At Freelance Life Magazine, we try to introduce you to a successful or interesting freelancer every week. This time we present Justice Nnaemeka, certified digital marketing professional, project manager and writer. This is his story.
I woke up this morning from a 4-hour sleep to see over 35 new work-related messages from both clients and my teams. It’s going to be a slow day. I prefer to be called a freelancer, even though I have long moved from handling one or two projects at a time to actually running a company that employs/contracts multiple teams to deliver various types and sizes of projects for clients. I’m super busy but I’m having a great time (I love my job). I really have come a long way:
Personal Life
I was born in Kano, Nigeria into a family of entrepreneurs. I have 5 siblings. Dad and mom resigned from their low-paid government jobs to start a stationery business with their savings. One of the services they offered was typewriting. At 7, my parents began to take us to their place of business during holidays, so we don’t get bored alone in the house. Noticing my fascination with the typewriter, dad offered to teach me to type. Learning to type in addition to my love for writing was the foundation of my career as a writer. Although I loved writing, I wanted to be many things and wasn’t quite sure what I’d do in life.
I just knew that whatever I do in life, I’d love to at least have a side-hustle that is in line with my interests and passion. High school and college days had almost no interesting events for me besides writing religious and political articles for publication in the school magazine, running a small-scale photography business and doing rental property agency business on the side.
I didn’t really get access to the computer and the internet until my final days in college. I fell in love with the PC and quickly transferred my love for the typewriter to the computer. I would spend all my money buying airtime in the cyber café, just so I could read the news about things happening in other countries, learn new things from Google and chat with some really great friends I met on Yahoo Messenger. With all that I saw going online, I began to imagine the possibility of living a laptop lifestyle. It wasn’t a thing then, as I do not really know anyone with such a career around me, I thought that someday, this could be a realizable dream. This possibility became my driving force to learning more about the computer and its applications.
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Career
So I graduated from college in 2006 and immediately got employed by dad to manage a cluster of his company’s branches in Lagos and eastern Nigeria. I served as the general manager as well as a regional marketing team lead, building strategies for new leads and new import-worthy products to bring in on behalf of the company. I also helped my uncle market his new car care products for some commission, whenever I wasn’t out there working for dad. Daddy was beginning to think I would continue to work for him and was making plans to have me set up more branches, until I told him I wanted to work elsewhere and do my own thing. He wasn’t quite happy with my decision but he understood.
Getting a good job in Nigeria isn’t quite easy. I worked in quite a number of small jobs, such as teaching, sales rep, promoter, typist, and marketer. While I worked, I enrolled in a number of computer courses and learned a few other applications myself. One of the few I particularly learned was Microsoft Excel (advanced), my SQL, and advanced Microsoft access. Almost immediately after I was done with those courses in 2008, I saw a job opening for data entry staff with NRECA. I applied, passed the interview, and got hired. This became my first computer-related job. I was a member of the database management team that entered the results of a state-wide survey into the company’s database. I was very excited that I would for the first time get paid for work using a computer.
It was quite really interesting working for NRECA. The working environment was neat and conducive, the job was interesting and team was great, but the most important factor was that they had free WIFI! I immediately knew what my lunch-breaks and the few after-work hours would be used for. It was my first experience working with so many computer experts, each with his or her laptops. I decided to buy my first laptop which cost almost double of my entire month’s salary but I was overjoyed because I knew that my life would never remain the same because of that laptop.
The possibility of living the laptop lifestyle became even more real to me while I worked with NRECA. The job was a one-year contract. I didn’t want to go back to the kind of jobs I did before I landed this job, so I immediately began to search the internet using terms such as “data entry jobs”, “computer typing jobs” and the like. The results got me tearing up in excitement. I saw a lot, from small practical typing and data entry jobs that paid pennies to very colorful sales pages that promised even more than the lifestyle I had always dreamed of for just a little amount of work. Most sounded too good to be true. One said “imagine waking up in the morning in your pyjamas and doing just 30 minutes of data-entry work on your laptop, after which you’d go out to the beach in your vacation destination to have fun with the love of your life. Then you return to find that you have just made $3000 or more using our high-income system.” I was excited at such, but would soon be sad to find that the system cost $500, when I earned only about $200 monthly. I soon realized that most of those were scams! But I wasn’t discouraged. I thought “if these are scams, then there must be a version somewhere that is real”. So I continued searching and sampling keywords until I keyed in “how to make legit money online”. That was exactly when my freelancing journey began.
Freelance Career
I dedicated every free time I had to research. I wanted to know how I can make legit money online with little or no investment. There were so many resources with valuable information. So among the many options I got, I chose to become a freelance writer. I began by writing for then-popular content websites such as ehow.com, Helium, associatedcontent.com and some others. I just found joy and some satisfaction writing for the web. It made me feel like a virtual stakeholder. Yes, my intellectual property is out there and I had a voice online. Some of my articles were accepted and paid for, while some others got rejected. These websites have quite a slow editorial process and I needed to make a steady income so I kept searching for more writing opportunities. By this time, my contract job with NRECA had ended. Some guy on the Nairaland forum was advertising an ebook on “How to make $500 or more monthly as a freelancer”. I loved the sales page and the way he presented the issues. “It takes hard work”, he said. So I purchased it for around $5 and studied it. It was quite detailed as he covered the basics of how to sign up, how to bid for proposals, get paid, withdraw your funds etc. He promoted websites such as freelancer.com (used to be getafreelancer.com), guru.com, scriptlancer.com (now acquired by freelancer.com), elance.com and odesk.com (now upwork.com).
I started with freelancer.com. I signed up, completed my profile and started bidding for writing jobs. I think I have a natural talent for writing proposals, so it wasn’t difficult for me to land my first job. It was a 10-articles assignment that paid $2 each. I was overjoyed! I completed the assignment satisfactorily, got paid, and also got hired to do more. I went ahead to sign up to many more freelance platforms such as guru, ifreelance, trulancer, odesk, elance, PeoplePerHour and fiverr, as well as several more that I could no longer remember. My goal was to make at least $200 a week, and since I was good at writing proposals I won projects easily. My second project was from ifreelance and it paid $10 an article. I completed well over 200 male enhancement articles for Peter Telus that year. By the end of the 3rd month, I had gotten at least one assignment from each of the websites I signed up to.
But soon enough, the Nigerian poor electricity situation began to affect my work. Sometimes, there would be power outage for days to weeks, making it difficult for me to meet deadlines and it worried me a lot. I had agreed to deliver a particular 20 articles assignment for a client within 4 days. But as I got halfway into the second article, the power went out. The situation never changed by day 2 and I knew I had to do something. I could not afford to fail my client, so I had to think hard and fast of a solution. “This job pays $5 an article”, I thought to myself “and there are many freelancers on GAF that would quite easily accept $2 or even $1 to write the same article. Why not hire one or two native English writers, pay them $3 or $4 to deliver these articles within the remaining 48 hours, and use the little power left in your laptop to proofread and deliver them? You get to make $1-2 for doing little work and save your face too”. That was what I did, and luckily, the writers delivered excellent content and on time, the client was impressed and assigned us a hundred more articles to write.
Then I thought to myself “Since you are good at proposal writing, why not focus your attention on bringing in the jobs in their numbers? Hire the best hands to complete clients’ projects and build a formidable supervisory system. That way, you won’t be affected much by the power situation in your country”. With an idea like that, I went from an ordinary freelancer to full-scale freelance project management. I hired the best hands, writers of multiple niches, and proofreaders to guarantee quality work and ensured they delivered to expectations. I later added web/graphics designers, digital marketers, app developers and programmers to the list. I had (and still have) a presence in many freelancing sites but I’ve long moved from using bidding sites, as I now run paid adverts to attract clients that pay for value. I do visit once in a while to keep the accounts active. Many of our clients from as far back as 2010 still use our services to date and things have been good.
Since my freelance career, I have acquired many more skills, obtained several certifications and have delved into several other businesses both online and offline. I sell things on amazon and shopify, import cool gadgets to my country from Aliexpress, I own a stationary shop, I have a few farms, and have set up a wholesale thrift clothing importation business for my wife. I have also travelled on vacation to a number of countries.
I would say I live the laptop lifestyle. I do not work 30 minutes a day and spend the rest enjoying myself, except for days I decide to take a vacation and would have to look into things for at least 30 minutes to ensure my manager is doing great. I commit an average of 14 hours to my work on a daily basis and sleep for 4-5 hours.
Advise to Freelancers
From my experience, the first key to success as a freelancer is to know your stuff. Be excellent at what you do. If you get it right the first time, you’re going to get more jobs. The second is to learn to write a killer proposal. A good proposal is all you need to convince the client that you can deliver. It is after he reads your application that he will check out your portfolio to be convinced that you walk your talk. The third is to always be professional. Go out of your way to ensure you keep your words. You may under-promise but do all you can to over-deliver.
