I encountered the best advice about freelancing I’ve ever heard back when I started: “Don’t quit your full-time job to start freelancing. Start freelancing while working your full-time job.” 

Unfortunately, I only heard it after I had been fired from my last full-time job (ha).

Thankfully, I had already picked up some short-term work and was only a couple months away from a long-term contract with my first big freelancing client, but I immediately understood the point. It is very hard to get this started from a standstill, especially if you have no experience doing it. Freelancing is much more than the skill you’re selling (which, for me, has always been writing): it’s selling itself, and learning that part of the game with secure, full-time income* locked up will eliminate 90% of the stress you’d otherwise have.

However, Inkspiller isn’t necessarily for full-timers looking to jump (though I welcome you and am writing with you in mind, too). This is primarily for new and aspiring freelancers that have been sold a bill of goods by YouTube copywriting gurus. I’ve been asked how to get started freelancing by a lot of people who have never written professionally or worked in marketing—or worked at all.

(Seriously, I had to tell a 17 year old on Reddit that he should graduate high school and maybe get a normal job first before trying to pitch companies on his marketing services.)

So here’s the advice above, updated for this new audience that’s been unfortunately created by the YouTube gurus: 

I know, it doesn’t sound right. Freelancing is supposed to be a path toward professional independence. It’s what you do when you don’t want to have a boss. But the thing the get-rich-from-home YouTube dinguses don’t tell you is: you’re not just writing, or coding, or designing, you’re running a business. It’s a business of one—yourself—but it’s a business nonetheless, with all the soft skills (sales, marketing, client services, administrative work, etc) that come with it. 

Running a freelance business is a HUGE part of “freelance copywriting” (literally half the name), and is a skill you need to learn in addition to copywriting. And you will learn that skill much better if you start out as a full-timer than if you will if you start out as a freelancer, for two reasons: 

1. It will help you learn the business side of things.
2. It will give you a lower-stakes environment in which to make your early-career mistakes.

And trust me, you will make a lot of mistakes.

Learning the business side

There are two ways an aspiring freelancer (copywriter or otherwise) can go full-time at first: at an agency or at a company (in the advertising and marketing world, working at a company is called “in-house”). Either will be better than starting out completely on your own, but I recommend an agency if it’s an option for you. It’s also the way I started, so I know it and can speak to it better.