Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Audio Recording

In Episode #12, I give my thoughts on navigating the pandemic as a freelance writer and what to anticipate if we head into a new pandemic-driven recession.

 

 

Transcript: What Freelance Copywriters Should Know In A Pandemic-Driven Recession

Hey guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

So today, I want to talk about the pandemic and initial/potential recession we’re looking at here and how it affects you as a freelancer. To begin, I want to look back at some of my predictions when this whole thing started, how it’s played out since, and then what I’m expecting moving forward including what you should be doing now and what you should be expecting.

Let’s backtrack a bit and talk about, “What did we see at the beginning?”

If you were on my email list, then I sent an email out and was basically just talking about how when the economy starts to decline, small businesses stop—for the most part—hiring freelancers, in general, but especially freelance writers. To some extent, we’re a little bit of an inelastic industry; were a somewhat recession-proof industry in the sense that people need writing, plain and simple. There’s no way around that.

I think no matter how bad things get, people are going to be hiring freelance writers. But when we talk about small businesses—when the economy’s down—they tend to be hiring fewer freelancers.

At the same time—and this is kind of what I was wanting to point out in my email to you guys—mid- to large-sized businesses actually will hire more freelancers, and the reason for this is because they stop making full-time hires and they start letting go of full-time employees.

When you stop making those hires—when you’re letting those employees go—the things that you needed them to do don’t just disappear. Maybe certain parts of their duties that were always a bit superfluous stop getting completed. But the essential pieces still have to get done, and the cheaper option in the short term—which, when the economy is down, that is the name of the game: cheaper in the short term—is to hire freelancers.

So, these mid- to large-size businesses start hiring more freelance writers.

I’m going to tell you right now, there were companies hiring freelancers back in my early days that haven’t been hiring freelancers in five years, and within the next year or two, they’re going to start doing it again. Previously, they grew to the point that full-time hires made more sense. In the long-term, full-time/in-house is the better option. So it’s the cheaper, more efficient, higher upside option, a lot of the time. Not always, but a lot of the time.

That was kind of the prediction I made: Small businesses: less; mid- to large-sized businesses: more. And that’s actually a good thing for us because mid- to large-sized businesses are the ones who pay more anyway. You’re going to start to see more of the higher price hiring projects, while maybe the lower price, small business stuff, less of.

Just in terms of my own business, and what I saw: I had stopped doing freelance work for several months while I was finishing out my course, which I completed in March.

With the pandemic happening, I was like, “Okay, who knows how selling, this thing is gonna work?

I’ve never sold products in a recession, so I’m gonna take whatever freelance work comes my way,” and literally within half a month, I was back up to $15k a month in freelancing gigs.

All the high-end leads that I had floating around all came in and were wanting these projects. They were all wanting content,