I Made a Living Writing as a Content and Web Designer for 20 years and then THIS Happened

I took my first freelance writing gig in October 2000. I was working a miserable customer service job where a co-worker said, “Hey, I know you love to write. There are jobs out there on the internet.”

And so I wrote some amazing lingerie product descriptions for a client in Singapore and I got paid!

That’s when I saw the vision of me writing for a living. Writing is something I have loved since I won a major story contest in the second grade, so achieving that would be a dream come true.

Nonetheless, prior to the soulless customer service job in which I learned writing about underwear could get my foot in the content writing door, I worked for a telecommunications dealer from early 1999 until the location was closed and sent me on the hunt for new employment.

It was at this hole-in-the-wall business in the mall where I learned HTML and web design in their almost primitive forms at the turn of the century. I was mainly there to sell AT&T phones and services during the era in which analog was being phased out and digital was barrelling in, but I was a sponge that wanted to learn everything.

In 2003, I began to use those web design skills.

Not only was I freelance writing, but I was building websites at a time when businesses were just recognizing the benefits of an online presence.

In all, it took me seven years to build a strong portfolio because I worked full-time and took on gigs part-time. My ultimate goal was to be able to write and build websites for a living so I could quit the grind of my day job.

And I did.

Over the next 13 years, I worked for small and large companies in 18 countries. I hired copywriters to assist me in my business because the workload was incredible. Some work I would bid on and most of it came from referrals or Google searches.

The portfolio I developed consists of hotels.com, ebay.com, shop.com, Indeeed.com, and many others. I built government, non-profit, small business, and large business websites and wrote Search Engine Optimized content for businesses of all different sizes in dozens of industries.

In the meantime, I became certified by Google in Google Ads (Adwords), analytics, and mobile sites. I eventually became a Google Partner. SEO was the crux of everything just like it is today and I knew how to get some serious results.

All-in-all, things were very good. My husband even got to quit working for an employer that humiliated him daily for 10 years. For 5 years, he was able to stay home and help with our very young children while I supported us with my business.

In 2018 when all of the kids were in school, he returned to working in his industry with a company that appreciates him and his experience. This turned out to be a much bigger blessing than it appeared at first because I was diagnosed with breast cancer nine months after he was hired.

I ensured my clients that I would still be able to work for them. I mean, I worked at home. However, some had so little faith that they dropped me. Some of them had been clients for years (the longest was 9 years), so it was heartbreaking.

While I had a lot of doctor’s appointments and had to have a mastectomy, I didn’t have to have chemo because I found the tumor in the nick of time. If I had found it later, I would have struggled with doing my job and chemo would be a part of this story.

Fortunately, I had a couple of clients hang in there with me and I am still very grateful for those kind souls that genuinely expressed concern over my health and had some faith. They looked at the quality and effectiveness of my work instead of everything else.

Once I got through the worst part of cancer, I offered so many marketing services and partnered with a printing company that I opened a brick-and-mortar space in the middle of downtown to save the business.

Of course, this increased my client base, but it was mostly small businesses I was servicing. Unfortunately, this wasn’t paying the bills. Placing a business in the heart of a struggling downtown was a 40-yard punt that didn’t make it through the goalpost.

Also, the gig industry was much more saturated than it was when I started many years before. I had earned the title of “pioneer in the industry,” yet I couldn’t win high-paying gigs fast enough. It was good before my diagnosis when the wheel was turning and never stopped. When it got hung up in a mud hole, all I could get it to do was rock back and forth.

At the end of 2019, I closed the brick-and-mortar location after just three months and took the business back home. I still had a few clients, but things were fading away.

Finally, everything faded to black when I had DIEP Flap reconstruction surgery (Click here if you don’t know what that is) in March 2020 where I woke up from the 8-hour surgery to nurses telling me that my kids were going to be out of school for a couple of weeks because of COVID. We all know how that turned out.

Anyway, the course of everything changed when a friend, who knew my business failed after seven years of doing it part-time and 13 years of doing it full-time, told me to submit my resume’ to an email address that he provided me. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I did it and I got a callback!

After the call, I interviewed from my recliner while still recovering from major surgery, I won them over, they hired me, and my life changed tremendously. I still work for that amazing company and intend to until I retire, if that’s an option. Plus, my work environment hasn’t changed because my job is 100% remote while doing amazing things, getting paid well, and enjoying wonderful benefits.

As a result of this profound change, much reflection has occurred on where I was versus where I am now. If my business hadn’t failed, would I have applied for my amazing job?

Probably not.

Being that I had so much blood, sweat, and tears in the business that I built from scratch, I would have continued to try to save it. Maybe I would have been successful and maybe I wouldn’t have. I’m actually glad that I didn’t stick to it to find out.

I now look at the silver linings because life is so much better now.

One last note: It was the skills I acquired during self-employment (much of it self-taught) that the company I work for sought. Those once primitive web design skills that evolved and turned me into a web developer are now used in the administration and development of a major unclassified system within one of the U.S. government’s largest agencies.

And I now get to write what I want when I want to write it.

Originally posted on Medium.com (https://medium.com/@gingergillenwater/i-made-a-living-as-a-content-writer-and-web-designer-for-20-years-and-then-this-happened-ed02c0ce6185)