I make over six figures a year as a full-time freelancer, and everyone’s been asking me lately for the story on how I got started, so here’s the step-by-step, play-by-play of everything I did. I went to the University of Connecticut and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in human rights under the idea that I was going to become a human rights lawyer. I took the law school admissions test my fall semester of senior year, but I always had this feeling in the back of my head ever since I was young that I didn’t want a traditional career. This kind of all built up right until my last semester in college where I was like, I don’t know if law school’s the best decision for me, and I really don’t want to go apply and then take out all these loans and then potentially hate it, so I’m going to take a gap year. Spoiler, this gap year has turned into a gap rest of my life because I am never going back to school. I decided to graduate and just give myself a year to figure it out. I was gonna try to travel a little bit, but then when I graduated, I was like, okay, I need a way to make money. I didn’t apply to a single full-time job. I knew I had a good side hustle doing Instacart. I was making about $50 to $55 an hour doing Instacart, so I was like, I have that if I need it. I was an intern at a freelance platform called Pangeo when I was in college for a bit, and I was like, you know what? I could probably find some opportunities on this platform. I know a tiny bit about freelancing. Let me give it a go. Now, I decided I wanted to freelance marketing. I had no experience freelancing marketing, so I literally just Googled my way through everything. I would look at a posting for a freelance opportunity. I would just go and Google whatever was there, so when there were tools or softwares that I didn’t know, I would go and Google them. I’d watch tutorials on them. When it came to social media management, I would literally go and take free courses on HubSpot, and I would go follow these experts like Maya Nicole and Brock Johnson on social media, and I would just learn from what they had posted. I ended up landing my first freelance client. I wanna say it was like a few weeks to a month in to giving it a shot. When I tell you everything snowballed from there, I really mean it snowballed from there. I basically applied to any and all freelance gigs I possibly could. I remember I had this one gig in the beginning that was literally a sales job. I was cold calling people in California and asking to build an additional dwelling unit in their backyard. It was the most bizarre thing. I hated it so much, but honestly, I just wanted to kind of get my foot in the door and just get some experience in a way, whatever that experience was, even if it wasn’t the experience I really wanted or the thing I really wanted to be doing, just learning how to manage a relationship with a client was valuable in itself. After a while, I was able to stop taking on those random opportunities and kind of just focus on building relationships with clients that were going to be long-term. I started with social media management work because that was what I was particularly interested in, but I knew that I probably wasn’t gonna do social media management forever, and that’s something I see a lot of freelancers make the mistake of. Whatever you commit to in the beginning does not need to be the service that you offer forever. You don’t need to specialize off the get-go. It’s really fine. By September of 2021, I was making enough freelancing and had enough clients for it to be my full-time job. Before then, I was working 70 hours a week, 40 on freelancing, 30 on Instacart, just to build up my freelancing business while also still having money coming in from somewhere. At that point in time, I was doing strictly social media management. I had a full roster of social media management clients, but then I started to burn out. So early 2022, I fired three clients in the same month. It was absolutely crazy, completely slashed my reoccurring revenue in half, and it was the right decision, and I decided to try to pivot into freelance writing a little bit. Luckily at the time, I had a freelance client who was looking for help with their blog, so I was like, okay, cool, gave them a really, really cheap rate. I think I was literally charging like $20 to $40 per blog, which is batshit crazy, but it gave me some experience and allowed me to just start to learn how to write better and start to actually put things out online and then I could use as portfolio pieces when I wanted to work with different publications. By, I would say summer of 2022, I had some more writing clients, I had a bit more of a portfolio, and by the end of 2022, my business was honestly thriving and in such a good place. 2023, I believe, is when I started to step into a bit more of like a marketing strategist kind of angle or content strategist angle. I wasn’t really doing any social media management anymore from what I remember, and if I was, it was for very particular clients because I didn’t love being on social media all the time and also my work as a content creator was starting to pick up and that’s just so much time being online. I’m coming up on three years of freelancing full-time and genuinely, it was the absolute best decision I ever made for myself.