#115: How Chelsea Baldwin Booked Her First Five-Figure Month (Without Driving Herself Crazy)

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Thank you for joining me for episode 115 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find the details show notes for this episode by going to b2b launcher.com forward/episode115 before I tell you about today's guest who is amazing, I want to tell you about the last opportunity to join my Get Better Clients Academy. I just opened a new enrollment window and this is the last opportunity to join me until at least spring of 2017. Get better clients Academy is designed to meet you where you are in your freelance journey and take you where you want to go faster and with less pain and less hassle. You'll start the journey by taking a self assessment and based on your score, you'll know what stage of the Get Better Clients roadmap you're in. You'll then get a specific action plan to follow best based on your specific situation. You can learn more about the Get Better Clients Academy by going to smarterfreelancing.com academy someone recently commented on our Facebook page that the words high income in writing don't belong together. And according to this gentleman, it's impossible to earn a great living as a writer. Unless of course you get lucky and publish a best selling novel. That was his view, his paradigm. Now I don't bother arguing with people like him, they just don't get it. So there's no point. But I also recognize that there are doubters everywhere. And there are doubters who want to believe, but they have a good reason to be skeptical. You know, if you've yet to earn a dollar from your freelance efforts, you have reason to doubt. If you've yet to consistently break the thousand dollar per month income ceiling, you have reason to wonder if this freelance thing is for real. If you've been freelancing for years and never come close to reaching six figures in annual full time income, assuming that is your goal, you'd like to be there. I can understand why you may have given up on this high income idea, this high income goal. The trouble is, I know too many people who make a very good living doing this work. So while I understand and respect your doubt and your skepticism, I have to tell you this high income Thing is entirely possible now. Most people who try, whether they try to start or they try to get to the next level, don't make it. That's just the nature of any endeavor that requires a ton of work, perseverance and focus. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. My guest this week is a perfect example of this. Her name is Chelsea Baldwin and she started freelancing on the side six years ago while she had a full time day job. But it wasn't until two years ago that she quit that day job and went completely solo. And this past July, Chelsea had her first five figure months. She brought in just over $10,000 in income and she's booked at that level or close to it through to the end of the year. In this interview, she's going to explain where she came from, how she's gotten to this place so quickly, and offer some tips and advice for those who are trying to make a breakthrough in their business. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Hey, Chelsea, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you for having me today.

Well, it's great to have you here. Always love to hear stories of how other freelancers are achieving success. What's working, not working certainly helps all of us get better at what we're doing. But before we get to all that, I always like to ask my guests to give us a little bit of background. So tell us about yourself and your business, you know, your background, how you got into this, what kind of work you do today, what kind of clients you work with, and so on.

Okay. Yeah, I started freelancing, freelance writing probably about six, six and a half years ago. I just graduated. I had a degree in journalism and couldn't get any jobs at newspapers or anything like that. So I found some writing opportunities online. So I was just taking those as I could get them, which worked for a while, but it was, I didn't know what I was doing and a lot of it was really low pay. So I kind of was not really enchanted with freelancing at that point. So I took some internships and ended up in sort of a career in marketing. Kind of kept a little bit of freelance writing on the side. But I eventually sort of climbed the ladder in my company and just really realized that even though I had this really cool job that is a dream for a lot of people, I didn't like it. It wasn't for me. I didn't like being at having to be at the same desk every day or working for something that I Didn't totally believe in. So I quit that job about two and a half years ago and then really got into freelancing for myself at a more serious level. Now I had all this sort of experience in online writing and freelancing for clients that worked, that actually worked well for them, that provided more value. And I had the marketing knowledge to kind of bring, to sort of supplement the fact that I could write well, to be able to kind of position myself in the market as, you know, somebody who knew what she was doing, who was worth more than like $15 a post, like I was writing for when I started. And so that was going well. And then about a year ago I started an LLC just to kind of make myself more official, to take myself more seriously. And I been growing that in the past year and things have really started to take off since then.

So would you say it's really been in the past year where you've seen a big inflection point in your business?

Yeah, yeah. As far as like really kind of taking off, success wise, I would say it's definitely been in the past year.

That's fantastic.

Yeah. But all that stuff kind of led me to that point, I guess so.

So going back, I guess like the very early stages, it sounds like your first few months or maybe your first year or two was writing a lot of, for maybe some of the content mills and what have you. Right. Because you were straight out of school, it sounds like you could write well, but you had no relevant experience.

Right, exactly right.

So, I mean, what was that like? I'm just curious. I'm always curious to hear from people who are kind of working in that day in and day out and have bills to pay. How were you able to make that work?

Well, honestly, at first it was really exciting. I was able to make enough money to where I could more or less have the same level of salary that I would have for an entry level job. So. So I was fine with it. I didn't like though that I was always working and a lot of times I would have these edits from clients that I would have to do and that would eat up a lot of my time. And I just found after a while, like after sort of the newness and the excitement of it wore off, it just got really like it was a total grind and not exciting anymore and I just kind of wanted something more. But yeah, at first it was exciting, but then I started getting a little more into what it meant to be a freelancer, to be professional at it. And I realized you always kind of compare yourself to other people. Right. And I realized that I was definitely at the bottom of the barrel and I didn't really like that. And so I wanted to change it. I started to get unsatisfied. So that's why I started taking internships to sort of kind of up level myself to be more valuable so I could kind of get to that point of being, you know, more valuable, better, worth more. Not feeling like I was in a grind all the time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So tell me about your internship. I realize that that ended up not working out long term, but it sounds like it did give you some of the foundation you needed to then go to the next step. So what would you say some were some of the big benefits you walked away with from that experience?

Yeah, so I didn't plan it at all. But the internship opportunity ended up being this like mini corporate career where I got to this pretty high marketing position within the company. And so that in the end I realized that I didn't like it. But it was such, like, such a game changer for me to, to take the opportunity and to do that because I learned so much. And now that's. One of my main selling points for me as a service provider is that I have this knowledge of marketing for multiple companies because it was one company and it had this sort of startup incubator inside it. So I was working with multiple brands, multiple business models, kind of. So that it was just. The big takeaway was all the knowledge that I gained from that that I wouldn't, probably wouldn't have learned otherwise if I had just, you know, kind of kept drilling through the freelancing thing the whole time.

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. So it's, it's, isn't it interesting? Right. So it's easy to connect the dots looking backwards. But yeah, trying to engineer this ahead of time is very, very difficult. You just kind of have to jump. I admire the fact that you just kept just at it and didn't give up. And even though at the time maybe some of these things didn't feel so great, looking back, it sounds like they led you to where you are today.

Yeah, they definitely did. Yeah. Looking back, it's really easy to see the path that I took. But yeah, in it it was like, well, I kind of want to travel somewhere else, so I'll take this internship there and then just kind of see how it goes. And it worked out really well. So I think there was definitely a bit of luck in there for me. But yeah, I think it's important to take opportunities when you need them.

So let's, let's talk a little bit about then when, when you started turning things around. And specifically we're going to get to, I want to lead up to, to the, you know, one of your recent months where you, you've had a record breaking month. So maybe walk us through some of the big things that started happening in the past year that led you to where you are today.

Yeah, so I a big part of what sort of helped me kind of after I established my llc, which was a year ago September, I was doing well first and then I kind of hit this slump around the beginning of the year and I had clients but things were not going the way I had dreamed about them going. So a big thing that I did then was I joined a sort of business coaching program and that really helped me see ways to sort of just get booked with client work. So that really changed the way I sort of looked at business and my comfort level with it because I was getting booked, I was getting referrals, getting clients, and then I didn't have to feel so worried and so strapped all the time, which I think is a big part of the soil, whole feasts or famine cycle of freelancing, trying finding smart ways to avoid the famine side as much as you can. So that was the first major thing that helped. And then I started realizing.