Reinventing My $10K/Month Writing Business in 2023: Embracing AI [Update]
This is a follow up story for Writing Income Accelerator. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Peyton of Writing Income Accelerator I help freelance writers earn top dollar for their work. As of 2023, I’ve been teaching people how to create a writing business for about five years now.
My flagship product is a course called 6-Figure Freelance Writer. It gives you everything you need to know to write good articles, rank them in Google, and get clients. I have an old Starter Story article on some of these details.
I charge $1,000 to $3,000 per article which usually ranks to page #1 of Google within a month or two. Today, many of my students and I make over six figures from writing. It’s been a fantastic journey of learning, connecting, and discovery!
Your network is your net worth. Choose great clients and masterfully solve a problem they want.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
First of all, I have to say that the clients I chose for my business gave me a first-class education on how to make money online. I started a business writing long-form articles that ranked on page #1 of Google. Four years later, most of them still rank on page #1. But what I’ve learned from my clients has helped me excel at online business.
I got to learn online funnels and internet marketing from my first clients: Iman Ghadzhi, Jonny Bradley, and Jordan Platten—all repeat clients. These people dominated their niche and were self-made millionaires at a young age.
I got to learn personal branding from those three as well as Natasha Vilaseca and NY Times Best-Selling Author Donald Robertson. (The latter even let me build his website.)
Private clients from Nike, Apple, and AJ&Smart taught me about how content should scale on multiple channels. I didn’t know how large-scale campaigns worked until I worked with these enterprise clients. Now I feel like I have an MBA in digital marketing.
So yeah, your Network is your Net Worth. Choose great clients and masterfully solve a problem they want.
Second of all, I did have an online business mentor from my neck of the woods (the Portland/Salem area). Her name is Gillian Perkins. She was a huge part of my success. I learned that with a tiny audience, YouTube channel, and email list you can make a huge impact. I had this completely ridiculous goal for what I wanted to make with my business and she helped me 10X it. You can never underestimate the value of a fantastic business coach!
The money was great until last year. Since mid-2022, business started to decline. Old clients stayed with me, but new clients were tough to get. A lot of that had to do with the impending popularity of Artificial Intelligence. In early 2023, I took the biggest hit. I think businesses got excited about AI as a cheap shortcut but failed to realize that it’s still very new in content marketing.
Also, even today AI at best makes a great first draft, but not a polished final draft. Sure, that will change, but it’s still pretty easy for me to tell if something is AI-generated and unrelatable to the target audience.
In response to that, I learned AI prompt engineering quickly on ChatGPT. I created course videos on how to utilize AI. I realized that at least a quarter of my course needed to change. That’s what I’m working on now. Writers need to adapt to this change, while still proving a useful service.
And in terms of the older content in my course, it’s still relevant. The writers doing well with AI have a strong SEO skill set. You need to know how SEO works and how to implement it. That’s a big part of my course today. You need to know the SEO prompts to ask and without that knowledge, it won’t serve you well.
In the past few months, I created a complete system that uses AI to generate some of the early-draft content and how to scale content with employees or virtual assistants—they don’t even have to be excellent writers!
However, if I’m 100% transparent I don’t feel great about AI.
Though it might help us cure cancer sooner in medicine, in the writing world it will take away jobs. I’m advocating for writers and showing them how to leverage it and still make money. The saddest thing is that it has been a while since I wrote a 100% human-generated article. I just published 20 articles in two weeks and I only edited them. I can’t say I wrote them.
To make matters worse, AI is great at scraping content. That is, you feed it a few URLs of top-performing content and it gives you a version of it in a new article. So when my articles get scraped, I’m going to be pissed! I worked hard on those. And if the AI article outranks mine on Google, that’s going to be terrible. But with AI and all new tech like this, you have to roll with the punches.
And I know this article is about me, but there is good news that mostly has little to do with me. As I started to take in more students, many began to fulfill my course’s promise. I have students who have quit their well-paying jobs, one published a book, and many others pivoted into high-ticket marketing consulting.
In addition to getting emails about how they got page #1 position #1 in Google for their articles, I enjoy hearing about their other successes. I think that’s a paycheck in itself. Intrinsically, it is what makes this all worthwhile.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
The biggest mistake I made last year was not adapting to AI quickly enough. When it hit, I feel like it hit overnight. Suddenly, it was everywhere. Because of deep learning, neural networks, etc, it grew up fast.
Open AI’s first release was great but it got smarter fast. Now the cash grab is creating apps and companies from the ChatGPT API. A lot of those are for writing and SEO. Honestly, I wish I had thought to do that!
I don’t know how to code, but I had an opportunity to create an app with a writing student of mine. It was a bad mistake not to jump all over that. In hindsight, that would have put me way ahead of the curve so I’m bummed I didn’t take action.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Seeing the freelance writing landscape now, I know what I want to do. I have to update my course for sure. But the long-term plan is to stress agency creation work more. A lot of my students are solopreneurs, which is great. However, I just have a few lessons on how to scale a writing agency. That’s really where the big bucks are. With AI and a lot of experience I’ve gained over the past year, I can create that program today.
So the 5-year plan is to continue building this agency model and showing freelancers how to be better employers. The turn-key solution I’ve created is easy to replicate with the right talent. I’d love it if more of my students went well beyond 6 figures and into 7 or even 8 figures. That’s going to take time to refine that program, but it’s what I need to create.
Look for a revised version of 6-Figure Freelance Writer this Summer!
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I walked into an old bookstore at the beach and picked up Sein und Zeit by Heidegger. Nothing like harkening back to old German philosophy in our strange times! However, that’s something readers might not resonate with.
For most people, I recommend Where The Crawdad Sing by Delia Owens. Read it to learn what great, descriptive writing looks like. The author is highly talented at writing and if freelance writers can emulate half of her visceral effect, they’d be writing rock stars. As you know, marking is part of storytelling and emotion. I read books that help me improve that aspect of my writing.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Start. Start a business. Get inspired by reading some stories on Starter Story and simply take the first step.
I waited too long to start my writing business. There is always time to go back to college, get into an insane amount of debt, and major in hieroglyphic studies where you will find zero jobs. Better to start something you’re curious about and pay the bills. (I’m pretty sure I’ve given this advice numerous times.)
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
I am looking to add more people to my team and these are all paid roles. I need a few f/t virtual assistants with a background in writing or teaching. Tasks include following my procedure lists to scale content. I provide all the education and checklists.
Also, I need a p/t graphic designer and video editor. Tasks include creating content for courses, YouTube videos, and educational modules. I prefer to not work with Upwork-type sites, so contact me directly. The search will be over by August 2023, but if you’re reading this before then email me with your CV to peyton@writingincomeaccelerator.com.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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