Each year that I’ve been freelancing, I do a retrospective looking back at the ups and downs. I do my best to make this post as transparent as possible, because I learned early on that getting a true and honest peek behind the curtain of the freelance life is highly valuable (and pretty rare, if you think about all the Insta-advice out there).
So, 2022. How was it? I’ll break it all down for you here, with all of my major takeaways that you can use to drive your own freelance career (or at least swerve some of my mistakes).
Here’s my annual roundup for 2021.
Here’s my annual roundup for 2020.
Career Stats
Let’s begin by looking at what happened in my fourth year of freelancing, by the numbers. Spoiler alert: It was a good year for me.
Length of Freelance Career: 4 years (approx.)
Time Spent Working: 835 hours or 18 hours a week or 3 hours a day
Number of Clients: 17 (not all at once!)
Number of Retainer Clients (more than 3 months): 9
Invoices Sent: 78
Income Growth: $20,000 more than I was making as Director of Content at a digital marketing agency, $40,000 more than I made in 2021
Not bad, seeing that I set out on my freelance journey with one goal in mind:
Earn more and work less than I did when chained to a desk.
Goal effing achieved.
It took me a while to get here, but I’m earning more now as a freelancer than I ever thought possible. I put this down to the amount of time I spend marketing my business, as well as the help I get from some amazing freelancers who support me:
Time Spent Marketing: 103 hours
Money Spent on Freelancers: $25,000
My marketing happens nearly every day for about 45 minutes before I work. And I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be where I am now without that dedication and strategy.
Even now, after four years, I don’t have what you would call “steady” income. It’s natural for income levels to fluctuate over the course of the year. Here’s a chart that proves it, showing my income throughout 2022:
As you can see, my January and February were well below my ideal income, and July was only barely above it. But I made up for that in Q2 and Q4 to come out well above my annual goal.
When you compare that chart to the hours I spend marketing, it’s easy to see that ramping up my time spent focusing on my business resulted in more income overall. I ramped up my marketing after a slower summer, and by the end of the year, my marketing efforts had paid off:
I use Toggl to track my time and get helpful charts like these.
Earning more income meant I also had more money to invest in my business, most of which went to other freelancers who had talents and skillsets I don’t have myself. These people helped pick up the slack on my marketing efforts, taking over the tasks I can’t or don’t want to do. Those included:
- Social posts
- Graphic design
- Email marketing
- Mentorship/counseling
- Client work
- Content creation for my website
Speaking of which, I did a bit of digging to figure out where my current clients came from, since so many freelancers ask me: “Where do I find clients?”
Not surprising, referrals and LinkedIn posting are my best lead sources.
Big takeaways:
- The time you spend marketing your own business directly correlates to your income
- Being able to predict your income is vital to indicate when you need to ramp up marketing
- Retainer clients are by far the most lucrative type of client for my freelance business
- It’s definitely possible to earn more money and work less as a freelancer
Personal Life Stats
The freelance life doesn’t begin or end at the work you do every day. As freelancers, the lines between personal life and work life are often blurry and sometimes indistinguishable.
If you’ve read my previous year-end wrapups, you know that in 2020 and 2022 I suffered a number of seriously traumatic events, one of which was Covid ruining years of planning to become a digital nomad.
I’m happy to announce that in 2022, my number of serious life traumas was a total of 0. And my digital nomad lifestyle is officially off the ground:
Number of travel destinations: 31
Countries visited: 10
Cities Visited: 48
Days Spent Traveling: 240
This was incredibly fun and incredibly challenging. I had to learn how to work efficiently on the road, which meant investing in some new technology (like a second monitor), and planning my trips based on my budget (thanks Kayak Explore!)
There are also downsides to being a digital nomad, which people don’t often talk about. I summarized them in this post:
There’s one digital nomad challenge that stands out among the others: The lack of community.
Traveling all the time, and moving from one destination to the next, leaves little time to build new, strong connections. Fortunately, I have friends around the world, and connecting with them on my travels helped.
But I need something more. So in 2023, I’m going to mitigate this issue in a few ways:
- Less solo travel to countries where I don’t speak the language (and most people don’t speak English or Spanish). The isolation barriers are too high.
- Longer stays in most destinations (more than one month). Give myself more time to meet people, and worry less about not loving the destination right away.
- Revisit my favorite destinations to build community
- Choose a city where I can settle down eventually, and have a new home base (as right now I don’t really have one)
Big takeaways:
- Being a digital nomad is possible again, with vaccines and precautions
- Maintaining and growing a community is the biggest challenge of this lifestyle
How did my business change in 2022?
This past year was transformative for my business, as I dove headfirst into the world of online training and coaching.
Teaching has been a passion of mine for a long time, and it’s something I’ve missed in my client-oriented freelance life. So in the middle of last year, I teamed up with StoryChief to release my very first free SEO Fundamentals training course:
This was a huge learning curve for me. I’d done some video work before, but nothing this grand. It took me a long time to learn how to make a good set, use my new microphones and lights, and edit the video so it looked good.
But despite this challenges, it was so fun, and it ignited a passion under me. So just a few months later, I launched another course, SEO Bridge Builders. This one is designed to help freelancers turn their SEO knowledge into high-ticket services.
My soft launch of this course was absolutely amazing. I had 5 “test subjects” sign up to go through the group courses, start a community together, and use all of the assets and resources I created for this course. They loved it, and I got great feedback like this:
My second launch, however…
Well let’s call that my biggest lesson of 2022. I spent a lot of time putting together a landing page and email sequence for the second launch of my course, and it fell flat on its face.
There were a couple reasons for this:
Launching at the start of holiday season was a big mistake. People were too busy to take a live course.
I rushed the launch, and ended up making myself too anxious and harried to make a quality launch.
Though I’m proud of the size of my mailing list, it just wasn’t big enough to get enough interest going in the course.
So what did I do? Well, I cried a little. Then I decided I wasn’t going to let my hard work go to waste, and sent out an email to everyone who had looked at the course landing page but not purchased. And I asked them: Why didn’t you buy?
This was one of the most valuable things I did in 2022. I heard from lots of people who wanted the course, but couldn’t make the group calls. Several people told me they wanted a self-managed option.
So that’s what I’m working on now: A big, self-managed course for freelancers who want to make bank off their SEO. Watch this space, it won’t be long before it’s ready to go live.
All in all, 2022 was a huge year for me, filled with success, travel, and important lessons. Here’s to a new year full of new surprises! 
