Ditch the Office, Keep the Paycheque: Earning Remotely on Your Terms
Welcome to One Step Closer, your weekly dose of inspiration and practical tips for building your location-independent life. In this edition: real talk about breaking into remote work.
Unless you’re independently wealthy or retired, figuring out how to make money online is one of the biggest hurdles to going remote. This is especially true if you don’t have prior experience working online. But here’s the good news: you don’t need a remote-friendly degree, years of experience, or an inside connection to get started.
What you do need is the right approach, a willingness to learn, and a strategy for making your skills valuable online.
This week, let’s talk about how to get remote jobs and contract work, even if you’re starting from scratch.
Trying to land that first remote gig is tough. If you’re trying to transition into remote work, you might feel stuck in a frustrating loop:
Every job listing wants “previous remote experience.”
The platforms that promise easy freelance gigs feel overcrowded.
You don’t know where to start, or whether your existing skills even translate online.
I get it. I’ve been there. And so I want to share the single biggest lesson that changed everything for me…
Stop Looking for Jobs. Start Looking for Problems You Can Solve.
Most people approach remote work like a traditional job hunt. They browse job boards, submit applications, and hope someone picks them. But remote work doesn’t function like a normal job market.
Companies, entrepreneurs, and small business owners aren’t just hiring; they’re looking for solutions to their problems. And that’s where you come in.
The key to getting your first remote gig is positioning yourself as someone who can solve a specific problem. Here’s how this played out for me:
I started freelancing on Elance (which later became Upwork) when the platform was still in its golden era. I did 500+ contracts there, not because I was the most experienced writer out there, but because I learned how to present myself as the best solution to whatever the client needed.
If someone needed blog content, I didn’t just say, “I’m a writer.” I said, “I help businesses create blog posts that bring in more traffic.”
The difference? One is a generic job title. The other is a solution.
This approach helped me build a steady stream of clients. And when the platform changed its algorithms and it became harder to get found? I didn’t panic, because I already had a solid client network. For the next several years, I worked almost exclusively on referrals.
When I did need to pitch for new opportunities, I knew exactly who I wanted to work with: mid-sized businesses with a solid marketing team but lacking a full-time writer on staff.
Your best remote work opportunities won’t come from blasting out applications. They’ll come from being known as someone who can solve a specific problem for a defined buyer.
I became known as the person who could solve marketing’s problem of getting subject matter expertise out of their in-house experts’ heads and onto the company’s website and socials.
Let’s talk about applying this concept in real terms to your remote work search, so you can get one step closer to location independence.