Day one-welcome!

I’ve been putting this off for far too long. Yes, I have a newsletter (I do recommend you keep reading The Friday File). No, I’ve been putting off just starting a real, daily email habit.

And it’s easy to push this off. Here are some of my favorite personal excuses for why I have:

• I don’t know what email service to use

• I don’t know what to talk about

• blah blah

Well, first thing I decided to do was just use the service that has been working for my newsletter. No, this is not supplanting my newsletter; instead, I am going to figure out how to add value to my newsletter, which will probably include making it less frequent but more carefully crafted.

As for the not know what to talk about…well, I will be talking broadly of how to build an income stream as a content creator. The medium that you work in doesn’t really matter because the process is the same.

Tips & tools of the trade

A big part of this is walking through what has worked, and what has not. I have been doing this for a long time now and have used all kinds of tech tools. To be perfectly honest, simple is always better. If I weren’t already so far in with Notion, I’d probably ditch it and go back to Docs and Sheets for all of my tracking. But I digress.

There are things that you really need to know and need to use, but almost everything you hear and see is really fluff. You don’t need much at all to get started, and what you do need is almost all free. Upwork is free (yes, I am a proponent of Upwork and I will talk about it a lot). Docs is free. GMail is free. YouTube, X, IG, FaceBook, etc etc etc, all free.

Success is the ONLY thing that matters

My whole point with this is to help you level up your game. But take heart! Go look around and talk to your family and people in your church or whatever social circle you have.

Nobody knows what WiFi money is. They have no concept that you can easily make six figs clacking on your keyboard for a few hours a day. No, seriously, they don’t get it.

Until like 3-4 years ago, nobody had ever heard of Upwork unless they were tasked to hire a freelancer by their company. If you found me on MoneyTwitter™️, you are already miles ahead of your competition. You are ahead of the game because you have a clue that it exists and that you can do something about it.

What can you expect?

I am an SEO content writer by trade, so you can expect to hear a good deal about that. I highly recommend taking this route as a great baseline skill to learn and build on because:

• The demand is crazy good

• The pay is ridiculous

• It is the ultimate evergreen skill

If you can learn to write medium- and long-form content and how to optimize for SEO (I am NOT an SEO specialist; I am an SEO enthusiast who understands its huge value), you can adapt your writing style to write anything else as well. And this makes you unbelievably valuable.

Also, I am going to talk a lot about what you need to look for in good clients and how to avoid bad ones. And yes, I will shamelessly promote my products here because life ain’t free, friends.

Anyway, talk at you tomorrow. And buy my Upwork ebook!