How Much My DIY “Free” SEO Writing Training Actually Cost Me
Free isn’t truly “cost-effective” when you can’t pay your bills and you’re missing out on tens of thousands of dollars per year. Some of these calculations might shock you.
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If you want to be a high-paid, sought-after SEO writer, you have to possess the skills that will take your work over the top and trend in the top spots on search engines.
When I didn’t invest in training, I missed out on better rates (a loss of $15K-$27K per month).
My hourly plummeted from $37.50 per hour to $12.50 per hour.
I couldn’t live off an annual income of $28K-$34K before taxes!
I’m not here to put a damper on free SEO writing training courses. (After all, we offer free SEO training too!) Back in 2017, I did my fair share of DIY free SEO training. I took all the online courses by Neil Patel, HubSpot and the like. And now, there’s even more of them.
But here’s what I realized: You can learn a lot, but you can never learn quite enough.
Sure, you might learn the basics. But if you want to be a high-paid, sought-after SEO writer (and make an entire career out of it), you have to possess the skills that will take your work over the top and trend in the top spots on the search engines.
Simply put: You won’t get paid well if you can’t perform well.
In this post, I want to share some real numbers that will show just how much money I missed out on by not investing in a comprehensive SEO writing course from the start.
These numbers are based on my experience – and yours may be different from mine – but I want to give you some perspective with my 20/20 hindsight.
If I had known the kind of money I could have been making if I had all the tried-and-true expert SEO writing skills, I would have felt way more comfortable purchasing an SEO writing course.
What My DIY “Free” SEO Writing Training Actually Cost Me
I want to crunch some numbers for you. All of these numbers are in comparison to what I was earning as a brand new, self-taught SEO writer. This was when I was telling clients I could write SEO, when in fact, I had little to no knowledge about how to do it.
For reference, I started writing 3000-word SEO articles for $0.05 per word. So, I was making $150 per 3000-word SEO article. What’s upsetting is that some newbies start at even lower rates, but that’s for another post…
I’d love for you to take this information, crunch some of your own numbers and decide what the next best step is for you.
I Missed Out on Better Rates (Approx. Loss: $15,000-$27,000 per Month)
When I agreed to SEO writing work (before I knew enough about it), I simply didn’t feel confident. So, I didn’t feel confident charging more than pennies per word for my work.
At the time, I was desperate to get any kind of remote job. And it was 2017, so remote work was even more scarce than today. So, I thought, “Yeah, $0.05 per word sounds amazing! $150 per article, and I can write them from home. I’ll take it!”
Other writers talked about how they wrote articles for $25 flat. So to me, $0.05 per word was fantastic.
As I’ve talked about so many times before, I got in with a client at $0.05 per word writing (approximately) twenty 3000-word blog posts per month. If they sent me enough work, I’d be making $3000 per month writing (until exhaustion, by the way). At face value, that seemed pretty good.
Little did I know that other writers who knew what they were doing were working at $0.50 per word, making $1500 on a single 3000-word article!
Back then, if I had possessed all the skills I needed to write for SEO success, I would have been making 5-figures every month! ($1500 x 20 articles = $30,000)
Even if I wrote shorter articles or took on jobs at $0.30 per word (which happened for me eventually as an authority SEO writer), I would have been making so much more money so much sooner!
My Writing Time Took 2-3x Longer (Approx. Loss: $37.50 per Hour Turned into $12.50 per Hour)
Because I only possessed piecemeal SEO writing skills (picking and choosing the best concepts from countless free SEO writing courses that I took), projects took me way longer than I wanted.
In my initial SEO writing work, I wanted to be able to write two 3000-word articles in a day. At the $0.05 per word rate, I would be making $300 in one day. I was thrilled by that. My hope was that I could write each article within 4-6 hours.
But, the reality was that these articles were taking me 8 hours apiece. Then, I’d turn in the article, and the client would come back with revisions. And since I was fairly new to SEO, everything took me longer to write and revise. So, each article was taking me about 12 hours total.
So, here’s the number crunching. My “ideal” rate for these initial jobs was $37.50 per hour (a $150 article completed in 4 hours). But, since each article was taking me 12 hours, I was making only $12.50 per hour. My hourly rate plummeted.
Annual Earnings Were Unsustainable (Approx. Earnings: $28,800-$34,200 Before Taxes)
Now, let’s look at my annual earnings. I was working so much (12 hours multiplied by 20 articles per month). So, I was working 240 hours per month. Hello “over time” without any of the benefits…
I had minimal energy to work harder and improve my SEO writing skills. I had minimal energy to pitch new clients. I was stuck in this stupid cycle of working too much for the pay. Luckily, I was in my early-to-mid 20s with no kids to support and no rent at my mom’s house. I wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway.
I was technically making about $36,000 per year, working over 40 hours per week with no benefits package. I was a freelancer using Upwork. Plus, the Upwork fee ranged from 5-20% of what I made, so my take-home income was far less than $36,000. That’s what you see in the subheading above.
I don’t know about you and your situation, but I was unable to support myself financially making the money I was. And that was 2017.
What Does Your DIY Free SEO Writing Training Cost You?
If this post bummed you out, that’s a good thing. It means you understand that “free stuff” doesn’t put you ahead, not even financially. In fact, “free stuff” will often delay the success you want, delay the career-changing opportunities you need and delay your ability to have the means to pay for the life you dream about.
But this post is actually meant to give you a leg up. I don’t want you to waste time. I don’t want you to waste the opportunity to earn tens of thousands of dollars more, this year alone.
Those who want to streamline their way to a sustainable, profitable income understand that investing in their own skills will pay off big time in the end. They know that training, even if it costs them, will enable them to make more money and do less work within months or weeks.
And that’s exactly the kind of students who decide to enroll in our Complete SEO Writer Roadmap course. We teach all the expert SEO writing skills so you can demand (and get hired at) expert rates from the start.
