that I was there. But later when I, when that contract ended, I started working at Zapier and I would do exactly that. So I would, to train the AI, so to speak, give it a lot of context that had to do with our writing styles. We had a style guide that articulated how we capitalize things, how formatting should look, what do we bold, what do we italicize, what words don't we use. So I would give it all of that context. I would also create templates for certain pieces of content so AI understood the general structure of what I wanted it to create, and then it could Fill in some of the blanks.

Okay. Now, were you a freelancer at this time?

At this time, no. At Zapier, I was working there full-time.

Okay. So you, you left Apple, started writing for Zapier. Are you a freelancer today? You're just—

Now I'm a freelancer. I just left my job about 3 weeks ago. Wow. So congratulations. Thanks. Yeah, super excited. My favorite thing that I think I created when I was at Zapier was when I had to write a tutorial. A tutorial was a step-by-step guide on how you could build a very specific automated workflow. At certain points, if a step was a little difficult to configure, I needed to make that clear first of all, and then I needed to help them through it.

Yeah.

What I did was I recorded myself, like I did a screen record, like a Loom, if you guys use that tool, and I would build the automated workflow and I would narrate as I was building it. So I would go, ooh, this is kind of complicated. What if I click here? What if I do this?

And this is your writing.

This is my writing. This is— writing is thinking. At the end of the day, writing is thinking. So all of that whole process, I wanna document that. Yeah. And the first reaction, if I can document my initial thoughts about something, that's the gold that you can feed AI. Mm-hmm. If you're going to use AI in your writing. Your reaction. Your reaction, your, your first thoughts.

Like you're humanizing it.

You're humanizing it. Yeah. What is actually coming to mind during the writing process? Let's grab that. So I would record all of that. I would feed it through Cursor and I would tell Cursor, okay, I want you to use Gemini to process the video and audio, and I want you to even watch. And when I say I would tell Gemini, I would just writing out in plain English, right? Process the video and audio through Gemini. Watch when I'm clicking, I'm hovering over something like it's clear that I'm unsure what to do. Capture those points. Write up notes based on my narration. And then I want you to take all of those notes and I want you to take a template that I've created for this tutorial and I want you to feed it through Claude. 'Cause I like Claude for writing and Gemini for processing video.

And you're just using Cursor to route it to all these different models?

Yep. 'Cause Cursor has that built-in model flexibility so you can use both Gemini and Claude easily in the same workflow. Yeah. So loved it for that. Okay. It would filter all of those notes through Claude. It would use my template, and then it would come up with a really solid first draft that I would of course edit afterward. I, there were still points it maybe didn't get quite right, or points that were a little bland that needed to be punched up with my personality. But I've captured all of those like tricky sticky points of building a workflow that I needed to get in the article that would've taken me hours to document, to think about manually.

Yeah.

So really great way to use AI there.

Hey, believe it or not, about 62% of you don't actually subscribe to this channel even though you see my videos in your feed. So just take a second, hit the subscribe button, maybe even the notification bell, and it would mean the world to me. Okay, so you're doing this full-time for Zapier. What made you want to quit your job?

Great question. I love Zapier. I, I'm still going to be freelancing for them.

Did you line anything up before you quit?

Yes, I had already been freelancing on the side while I was at Zapier, and they knew about it. They were cool about it. I'd been writing articles for a couple of tech companies, and I also had been editing resumes for an executive writing coach. Okay. I had been helping students, uh, in high school write their college application essays. So I had my hands in a few different pies already.

How were you finding those customers?

A lot of them through Upwork. I started out as a freelancer on Upwork. That was how I got my first client back in 2016. And to this day I still use it. I know a lot of people like don't love starting on Upwork or they're a little worried because—

I think it's great.

You think it's great?

Oh yeah. Yeah.

It's rad.

'Cause you have nothing, you have nothing to start from.

Yes.

When you're like, I wanna be a freelancer, what do I do?

Dude, you don't have to collect leads. Like they're there.

Okay. So it's been 10 years since you started on Upwork though, right?

Yes.

Yeah. How are you finding jobs on Upwork today? Are you like actively soliciting them? Are people reaching out to you?

When I do look for jobs, I'll get into little moments where I'll go, okay, I'm gonna apply for the 10 jobs a day. Uh-huh. I'm going to carefully select ones that, you know, are interesting to me where I can communicate how I can help that person specifically. And that also have the opportunity to grow into something more. Every once in a while I like a good one-off project where I just, write, you know, I redo somebody's website or I write them an email and then it's done. But if I see, okay, this person wants one blog post written, they're probably gonna want more after that.

Yeah.

So I can pitch that or they might just ask me. I can also offer to upload the blog posts myself, which is another great way to expand the contract and make a little bit more money. So anytime I see opportunities like that and anyone, anytime other people do, like I always encourage people, How else can you help this person? Once they like you, once you have a good working relationship, it's really easy to make a contract last even years, which I've done.

Okay. What does an average project look like? What does an average project, and then how do you decide what to charge and how to charge?

Sure. This is a good question. It's a question a lot of people have, and it is tough for a reason, but I'm going to focus on what I'm working on right now. I am writing a lot of blog posts. For tech companies. And right now I'm charging anywhere from $900 to $1,200 per blog post.

Okay.

Takes me about 5, 6 hours to write each article.

Holy cow.

I am using a little bit of AI, but a lot of it's all me. And the tech companies know that, and that's why they'll offer that price.

Give me an example of tech companies that would hire you for this.

Any B2B SaaS company. I mean, Zapier, Jotform, Softr. Those are the ones that I'm working with right now.

What about like ChatGPT or OpenAI, Claude?

ChatGPT, right, right. Those are harder to break into. I don't think that they're, they are hiring AI model trainers, which is another lucrative opportunity. I know I just talked to a writer who does that every once in a while and they're paying $90 an hour around that.

Wow. So, okay, so $900 to $1,200 per blog article. Mm-hmm. How many words are they on average?

On average about 2,500, 3,000 words.

Okay, so long.

Long.

These are like lengthy.

Yes, yeah.

And is it more for like explaining things to an internal audience or to employees, or is it solely for SEO?

Solely for SEO.

Okay.

So solely for SEO, you still want it to be readable and enjoyable by humans, but the goal is they'll give me, so here's an example of, of a project I might get. Softr might say, hey, I want you to write an app comparison. So Claude Code versus Cursor. Or they might say, I want you to write an alternatives piece. So 8 alternatives to Quickbase.

Okay.

In pieces like that, Softr's gonna be one of the options, right? Sure. Or whatever, you know, tool I'm writing or company I'm writing for. Or they might do, right, for Zapier, like a tutorial where I'm showing step by step how to build a workflow. Things like that, things that people might be searching for. They'll give me some keywords that they wanna target. They usually provide that so I don't even have to look it up.

You don't need to be like SEO savvy or technical?

You should know SEO best practices. Those have to do with things like what should headings look like? What should subheadings look like? How many words? What should the title be? You should know not to keyword stuff. It shows that you yourself are using the tools. That's another reason why companies will pay so much money right now for these blog posts because if you know how to use these tools, if you're tinkering with AI, you're tinkering with automation, and you can speak confidently about a certain tool. So if you can write like that, you already have a good idea of what SEO best practices are.

Okay.

There are some new things to keep in mind too with GEO, which is just generative engine optimization, which is how you get your content showing up in AI tools.

Okay, so call it $1,000 for a 3,000-word blog article. Yeah, taking you 5 to 6 hours. What are you spending all that time doing specifically?

Yeah, great question. I'm signing up for the tools that I'm writing about. I am noodling around in them, just clicking, seeing what my experience is like. I'm not like building a whole product or anything. I'm not going wild, but I am using them, especially if I've never used them before. Taking screenshots potentially that are visually appealing. You could give it, I suppose, instructions. This is what a lot of people try to do, and this is a mistake I see a lot of writers making, is they'll go, I'm going to automate this process top to bottom. I'm going to use AI for everything. And then what happens is they actually spend so much time configuring the tool that they're using and maintaining it, and the output isn't even 100%.

Yeah.

And now they're burned out. And they've got AI brain fry, as they call it, from just constantly using AI for everything. You can use it and there's a great way to use it, but use it in the place you need it the most.

Yeah. Okay, so that's really interesting. 5 to 6 hours. I'm thinking like, how are you writing for that long? Especially if AI's helping. But would you say you're spending like much of that time or most of that time actually testing the tools that you're writing about?

A lot of it's testing the tools. A lot of it is also, Reading like just Reddit threads. Like, what are people saying right now about these tools?

Yeah.

If I'm in like certain communities, I wanna see how people are using those tools right now, what they're saying about it. And then I'll find some interesting tidbits and I'll do a little more research into that aspect myself.

Yeah.

If people, for example, on Reddit are, you know, griping about a confusing pricing structure, I'm then gonna go in look at their pricing and really figure it out for myself and then go, okay. But I wouldn't put, you know, that would've, might've taken me so long to find.

Yeah.

If I had just manually done the whole thing. A lot of companies, these big name companies, right? Microsoft, Apple, Replit, Lovable, Anthropic. I've seen them posting a lot of jobs for writers and editors. And the point is, if you look actually at those job postings, I was just looking at one from Microsoft. They were looking for a lead writer and editor. They wanted someone who understood grammar, style, storytelling devices, but they wanted someone who also was plugged into meme culture and had some personal creative thing that they did. Like they played an instrument or ran a newsletter on something unrelated to work. And you have to think, well, why do they want that? Because they want a, a well-rounded person who's tapped into culture, who's going to pull from these rich experiences and put that into the writing. Because that's our advantage as humans. Like a Hollywood movie that's just perfectly scripted the way that you would expect it to be, it's watchable, but you're like, I know what happens at the end.

Yeah, it reminds me of some of my content because I'll see other people on YouTube With videos titled like the 7 Best Side Hustles for 2026. Yes. And they're reading an AI transcript. I know it. Yeah. And there's no personal experiences, no stories woven in. Yes. Whereas when I make that same video, it's like when I had this grass-fed beef business, the cow's leg went through the floor and it was dragging on the road and they're real stories, you know?

Right. I think the biggest proof that we're seeing now, cuz this is all happening in real time, right? is that companies did try to use AI for everything. And there was a big scare, I wanna say a year or two ago, where I was hearing a lot of stories from freelancers going, my employer just told me to hit the road, right? They're using AI for everything. And then a year later, those companies would come back and go, actually, are you free?

Yeah.

Can you help me write this?

What do you think about this new watermark that Anthropic came out with? And maybe explain to people what it is if they haven't heard of it.

Yeah, essentially Anthropic is going to be putting, and they're already putting watermarks on any AI-generated content. So if you copy and paste something that Claude created for you, there's gonna be an invisible watermark. It's not like something physical that you see that will show you created this with AI. There are people coming out with tools already to remove the watermark. I just taught a class and my student was like, Hey, by the way, I thought you might want this. And it was some product that you can pay for that removes the watermark. I can't imagine that's gonna last.

How is that product smarter than Anthropic, a trillion-dollar company?

Yes, right.

Anthropic doesn't publish what the watermark algorithm is.

Exactly. Even the CEO of Anthropic, I think a month ago he did an interview with NBC. He said, I don't use Claude to write. I use it for research. I use it for assisting with certain aspects of the writing process. The struggling, that part that everyone can't stand, that is what leads you to the great idea. That's what makes the content. So it's so hard to just get that out of the process.

We're seeing things trend in that direction. Snapchat just came out and said no more AI videos.

Yes, right.

YouTube just came out and said we're demonetizing thousands or millions of like faceless AI-generated channels. They're not banning AI.

Sure.

But they're basically saying we're deprioritizing it.

Right, right.

And then Anthropic came out with a watermark. And then Sora, which was, you know, OpenAI's answer to TikTok, short-form video social media platform that was only AI-generated videos. It got to 100 million users in like a month and then they shut down like 3 months later.

Right, right.

And so it's like, we want real stuff.

Yeah.

More than ever.

Yes. The fact that, that youth are, are doing that, if I had a something I could say to them, it's like, I get it. Writing is, is painful.

Yeah.

And it's struggle. And especially today when there are all these screens, there are all these things you could be paying attention to. Staying focused is an art. Yeah. Learning how to be articulate is an art. But that's exactly why people are paying so much for content right now. Why I have a job. Yeah. Is because they value somebody who's taken the time to learn how to do that.

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Sure. I think for me, 70, 80% of those words are mine. There's also something to consider where like how much of the structure was AI generated? That is all mine typically. Like, you know, what does the introduction look like? Okay. How many headings do I have? How long or shorter are, you know, is the body copy within those sections? The idea behind the article, close to 100% mine. 70%, I'd say around, might be my words.

Okay.

Yeah.

You know, having a podcast, I get a ton of emails from people like, hey, what do you think about this? Should I start this business?

Yeah.

And those were going unanswered. But now I, I have an AI trained on my thoughts and I can respond to them with AI. And it's not me.

Yes.

But it's trained on millions of words of my content, my data. It's almost like me. It's how I think. And it most importantly, it enables me to answer emails and help people that I wouldn't be able to help otherwise. Right? Yes. So it's additive. It's not replaceive.

Right, right, right. One of the last things that I worked on at Zapier, I was copy editor on this report called the AI Workflow Index, and it basically looked at how successful or companies that were successfully using AI that were repeating the same workflows. That's how they defined success. Among some other things. Well, how did they use AI? Where did they use it? And they found that they were not using AI for everything. In fact, I think it took up just 18% of the workflow.

Hmm.

So it was usually like 1 or 2 steps. If it was a content creation workflow, they would just have AI analyze something or write up a rough draft, not expecting anything to be perfect. And that would always get filtered to a human.

There would be some human-in-the-loop step So with you specifically, let's say you've written 100 articles that are 3,000 words. Yeah. Why can't you just upload that to a Claude project and have it write for you like you? Is it, is it still not good enough if you do that?

You'd be surprised because I've tried it all of like, I want to automate myself out of a job. I want to see if it's possible. It's not working.

Well, it's not replacing all the research.

Yes, not replacing all the research. And it is capturing my voice. Somewhat, but it, it doesn't have all my memories. Like, sometimes I'll start a blog post with something that happened to me in childhood just because I feel like it makes sense.

Yeah, it would never know that.

It would never know that.

Even if it wanted to. Right, right.

Another reason why I don't love that is if you want AI to do all the writing for you, you're not letting your own voice evolve. So over time, you've become a more interesting Thinker, writer, as you interact with whatever subject material, material you're working on. And that's reflected in the writing. With AI, you're in a static position if you're just having it do all the writing for you. It's not growing, it's not learning.

When it comes to like the people that make the decision at these Jotform and all these other tech companies to hire you, do you know how they look at it? Like, yeah, like of course they know what ChatGPT is. Yeah. Are they thinking like, you know what, this is just worth it because our product is XY price and like we know that the lifetime value is like— do you know like what the calculus is in their head to justify paying $1,000 for an article?

Sure. I know from the perspective of having worked in Zapier and seen freelancers sending us content, they are concerned with speed. So they know that AI is helping these freelancers write a little more quickly, which really matters when something happens like Fable 5 is discontinued temporarily, right? And they need to get on that for SEO, like immediately, same day. Not just SEO, just to be a, you know, a thought leader, if you wanna say that, in this space, right? If I'm the person that publishes this content immediately after something happens.

How much do you think that plays into these tech companies hiring you?

Huge, yeah. I think people, and I play that up in cover letters or when I, do just cold pitches to, to people. My background is in creative writing. I know storytelling techniques. I know what is a sentence, right? I know the parts of a sentence. And so I know how to manipulate everything down to the word to achieve a certain rhythm, to bring a little bit more engagement, you know, to a piece that as soon as it starts getting a little bit boring or we start talking about something technical, I have 1,000 different tools to, you know, bring it back to life. That's creative writing.

So how can people find success at this if they don't have a creative writing degree or professional writing experience?

Yes. So actually in preparation for our conversation, I went on Upwork and I hired 4 or 5 people to talk to me for 20 minutes.

Oh, so you, you hired people as an—

I hired people.

As an employer on Upwork?

Yes, as an employer. I went on like the employer side. Uh-huh. And I, I said, I'm looking for freelance writers who have been doing this for X number of years making, I think I said like at least $3,000 a month just to talk to me about how newcomers could break into this business.

Oh, that's awesome.

And you, I mean, I, it was up for 2 days. I got 15 applications that were all really thoughtful.

Yeah.

Talked to 4 people. They wanted to talk beyond the 20 minutes. Like they were more than happy.

Even though you only paid 'em for 20?

Only paid 'em for 20. And they were like giving me resources. Someone gave me their, SEO AEO guide. They were like, you can share this. So I was asking them, what can people do? Because I have ideas, but everyone has their own journey into freelancing. All of them said, you don't need any specialized degree. You don't have to have even studied creative writing, English, whatever. None of those writers had a writing degree.

Yeah.

What they said you need to do is first, if you wanted to get started in 90 days, First month, you need to understand the landscape of what's possible. You've got the creative writing world. A lot of people are publishing, like self-publishing books, fiction, memoir, whatever, nonfiction books for their business. You can be an editor in that space. There's also this whole marketing corporate world where you can create copy for small businesses, bigger companies. There's blog posts, landing pages, ads. Scripts. I mean, you name it, you can write it. So look at what's possible. Ask yourself, what am I interested in? Because if you have just a glimmer of interest, you know, you, you're probably drawn to something.

And start in that niche.

Start in that niche, right? I think I started as a generalist and it took me a bit of time to realize, all right, I need to get good at one form because that's how someone's going to trust me to hire me.

So if I love Barbecue, like Texas barbecue. And I wanna write or I like writing.

Yes.

That could be my niche.

Totally.

Like I could write for Traeger or company like e-commerce brands that sell barbecue stuff or a restaurant.

Yes. I saw, I'm like, I'm really into barbecue. I saw that there was a new beef protein powder that was getting sold in stores.

Oh, interesting.

I contacted the guy who ran the company. I said, hey, I tried this, this flavor's awesome. Like don't stop, whatever. Some human connection there that's honest and true and genuine.

Yeah.

And then I said, hey, like, I see you have a blog. Do you need a writer? Yeah. He hired me.

Really?

Right. Like, just like that. Yeah.

Did you wait for him to respond before you pitched that?

No, I put that in the pitch. Really? Yeah. Wow. So sometimes that just being upfront works.

My friend Brandon has a marketing agency for e-commerce brands and he would just be like swiping reels on Instagram and see like a new e-commerce brand, new Shopify brand. He's like, oh, that's really cool. They're good branding. And then he'll just like, DM them and say like, I can help you with Facebook ads. Like, this looks really cool.

Right.

And it's just like, really? That's it?

That's all.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so what else did they say in these interviews?

In these interviews, they were saying you have to have a portfolio. So you don't need some kind of a certification, but you want to have produced, I would say, 4, maybe 5 pieces of writing. You can just put it up on your site. It doesn't have to be like you have to get published somewhere, 'cause that's quite hard when you're just starting out. But yeah, if you wanna write blog posts, write 3 blog posts and a landing page and some other form just to show you've got range, right?

Well, go write an article about what makes Franklin Barbecue different.

Yeah.

And then put it in your, you don't have to sell it to them. You can give it to them.

Right.

But it's, you don't have to say like, they paid me to do this. They are my customer. It's like, no, I wrote this blog article for Franklin Barbecue. Here it is.

Yeah.

Right? Like that's kind of a rare opportunity. Whereas usually when you need your first case studies or clients or something like, You've got a chicken and egg problem because you have to get hired before you have that, but you can't get hired until you have that.

Right, exactly.

With this, you just go write the thing. Who's stopping you?

No one is stopping you. It's never been easier, in fact, to just do that. So once you develop that trust, people don't want to go out and find another writer. Even at Zapier, we were like, we had our freelancers that we were like, we got to hold on to these people. They're amazing. So yeah, I wrote a feature guide, Zapier MCP. If you search that and then search feature guide after that, this was something we had just come out with this product when MCP technology came out. Everyone was losing their mind about it. I'm not a technical person. I have no coding background. And they said, write a feature guide now. I said, okay.

By the way, if you are a diehard fan here on YouTube and you want episodes early or exclusive episodes or unedited full episodes, join my community. It's only $5 a month. Don't join on iPhone 'cause it'll be $7 a month. And that doesn't go to me. Join on desktop and it's only $5 a month and you can get exclusive replies from me, early access to all these episodes, exclusive episodes that never make it to the general public. And every single $19 business plan is free. $5 a month. You can check us out at the link below or on my channel page that's hosted right here on YouTube. Hit a like or a comment below and we'll see you next time on the Koerner Office.

This succeeded in that regard so much that Anthropic actually published it or linked to it in one of their newsletters. Oh wow. Driving a ton of traffic to it. And they had said something like, this is great. And I was like, oh, I was so proud of it.

That's a great example of justifying a $1,000 blog because how much money did that bring Zapier?

Yeah, that's right. I'm sure that's recorded somewhere.

And does Anthropic post it if they look at their watermark and like, big deal, we wrote this. Yeah, yeah. Let's just write our own and publish it.

Exactly right. So the menu customization built into Zapier MCP reminds me of action role-playing video games. Stick with me here. In these games, you can equip your main character with gear that complements your play style or the quest at hand. Similarly, with Zappy or MCP, you choose which actions to equip based on your workflows and security needs.

So I'm going to go to Google Trends, and I'm going to look for the phrase hire a writer and see what it looks like. Look at that.

Look at that. How cool.

It's never been higher.

Right.

And then let's go last 5 years. I wanna see if it dipped when ChatGPT came out.

Oh yeah.

So ChatGPT came out late 2023. It did kind of dip a little bit. I mean, it was coming up and then it went down and then people were like, we need a writer actually. Imagine that. All right, so what is the playbook to finding companies that will pay you a lot of money to write articles?

I think gotta get started with a portfolio. So first make sure that you have some writing out there in the world. It will feel a little uncomfortable, but if you get started on Upwork, or if you, you ask a family or a friend for, hey, do you know anybody who's starting a business or just needs help with their writing? I mean, again, I, I mentioned earlier, I, I do this thing where I help college or high school students write their college essay applications, $90 an hour. Like, really lucrative stuff is out there. And even if you don't start at that rate, if you start for a little cheaper or even free, it is not for nothing. One, you might be developing a really great relationship with that person that will pay you more later, or two, you just might learn a new skill or a new format or get better at your craft, which you can then show to somebody else.

Yeah.

I hadn't worked a ton on much of anything when I got started in, in the freelance world and I was applying to stuff on Upwork. Had a little portfolio, and I got hired by Biggie Smalls's son. What? Notorious B.I.G.'s son. He was starting a CBD brand, and I didn't even know at first because he didn't advertise that like he was his son. It just like came out as we were working together, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. And then from there, I mean, they trusted me with helping them edit press releases, doing like PR and communication stuff that I'd never done before. But because You know, I worked for cheap like in the beginning and then worked my way up, asked for, you know, more money at some point. Like that worked out, that was great.

Okay, so a portfolio, does it matter where you host it? Could you put it in a Google Drive folder? Do you want it on a website? Like—

I think on a website is, I don't know if you, yeah, you make something look professional, you put it up there, that's probably the best.

Okay, now how do you find customers?

Oh, they're everywhere. They're everywhere and nowhere, right? They're like, how am I gonna find this person? I have found customers and the people that I spoke to have found them. If you're not on freelancing sites, getting on social media and just whether it's LinkedIn or wherever it is that you're active and commenting, engaging, directly messaging people, it doesn't have to be gross. You don't have to be weird about it. You can talk to them like a human. If you master the art of the cold pitch, which Really, I think comes down to 4 or 5 sentences where you are briefly introducing yourself. You're making some sort of connection to something that person does that you like, that you genuinely like, not just like the first—

Yeah.

Piece of content that you see that they posted recently. One time I listened to a whole podcast that some agency had put out, and it was a lot of time investment on my part, but I was able to reference some really specific detail And they literally called me and they were like, this is so impressive. Like, we need to talk to you right now. Yeah. So you never know, like, what doing a little more research than, than you wanted to do might get you. Yeah. Like in the long run. So yeah, some little personal detail. You don't have to go crazy. And then show 'em the portfolio and then say, I'd love to get connected. The worst they could do is ignore you or say no.

Right. And get over it.

Get over it. Yeah.

What's a good rate to start at? A rate that is where you're worth your while, but aggressive enough so they won't say no.

Yeah, I'm seeing, I struggled with this 'cause I thought about this and I was like, man, it really, really depends, but that answer's boring. So I think I'm seeing a lot of $30 an hour on Upwork, $40 an hour. You can get away with that, especially if you've got the things that I'm describing, the portfolio and the, The pitch that's tailored well, and they might come back and counter with something lower. And if you think it's worth it, that might still be worth it.

Yeah.

Yeah. When I work with people, I ask them for a few things. I'll ask them for, if I know it's going to be like a single deliverable, like I'm gonna update your website or I'm gonna write a totally new copy for your website, I wanna get a sense of how many words total it's gonna be or how many pages, right? It's kind of hard to estimate words. I want to get a sense of if they have existing copy already, can I take a look at it? What shape is that writing in? If it's really rough, I know it's going to take me a little more time to get it into shape. Or if they have no copy at all, I got to create stuff from scratch. You know, I might need to spend a little more time with them. This is another great way to use AI. When you're in a meeting with somebody gathering content for your writing, if they're cool with it, turn on Granola. Like capture—

Explain what Granola is.

Granola is a tool that you can use that plugs right into your like video calls that transcribes everything that they're saying, takes notes, right? Knows who's speaking. And after the call, you can ask it questions like, hey, what was the due date for the project? Right? And it'll give it to you. Yeah. And you can ask it much more detailed questions. You can get a sense of how much time a project is going to take you by asking those questions first. And then rather than charging them hourly, give them a project-based quote that feels fair. You might even still be calculating it based on like an hourly rate, but there are no surprises. You know that, like, you know what the scope is, you know, this is what you're gonna charge them. It just feels better for everyone involved. I think that's my preference.

So what are your income numbers like today?

Today I would say I'm writing anywhere from 5 to 10 blog posts at around, again, anywhere from $800 to $1,200 per blog post.

Is this per week or per month?

Per month. Okay. Per month. Uh, and I have a bunch of side projects going on as well. So once or twice a month, I will help a student with their college application essays. I sell it in packages of 5 at $90 an hour, so $450. And I also do Coaching, and those packages vary. I just got back into freelancing. I was working full-time, but I would say close to $6,000 or $7,000 a month right now.

Wow.

Yeah.

Mostly from writing?

From writing.

And it's like technical writing from a non-technical person?

Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Writing, coaching, editing, all in the same family, different skills, but yeah.

Well, if someone wants to hire you, where can they find you?

You can find me at stephspector.com. S-T-E-P-H-S-P-E-C-T-O-R.com.

Okay. Thank you, Steph.

Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.

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