Meet Victor, he went from an abysmal pay of $50 for a 1000-word article to earning $500 weekly and having fun along his technical writing journey.
To top it all off, in his journey to success in freelance technical writing, he endured a $400 monthly payment from his first workplace to learn, grow and build capacity with his newly found freelance technical writing career.
Warm your hearts with hope and brace yourself for future and unseen events in your freelance technical writing career, as we take you through this journey with Victor Jawole. You’d get to learn the special tactics he employed to turn his worst experience into a new career part.
Shall we?
Please introduce yourself
My name is Victor Jawole, I’m a social media manager, Web 3 and blockchain technical writer, and security reporter.
How did you start your journey into the technical writing space?
My journey into blockchain and Web 3 ecosystems started in 2020 but 2018 was the first time I heard about BTC then all I know about BTC was that it is used by cybercriminals, so that made me not develop more interest in it in 2018.
Furthermore, in 2020 during the lockdown and the Ethereum bull run, a lot of my friends persuaded me to invest in Ethereum which I did and it doubled my money in weeks. From there, I started regaining my interest in the blockchain space doing crypto trading and other financial-related crypto business.
However, in 2021 when I got to know that there is something called crypto jobs via Twitter and LinkedIn, I started browsing about it and landed with an agency that teaches people how to monetize their skills in the Crypto and blockchain space.
In the training, I learned about writing, different writing techniques, and how to start monetizing your skill in the crypto and blockchain space.
After gaining the experience and knowledge from the training, I moved forward to building my personal brand online because your personal brand is who you’re online as a technical writer.
Furthermore, after creating my presence online, I started shooting cold emails and DMs to crypto CEOs, CMOs, and other crypto-related app owners. To cut it short, while shooting a lot of emails and DMs via Linkedin, I was lucky to receive a reply from CryptoLocally who had an interview with me to become a technical writer and social media manager.
When I was asked for my expected salary, I was naive as a student and fresher in the technical writing business to say $400/month which was below average but was also good for me to gain experience.
My content gained a lot of traction and people started reaching out to me with positive feedback during an online Meetup I attended. I discovered that people are earning more than I was earning. Then I realized my worth and asked for a raise. After outlining the successes and tractions my content has gained and generated for the company, the salary was upgraded to $1000.
In early 2022, I moved away from CrytoLocally and started running my freelance technical writing business where I write technical articles for meme coin founders and other blockchain-related companies such as Tsuki Inu, AkaInu coin, etc. At the moment I make an average of $500 weekly.
What’s your best experience as a technical writer?
One of my best experiences is that I added knowledge to myself by reading, researching, and adding value to myself as a technical writer, at the same time, I am getting paid.
It’s amazing to know that I can get paid to gain knowledge as a technical writer through learning and researching a particular concept.
How much did you get paid when starting out in technical writing?
From the previous conversation, if you divide $400 by 8 articles approximately, you will quickly notice that I was paid below average compared to what I earn now as a freelance technical writer.
In summary, I was paid $50 per 1000-word article when I started out. I worked a lot to gain industry experience and improve the quality of my articles over time.
What about your worst experience?
My worst experience as a technical writer is this: as a technical writer who doesn’t know how to code. I was trying to write an article on ERC-20. I was completely obscure of how the code structure should look or how the codes should be developed.
So I went further to write up all the theoretical parts of the article and when it was time for codes, I checked online and just copy and pasted codes from Stackoverflow and other sites without any idea of it or proper validation.
That particular article took me several weeks to deliver a final piece because of the back and forth with my editor. Nevertheless, that particular experience was what led me into learning deeper about Blockchain, Web 3, and building smart contracts with Solidity.
If you could turn back the hands of time, what will you do differently?
What I will do differently is to increase my branding and know my self-worth right from the beginning because it’s really painful when I discover that I could be paid more.
Initially, I didn’t know that what I’m doing, I could be paid higher. All I was just doing back then as a university student was trying to find a means of making money online.
What would you describe as your writing weakness?
Some of my weaknesses are procrastination and distractions, that’s why if I’m writing content after doing my research, I will simply put my phones and other distracting devices on silent and keep them very far away from my workspace.
In addition, what I do to cope with procrastination is by giving myself a target per week and making sure I meet the target, so that method helps me reduce procrastination.
In summary, another interesting story is that I started my newsletter as a way to reduce procrastination because every week, it is a must that I will send out a newsletter to my followers. Therefore, all these checks help me to stay focused and reduce procrastination.
What do you want to say to technical writers out there?
What I will say to technical writers out there is that networking is good and at some point can act as a necessary tool to accelerate your business.
However, it’s also important to note that as they’re networking, they should put in more effort to make sure that the quality of their work is improved and of standard.
For instance, this is particularly important if you have CMOs, CTOs, or CEOs in your network and the quality of your work is not good, it won’t be so long before they lose interest in your work.
However, as technical writers, we should try to always upgrade the quality of our work, and learn and apply industry standards to our work to stand out.
In summary, it’s important that as you’re networking, you should also build capacity.
How do you present your portfolio to clients?
I send my cover letter along with the links to some of the best articles that I have written. I usually send only 2 or fewer samples of my best content alongside my cover letter.
Contentre is very helpful at separating your samples into multiple portfolios so that you only send one link containing only the specific samples you want your client to see.
Connect with Victor
Contentre helps technical writers stay organized and gain more clients. Grow your technical writing career in one place.
Now that you’re here, let me briefly recap the most important features Contentre can offer you:
- Organize your content in categories, topics, and tags
- Create and manage multiple clients
- Create and manage multiple personalized portfolios
- Get statistical analytics of your content revenue, top categories, and tags.
