Can Freelance Writing be a Full-Time Career in 2024?

It’s no secret: freelance writing is saturated. In 2024, freelance writers have an entirely new genre of competition — one that seemingly came out of nowhere — in AI.

Clients want to pay less but expect more. It feels harder than ever to secure enough client work to make a consistent career out of it.

But is it actually harder than ever?

If freelance writing is your dream, please hear me when I say that you can still do it in 2024 in a way that’s both smart and sustainable.

You just have to be a little more creative about how you approach it than you needed to be a few years ago.

What is Freelance Writing?

At its core, freelance writing is simply getting paid for writing-based projects.

You could be:

• A copywriter (writing static website copy or ad copy, for example)
• Content writer (writing articles, captions, blogs, news, etc.)
• Ghostwriter (writing as if you are someone else, where they get the credit/pen name & rights to the content)
• Instruction manual writer
• A book author
• Or anything else you can think of.

Author’s note: This article assumes your goal is primarily to get paid to write content (like the blogs/articles you see on this site). So let’s talk about how to do that.

What Freelance Writing Clients Want in 2024

The main thing you’ll need to make your dream of full-time freelance writing a reality will come as no surprise.

You need clients.

Who are your clients?

For the vast majority of us freelance content writers, that’s going to be other businesses.

You can (and should) pick an industry to hone in and focus on, (here’s my article on that): Yes, Your Business or Side Hustle Needs a Niche

But no matter what niche you choose, businesses generally all want the same thing.

What do they want from you?

At the end of the day, your potential future clients want one (or more) of these things:

• More customers
• Better quality leads
• Clarified branding/to become more established in their industry
• Better reach
• Etc.

So you need to identify what your target client wants most and speak to how you can help them do just that. If you can show it in a way that beats out the competition, it’s a no-brainer to hire you.

So let’s talk about what your competition looks like and how to offer more than they ever could.

Sizing Up the Competition

Unless you can figure out how to differentiate yourself, everyone is competition.

• Fiverr
• Upwork
• Independent freelancers
• AI (ChatGPT and other new AI bots that pop up every day)
• The status quo (whatever they’re doing now without your work)
• Etc.

Just being a great writer isn’t enough in 2024. You need to be strategic, thoughtful, and clear about your work and its value.

How to Sell & Be Competitor Proof

Let’s talk about creating a strategic competitive advantage that makes you the no-brainer hire for any potential client.

Think about the end goal* and work backward

*from the client perspective.

How do you win clients?

Offer them a solution to their problems.

What are their problems? Things we touched on earlier, like:

• Not having enough customers
• Pulling in low-quality leads
• Unclear branding/struggling to compete in their industry
• Low reach
• Etc.

Remember these in the next section.

So how, as a writer, can you solve these problems?

With a little upskill in SEO.

How SEO + Freelance Writing Work Together

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of creating (& executing) a strategy to help a website rank higher in search engine (like Google) results.

It is this skill that turns your writing into a tangible benefit for businesses. It’s also what differentiates you from AI or content machines like a lot of Fiverr & Upwork freelancers.

Here’s how:

• Understanding & using SEO principles helps to make your articles more visible on search engines. Articles aren’t worth much to a business if no one can find them. Search engine visibility creates reach for your clients.
• Every piece of content strengthens the overall website. If you’re strategic about the articles you write and hover on relevant key themes, you can improve their ranking prospects for other website pages too. This strengthens client branding.
• Credibility. People trust the top Google results. We don’t always realize it, but we rely on Google (or another search engine) to do a lot of the due diligence on the back end. We naturally expect them to curate the best results for our search queries, which gives the top results insta-credibility. By helping your clients show up there, you’re building credibility for them with both the search engine (so it knows to curate them) and the people who use that search engine. This helps clients convert customers.
• Every article creates a new opportunity. The more SEO-optimized strategic articles you write for them, the more and more their reach will grow in relevant spaces. Each article creates new opportunities to rank. This helps clients connect with better-quality leads.

The Point: Freelance Writing in 2024 Requires Attainable Skills

SEO is what turns writing into a profitable business skill people want to pay you for. And the best part? A lot of businesses are already out there looking for SEO experts, and there aren’t enough of us out there to satisfy the demand.

So if you can level up your skillset and stay client-focused, you can absolutely still be a full-time freelance writer in 2024. In a way that’s both smart and sustainable.

But SEO optimization goes far beyond the articles themselves. It’s a science, but a highly achievable one.

If you want to turn your freelance writing dreams into a full-scale career that clients are actually looking for and are happy to pay you for, join the waitlist for my Build-a-Business Workshop: Building a Business with SEO.