- Elna Cain is a freelance writer for B2B businesses who earns six figures a year.
- She started finding higher-paying work when she optimized her website and guest-posted on blogs.
- Engaging with potential clients on social media before reaching out directly also helped her.
Elna Cain, 42, started freelance writing in 2014 when her maternity leave was coming to an end. A special-education support worker and behavior therapist at the time, she wanted to continue staying home with her newborn twins, so she started looking for a way to earn money remotely.
"I was on sites like Elance (now Upwork) and Guru, but a lot of jobs on there were only paying two cents a word," Cain, who's based in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, told Insider. "It wasn't a sustainable way to replace my former income."
So she turned to job boards like Freelance Writing, ProBlogger, and Blogging Pro, as well as LinkedIn, to find higher-paying gigs. But, she said, her business really took off once she optimized her website, started guest posting for blogs in her niche, and reached out to potential clients through social media.
Today, she makes six figures a year in income writing B2B SaaS content — essentially bridging the gap between a person's problem and how a particular SaaS product can help them solve it — for brands like Walmart, Optinmonster, and Blogging Wizard and selling online courses to aspiring freelance writers. (She declined to provide an exact number, but Insider has verified her income with documentation.)
All of this work only takes her five to six hours a day. She shared with Insider how she set up her marketing and lead-generation channels to provide her a steady stream of clients.
Building a website that showcased her skills and targeted her ideal client
When building her personal website, Cain said she started out by looking at other freelancers' websites that she found by searching on Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn. She took note of how easy they were to navigate as a potential customer and specific pages freelancers tended to include, such as an "about" page that didn't talk about the freelancer's education or love of writing but their client and how they could help them with their knowledge and expertise; a "hire me" page that detailed the freelancer's onboarding process and what they did to make their content stand out; and a testimonials section that outlined success stories they had with past clients. She also used other freelancers' portfolio pages as inspiration for jobs she wanted to chase.
She took a quality-over-quantity approach. "I don't have thousands of people coming to my website each month, only about 400," Cain said. "But of those 400, I'm converting a good amount of them."
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Converting a website visitor into a client, she said, comes down to making it super clear what services you offer, what problems you can solve, and why you're uniquely qualified to solve them. "You have to ask yourself why a business is hiring a writer in the first place," Cain said. "Is it to save time? To help them grow their brand? Because they lack writing skills?" Figure out which problem you want to target, she said, and build your services around that. On Cain's "hire me" page, for example, she pinpoints one of her ideal client's biggest problems: finding time to create valuable copy.
Blogging to build up her portfolio and credibility
As she was never formally trained in writing before she began freelancing, nor did she have a background in writing, Cain set out to prove she could handle the task for clients by building up a portfolio of work through guest posting and blogging.
"I found that this was an easier avenue to get experience in writing quality content, even though I wasn't getting paid," Cain said.
She found opportunities and publications to write for by Google searching "Write for us" and her niche."Look at their guidelines, see how frequently they publish blog posts, and whether it's a topic you can speak to," she said. One guest post on Blogging Wizard, she said, drove an increase in potential clients reaching out to her.
Using 'warm engagement' to expand her services and clientele
In 2021, Cain decided to expand beyond small businesses to offer copywriting and email-marketing services for SaaS companies. She said she'd been feeling "jaded," and another writer in the industry inspired her to make a change.
But delving into a new speciality required climbing a "client ladder," she said — a pipeline of clients you have to take on to get to your ideal client. Cain's ultimate goal was to work on sales funnels for SaaS businesses, so she started out by finding fellow mompreneurs and following them on social media to see how she could potentially help them out.
"You want to think about warm engagement versus cold pitching," Cain said. "Comment on their posts, engage with their stories, show them that you're invested in their lives and what they have to say." She'll then take a look at her potential clients' websites and examine areas she can improve.
After two to three months of engaging with them publicly, Cain will send them a direct message and pitch her services. "I keep it casual," Cain said. "Usually I'll say, 'Have you thought about adding a funnel to your email? If you haven't already, I can help you with that.'" Having already landed several clients this way, Cain said she's ready to move to the next rung of her client ladder.