I fell into writing/editing/translating through my first "real" job after grad school. I researched, edited, and translated information about international trade. Later I went on into other areas like consumer goods market research, writing/managing content for an industry-specific website, researching and writing about infrastructure projects, and now writing business plans. It's been a mix of freelance and permanent work. A lot of people think freelance writing is just writing articles for websites, but a lot of businesses hire people to create other business writing content.


Unfortunately, it's a tough time to try to break into the field. There seems to be a lot of people thinking it's an easy money-maker and sort of saturating the market. My main client these days pays me an hourly rate, which is good, but I've heard places that pay per word are reducing their rates. This is especially true for conent mills that hire people to churn out things like those clickbaity articles that are everywhere these days. AI is also invading the space. The Upwork platform seems to favor people that got in early in and were able to develop a work history before others. Don't even touch Freelancer.com, it's full of scammers.