As a freelancer for almost a decade now, I have learned that I need to put my eggs in various baskets.
When you’re a digital nomad or self-employed and working from home, the worst thing you could do is to rely on just one source of income. If one job falls through (which does happen often), then you need backups to carry you through.
To give you an overview of my baskets of freelancing income:
I have learned that instead of one income from a single job, I have multiple different sources of income from various freelance and project-based jobs. Each one may not pay much on its own, but when you add them all up, it amounts to a more significant sum.
I’ve already explained how I started as a Virtual Assistant – now I’m going to tell you how I became a freelance Digital Marketing Manager!
Just like any other type of job, it took me a while before I landed my first digital marketing job.
I started off by gaining experience with social media and digital marketing through this very blog. When I first started blogging back in 2004, I didn’t intend for it to lead to an income-generating website, all I wanted at that time was to create a space online for me to rant and share life updates with friends and family overseas.
After going on hiatus online for almost 2 years, I went back online and rebranded my blog. From then on, it became apparent to me that social media and digital marketing was something I liked to do. The time I’d spent working on organically growing my blog’s stats was enough to prove that I was good at this kind of job. Now I just needed to find someone who might want my services.
After months of sending in my application to various digital marketing agencies abroad looking for a novice digital marketer, I was able to finally land a job that allowed me to learn more about the business, the ins and outs of digital marketing, and earn more than what I expected as a newcomer.
After 4 years of working with them, I decided it was time for me to move on and start fresh. I was back to square one, I was applying for jobs left, right, and center; but nothing seemed to be coming my way.
I re-evaluated my application methods.
Eventually, it occurred to me that I was applying for the same jobs that a Virtual Assistant in India could do for 1/2 of the price. I was competing against people whose cost of living was much less than mine and could therefore charge a fraction of the price for the same job.
So I asked myself a few more questions.
I listed all the tasks that a digital marketing manager would have and cross-referenced it with the skills that I had. When I looked at it all on paper, I realized that there were parts of it that I didn’t even want to do anyway.
What stood out to me the most was leadership and spearheading a team, social media, and community management specifically Instagram and Facebook, planning and execution of campaigns, and anything that involves graphic design and video editing.
So instead of marketing myself as a digital marketing manager (which, to be honest, is very general), I became a digital marketing specialist under which I laid out in my resume my strengths and interests that relate to that job title.
I got various interviews and was finally able to secure a full-time position with an Australian-based digital marketing agency. For this company, I was a Marketing Assistant that exactly works on the specializations I listed down in my resume.
From then on, more and more clients came in and I was able to provide them an appealing portfolio that’s worth their time to read through.
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