 Hey guys, welcome back to my youtube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here So a couple years ago I was browsing on the internet going about my my day and I kept seeing these intriguing articles on Twitter and Reddit To this clip on a CNBC program called make it or made it Featuring something I'd never heard of before by the name of Alex Fasulo Now what piqued my interest about this video clip was that this person Alex Fasulo Who said that she was making her living as a freelance writer on Fiverr Was earning 378,000 United States dollars per year now at the time I was making my living mostly actually from Freelance writing I've since transitioned to doing slightly different marketing jobs and doing it more in-house But at the time freelance writing was my bread and butter. It was a market in a world I was very familiar with and to me making $378,000 Single-handedly on a platform doing ghost writing putting all that together It just didn't make any sense like whatsoever. So I remember delving a little bit into the clip It was the day before Patrick's Day So I was getting ready to do what Irish people do on Patrick's Day, which is go to a bar and I was like, you know what? This is interesting enough for me to write about Now the reason I'm sort of making this video is that this article has kind of taken on a life of its own According to the latest statistics the article has been viewed 51,000 times It got a lot of comments So I ended up closing the discussion about a year ago But people are still occasionally tagging me on Twitter and taking an interest in this whole niche So let me just say a couple of things about this article It was not something I put a lot of thought into I was just kind of I was going through this streak of writing on medium And I thought this is a really interesting issue to pull apart now the thing I want to say is this It wasn't really about this person called Alex Fasulo who I never made who I never had heard of before never knew about She just struck me as a classic example Of what I call kind of the Course promotion trick now We did a whole infographic where I described in this article the how it becomes a cycle And that was why I wrote the article to use her as an example now. I guess from Alex Fasulo's perspective This is kind of crappy. It's unfortunate that she was my example But that's just how it was I kind of saw through this or I My opinion was that I saw through this and I was like I'm going to write about it I guess what you could say my motivation here was that having made a living as a freelance writer I believe in open sourcing knowledge This is a lot of the reason I put up videos on youtube if I can figure out how to do something I put it out there on my youtube channel make a small bit of advertising we're having you from it But I don't charge for that now to make a living as a freelance writer to be successful in freelance writing It's not rocket science. You basically need excellent writing and editing skills If you don't have those it's probably the wrong job for you business and client management or skills No one really ever talks about but those are essential You're going to go bust unless you know how to manage your clients properly how to land your business which is really in my The the summary of my advice is inbound marketing inbound marketing inbound marketing forget cold pitching the internet's way way too credit And by the way, a lot of the reason I moved away from freelance writing towards mark back towards what I did in house marketing and communications is I came to the conclusion that freelance writing is just a really really saturated space I think there's much better ways to make money remotely through the internet Especially today when companies are so open to it I I saw it as a very very simple one two and the one two is I described it in this article It was a little graphic idea of a cycle was you basically talk about making a lot of money That was when I started googling this person alex fasulo. I was like this cnbc appearance wasn't a one-off thing It was like she's gone on like 20 30 40 50 different shows Podcasts what have you and it's always the same messaging. I'm making a ton of money. I'm making a ton of money I'm making a ton of money and then after two or three of reading these pieces I saw she's selling a course and how to make money freelancing So you could say and this is again, it's all just my opinion all this commentary about alex fasulo I never I never said she's a scammer. I don't think she's a scammer I think she's doing a very calculated and kind of deceiving a bit marketing technique As I described in the blog in the blog post you Talk a lot about how successful you are you do that enough times and enough people hear about you You kind of get some jealousy going you get some brand recognition going and then you say hey I'm doing a course if you want to be as successful as me by this course And then it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because you talk about how wealthy you are Actually because of the course and all the interest you've generated you actually end up being successful So that was basically what this uh blog post was about again It wasn't really the intentional least wasn't to just dig into this random internet person called alex fasulo Because that's not really something I would regard as a good use of my time I did end up writing a much more detailed piece than I had intended to and I think the reason was I drunk a little bit too much coffee that afternoon. There was no other reason But it was like very very in in detailed and people picked up on that regarding, you know, two years later I really don't have much to much to add about it or I don't really have an answer for the question Is alex fasulo a scammer After I wrote my piece she did come out and say that she was actually working with co-writers That suggests to me and a lot of people that had it It was literally a few days after my piece sort of went low-grade viral had he not written that piece She wouldn't have so that to me spoke to a real lack of transparency because the cnbc I made a piece said basically I made half almost half a million dollars almost four hundred thousand dollars Single-handedly on fiverr and then, you know, if you look her up, you can buy her course So basically that's what I have to say about it. I think for people who want to make good money freelance writing or Consulting or actually doing literally anything you don't need to sign up to courses from people like alex fasulo I know there's a temptation when you're starting from scratch if you're looking at making a full-time living on internet I know it's scary as hell because I've been there before I've done it But Curate the information you get carefully. There's so much you can get for free. There's a great freelance freelance writers community on reddit that has literally free advice go on to the wiki of that reddit If you want to become a freelance writer and you can get all that advice for free You do not need to pay anybody to learn how to be a freelance writer And you definitely don't need to take an online course. So anyway, that's what I have to say about it The whole freelance writing game to be honest. I'm a bit jaded and tired of it I no longer recommend that people go into freelance writing I think you can make good money in it, but I just think it's there's better ways to if you want to be independent You want to you want to lead the digital nomad life. You want to lead the remote life, which is fantastic. I love it Um, I just think there are better ways to do it, but that's what I have to say about it I know there's still a lot of interest in it. And um, yeah, just just let that whole circus go on And if any of my friends were to ask me, I want to do freelance writing How should I get into it? I would say, well, I probably don't recommend it But if you do you can pretty much figure out everything you need to know about how to do that For free on the internet. Thank you guys for watching