20 From the Field: How I Ditched the 9 to 5 and Built a Business I Could Live Wi
20 From the Field: How I Ditched the 9 to 5 and Built a Business I Could Live With
Lori Benjamin
From the Field
My Story
I started working as a freelance content marketing writer after about 15 years of work in traditional marketing and advertising, mostly in the business-to-business software field. So, I come to it from a business rather than a journalism lens. Content marketing felt like an enormous (and obvious) breakthrough. For years, I’d been asked to write product-focused emails and online ads designed to interrupt busy people with a sales pitch. Now suddenly, I had clients who wanted to produce things that people would actually seek out and read. What a concept!
I discovered content marketing after leaving my ad agency job in the city behind and moving to an island about two hours north of Seattle and an hour by ferry from the mainland. Commuting was not an option. After five years of writing emails for Microsoft clients, I needed to update and sharpen my skills. It was 2012, and new ideas, voices, and technologies occasionally broke through the ad agency bubble, but were usually rejected in my commercial, business-to-business niche.
From my first Skype interview as an islander, it was clear I had a lot to catch up on. I began investigating marketing blogs in earnest, and found sites like Copyblogger, HubSpot, Seth Godin, Content Marketing Institute, and Convince and Convert. I had a decent portfolio, but not much for bylined articles, and I was competing against writers much younger than me. At first, all I found were clients asking me to work for less than minimum wage: To type fast and think very little.
Ultimately, LinkedIn turned out to be my most valuable tool. As an “early adopter,” I had started collecting recommendations around 2007—a great way to establish credibility in a field where almost nothing I wrote had my name on it. I began applying for any and every job I felt qualified for, no matter where it was based geographically. Unless the job description said specifically, “This is an onsite position,” I sent an application. If it seemed like a perfect match, sometimes I applied anyway, ending my cover letter with a polite, “I hope you’ll consider me as a remote candidate for this position or alternatively, for any project work I may be able to help you with.”
After a few months of this, I started picking up work that paid reasonably well. Within the first 18 months, I was making a decent living writing ebooks and ghostwriting guest blog posts on the very content marketing websites I’d been reading. I was over the moon.
The content marketer’s motto: Be helpful.
“Content marketing” is nothing new, of course. John Deere has been publishing its brand magazine, The Furrow, since 1895. Today however, every brand in the world is up against the overwhelming information overload that we all experience in our multi-screen, multi-tasked lives. Audience attention is the holy grail.
Because of the Internet and social media, the corporate