My new career as a fulltime freelance writer has been a lot of fun. I started writing a little bit of freelance work in January 2014 but shifted to doing it fulltime in September 2016. As a midlife career change it has been a good fit for me. I have a number of regular clients I work for providing all kinds of web content for their websites. Some of the websites are blog-based and others are for eCommerce. My writing jobs are as varied as the types of websites they end up on.
I recently added a full-time regular client to the mix. I was hired as part of a team of writers who work specifically on projects related to sewer, plumbing and electrical matters. The clients the group of seven of us writes for include national and regional companies based in Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Illinois. At the beginning of each month we receive our assignments for the month and have to submit finished work in weekly. This is different to what I have been doing. This regular system of submissions is a slight change to what I have been using. The other clients I have are based in Australia, the United States and Canada. They order projects from me whenever they need something written for their blog or website. I have a couple of weekly and monthly contracts in place where others are “when required” but an average week sees me with enough work for five solid days of writing, including time for researching. When I started writing freelance out of my home I also started to publish eBooks. They were subjects that became projects for me that I felt could become popular in an eBook format. I try to publish two titles a year at the very least with the goal of a complete library of ‘how to’ guides available in eBook format. To date I have a total of six eBooks available online. My most recent one was published last month and has an interesting story behind it. It’s titled, “Someone Stole Our Rhubarb: How We Started Our Home-Based Specialty Food Business” and it is partly about another home-based business my wife, Brenda and I own and operate. The business goes by the name of JamBusters! and is a small home canning and preserving business where we sell products Brenda makes. They are jams, jellies, relishes, chutneys and salsas which contain a pepper-based theme to most items. We started this little venture at roughly the same time I started my freelance writing business. The eBook came about following the suggestion of a client of mine. I had not really thought much about writing specifically about JamBusters! although it played a role in my “Surviving Midlife Career Changes” eBook about how Brenda and I, in our late 50’s, were able to ‘reinvent’ ourselves with new careers after closing down our local newspaper business. The eBooks are far from a replacement for my freelance writing jobs. If anything, eBooks give me an outlet to feed personal projects so I can keep writing for myself alongside all of my other clients and writing commitments. However, the eBooks do generate an additional stream of income. That was one of the things I wanted to create with my midlife career change – multiple streams of income – and I think I am getting closer to that point.
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AuthorMy name is George Elliott. I have been in the Media Industry since 1978. I spent 23 years in Broadcasting and worked in a total of six different radio stations located in southern British Columbia Canada during my career. In 2000 I switched gears and moved into the Print Media Industry at a small town, local weekly newspaper. In 2004 I bought the paper and operated it with my wife, Brenda until July 2016 when we closed it. I launched a freelance web content and article writing business from my home in January 2014. Archives
April 2021
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