Because today is the first Monday of the month, here is another entry in the F.I.T.S. (Freelancer In The Spotlight) Series on Wording Well. 🙂

The “Freelancer In The Spotlight” today is Alicia Rades.

Take it away, Alicia!

How did I get into freelance writing?

I started freelancing when I was 17. I’d never had a job before, and I couldn’t exactly get one around all the extracurricular activities I was in, not to mention that I lived in a house with three other teenagers and we only had one vehicle available to share between all of us.

So when my sister told me about this opportunity where I could work online and create my own schedule, I jumped on it. I was working for a content mill writing crappy 300-word blog posts for $3 per piece. In today’s market, I don’t think anyone would have hired me at the level of writing I was doing. It was bad. At the time, though, I thought, “At least it’s money.”

I used that money to save up for college, and when college came around, I was working for several other content mills, and the rates were starting to get a little better. I loved the flexibility of it, so I stuck with it.

And then this amazing thing happened. I didn’t realize how great of a shift it would be at the time, but it’s made my entire career evolve. Google changed their algorithms. That meant that content mills had to step it up a notch, and so did I. One of the places I was working for started training us in writing higher quality content. Their training guides intrigued me so much that I started searching for information on my own. I ran across all these amazing blogs like Be a Freelance Blogger and Make a Living Writing, and I realized that I wasn’t really doing the freelancing thing right.
I took the first few months there to practice my blog writing skills and learn all I could about how to write quality content. Can you believe that I almost didn’t want to do it and was just going to stick with writing product descriptions, yet I went on to write a bookabout how to write quality blog posts?

After I started to get the hang of it and even took to creating my own blogs (most of which don’t exist anymore because I’m focused on writing for clients’ blogs), I realized how much I really loved writing blog posts.

This started happening right around the time my husband graduated from college. I wanted to follow him wherever he went, so I said screw it to my major and my previous career choice and said, “I’m going to be a freelance writer forever!”

That really made me get my butt in gear. At that point, I finally launched my freelance writing website, I paid for some training resources, and I started attracting private clients.

But I didn’t give up on my dream about graduating college. Today, I’m taking online courses to get my B.A. in communications with an emphasis in professional writing and a minor in social media marketing, but that has opened me up to even more flexibility, which allows me to work quite a bit with my freelance writing.

Alicia Rades’s Top 3 Freelancing Tips

1: Join a community of writers.

Alicia Rades (@aliciarades) is a freelance blogger, writer, and editor with a passion for giving tips to help others succeed. You can learn more about her and her freelance writing at aliciaradeswriter.com. When inspiration strikes, she’s also an author. Please support her and her upcoming debut fiction novel at aliciaradesauthor.com.