$60K writing stories in Nigeria

Yes, and as a full-time law student 👇

XYZ
March 22, 2024

In today’s email:

Highlights:

He wrote 500 words for his first order, finished it in one day & made $5
Has written 25,000 words in 4 days, 8000 words in one day, and 4000 words in one night.
Currently makes about $2500/$3000 monthly (different projects and clients)
Made $1750 from a single gig
Made $14,000 total from a returning client
He made over $60,000 in his 6 years of freelancing on Upwork and Fiverr
Took him 4 years to go from $0 to $20,000 and roughly 2 years to go from $20,000 to $60,000

A N300,000 allowance, MMM, BetNaija, and how he got started:

He resumed with N300K to settle down comfortably in school for the semester and (oh well) blew through it all. Especially on a Samsung Galaxy S5 from Computer Village that got spoilt 3 weeks later (fake screen).
It wasn’t even the middle of the semester yet and he was getting broke. So, he needed fast money to buy a new phone and have spare change to “guide” throughout the semester.
That’s how he put some money into MMM, a Ponzi scheme and it worked.
“Easy money”, right? GREAT.
But he got ambitious and put money into another “easy money” scheme.
Betting.
He lost more than he made and got broke. Again.
He started looking up ways to make “easy money” online that was (ah, not MMM or sports betting lmao).
So, he got into Quora and Reddit and after seeing people write about their personal experiences on Fiverr he decided to give it a shot.
He created his account on a friend’s laptop
4 months later, he got his first order. This was December 23, 2017.

Writing about SEX in his first gig:

Backstory
His mom owned a bookstore, his dad was a university lecturer, and there were plenty of books at home. From fiction to history, you name it.
That’s how he picked up the habit of reading at an early age.
He became a better writer because of it.
On Fiverr, it took a while before niching down to writing erotic stories.
He had set up his profile on Fiverr to attract clients who needed all forms of writing.
But he wasn’t getting orders, so after he saw another Fiverr seller offer to write articles on human sexuality, he decided to niche down to that AND IT WORKED.
He got a lot of orders.
Then, he niched further down to writing short erotic stories and the orders kept coming.
All was going well.
He kept receiving orders on his Samsung J3 while writing on a borrowed laptop.

He made quite a bit of money writing but it was just figures on a computer screen:

He worked for about 6 months before he could find a way to withdraw his money with Payoneer. But he needed to have their physical card to make it work.
So, he ordered one.
After a few months, the card got shipped from overseas but (you guessed it) got lost in transit.
He ordered another.
That one even took more months before it got delivered to him.
So, after one year of zuzu working on Fiverr before finally seeing his cold, hard-earned cash.

His first-ever client kept coming back to give him more work:

I asked how he brings in roughly $3000 monthly and he said that his clients kept coming back.
He worked with his first client from late 2017 to early 2019.
It’s a retainer but he didn’t know what it meant back then
He was just writing good stuff for her and she kept coming back to order from him.
He also had other clients coming back for MORE WORK, he kept paying MORE ATTENTION to those clients, and they paid him well.
Those returning clients sustained him in his first dry spell. Cos new clients were not coming in at a point (it happens lol).
If you go above and beyond for clients, they will reward you with more business.

Making $3000 writing about NFTs before it crashed:

He was introduced to the basics of crypto, web3, and all that stuff.
So, he also learned how to make money off it by trading cryptocurrencies.
During the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) boom, he saw that a lot of NFT projects had websites with poor content and copy.
And the thing with NFTs is that you have to explain your project to potential buyers. From the features of the NFT art to making money off it.
However, the website content and copy were poorly written and didn’t explain these projects well.
So, he started writing for that niche on Upwork.
Made over $3000 before the NFT hype died down.

Freelancing can be HARD sometimes:

Getting overwhelmed with work here and there
You could make $3000 this month and then $700 next month.
Withdrawing $$$ to Nigeria used to be a BIG issue. PayPal and Payoneer do not make it easy at all. He has even been defrauded on Payoneer.
Someone in India used his card details to buy $110 worth of game accessories.
But it’s getting better anyway. GeegPay and GreyFinance make it easy to create USD, GBP, or EUR bank accounts on their platforms that you can link to Upwork or Fiverr and get paid in less than 48 hours.

His advice to anyone starting today:

Pick a niche that you like and won’t get tired of. It could be something that plays to your strength, something interesting, you can be consistent in. Be true to yourself and find what you can do. Things changed for him when he niched down. It’s good if you can write for blogs, books, emails, ads, etc but find something that you can write better than others. You will find your target client easier and they will love working with you because of your specialized knowledge.
Take care of your clients. Go above and beyond for them and they’ll keep coming back. It’s harder to get jobs on Upwork and Fiverr compared to 2-3 years ago. More people are applying to the few available jobs there and that’s not sustainable. But if you manage to secure a few clients, take care of them and they’ll take care of you with their cash and keep coming back for more.
Find a mentor. It took him over a year before making his first $1000. Meanwhile, someone he put on Upwork last year has made $9000. In one year lol. It also took him over a year to figure out how to withdraw his money and this same guy he mentors set up his payment account in one night. Find a mentor lol.

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