Earning 5000 Rupees a Month — My First Taste of Freelance Success
5000 Rupees in US Dollars is 60 US Dollars, that was first income when I started freelancing. This is the second part of my series of my freelancing journey. The title ‘my first taste of freelance success’ could be the way to describe my situation at that time. In the previous, I had talked about my motivation to start freelancing was financial problems in the family. But what is wrong with this mindset is that it is a ‘hidden blackhole’ and money that comes never stays in the pocket.
Now, let’s come back to the story, The time around in the month of January 2021 probably (I never documented my dates much). it had been some time since I closed my last client, if you want to know how I found my last client you can check out my previous blog. There I had explained to you how did I got my first client through a feature on Fiverr called ‘requests’.
Now, it was time of New Year and after getting my first taste of money, I wanted the first taste of income. I wanted to make some dollars so that I could support my family full time and really make it in the freelance world.
The problem was that I was working in a saturated market that was filled with people more successful and more experience than me while I had only the leverage of price at that time. I was probably a great choice for someone who could wanted it for a lower price but we all know that they will not be those high value clients.
But I still tried and I kept on mailing new clients and I kept trying my luck on requests. Although the emails were of no worth, request were hitting off the floor and I got some clients coming in. Some stayed and some went away after their first order with me. After some months, I made a total of $10 of in hand cash, but I was still not satisfied and I wanted more. I had got the taste of it.
My First Repeat Client
It was in mid-2021 when I got my first repeat client. So, I was sitting on my bed (Yes, my bed is where I write all my writings) writing an email to one potential client, then a message comes…
ping…
It was a notification on Fiverr, I opened with utmost enthusiasm, I see a pink mark on the message icon of fiverr, I felt my eyes glowed up to see a client message. The client said “Can you write a script on reaction to weird videos, if we like it, we can together for more videos”.
These lines, oh my God!! These lines made me go on madly chatting for more an hour with the client trying to seal the client. I was so blindly in love with the process that I just wanted this to be my permanent client that I was ready to work for free for the first script.
Working the thing out
Now, I had taken the project but neither did I know anything about reaction to weird videos. And even worse, I had only 2 days to figure out that also write my ideas for the videos. I was anxious and stressed. But then I found the most generic saviour of our generation, YOUTUBE!!
How I figured things out?
So, I started searching for the funny reaction videos and I observed how they were reacting to a specific video or how were their speech funny and amicable and then I replicated it. Now, as a writer here is one piece of advice, never copy the style of someone, even if you don’t know anything about the topic, try to develop you own idea in your own voice, because when you try to copy things, you do a grave injustice to your readers.
With almost 4 hours of continuous research and a little bit of coffee I was able to conjure up a script, that I was really proud of.
OMG! Revision!!!
With a lot of fear and anxiety I gave my work to the client in hope that the moment he sees it, my script will take over his mind and I will earn my hard-earned dollars. I was so much excited for his reply that I literally stared at the client’s chats for 30 minutes, without blinking (Or maybe!! a little bit blinking). After almost giving up on a reply I get to see that wave of three dots that tell me that the buyer is writing, my excitement rekindles and I glue my eyes on my laptop again. The message comes “Buddy, the script is great, but I think it can be better. Take some more time and write me a better script, I believe in you!” The good thing was that he believed in me, the bad thing was he wanted me to write a better script. Now, I didn’t know how could I make the script funnier.
Making it up to him
I am an emotional person from the very start, when this buyer said that he believed in me, I knew that I have to do something to keep up his believe. I feel that having a personal motivation really fuels up my writing process. With all my powers of writings, I gave my best to better my ‘best script’ on the topic. I watched many videos from YouTube, took some inspiration and then again, I watched videos. When you are invested so much in these projects, you seem to naturally get yourself disciplined, so when I was writing I didn’t do anything else much, like trivially scrolling social media. You need to find your eating passion, for me at that time was money and to know that I was earning something was a big factor that disciplined, when you want to discipline, creating a reward system is something that you can do.
Moment of truth
Once I was done, I resubmitted the order with a note “This is my Best”, my hands were shaking and I was anxious again, yearning for a positive reply. After almost killing me from anxiety, I got the reply that I wanted from him, “The script is great, thank you, hope to work with you again”.
In the month to come, that buyer and I worked together successfully on several projects. Lovely story right!! This is Sagnik Dey signing off!!
