I didn’t set out to become a content writer. I stumbled into it, the same way I’ve stumbled into almost every turn of my career. Plenty of people in this profession will tell you they always knew they wanted to write; that they were the kid who filled notebooks and never stopped. I love books, and always have, but a career in it was purely coincidental (sort of). What I didn’t have was a plan.
I started in digital marketing in 2010, at a small agency in the UK, and content writing found me along the way rather than the other way around.
It Started by Accident
After a few years at that first agency, I moved in-house as the digital marketing manager for an e-commerce business. Then life moved me again, this time across the world to Australia, and into an in-house lead generation role for a few years. None of it was a straight line towards writing. It was a straight line towards digital marketing, and writing happened to be one of the things digital marketing kept asking me to do.
The Leap
The real change came around the time I planned my second child. I had friends dabbling in freelance work, and with a fair bit of their encouragement, I jumped: out of full-time employment and into freelance digital marketing consulting.
It was hard. Building a pipeline of business from scratch is not the romantic version of freelancing that anyone sells you. My last employer became my first client, which helped, and I topped up my income with flexible temp roles in digital marketing through employment agencies. For a good while, the days went like this: finish the temp work, come home and parent, then sit down to the freelance tasks waiting for me. Late nights. Weekends. Slowly, the client list grew. Slowly, I dropped the temp work. Eventually, I was turning jobs down rather than chasing them.
These days I have a full roster of clients and I take on more only when I want to. The work fits around my family and around my own writing, which, after the years it took to get here, still feels like a small miracle.
Digital Gaffa Tape
A client once described me as digital gaffa tape, and that is about the most accurate job title I’ve ever been given. Over sixteen years, I’ve worked across most of the disciplines: paid ads, organic search, email, organic social, conversion rate optimisation, analytics, planning, content, and SEO. When something needed holding together, I was usually the one holding it.
Content writing emerged out of all of that. SEO and content go hand in hand, and the more I learned about one, the more I needed to understand the other. My love of writing and my love of digital marketing pulled me naturally towards that corner of the industry, rather than design, development, or CRO. Some clients still use me as gaffa tape, across a whole spread of marketing functions. Others bring me in for one thing only: content writing, editing, and optimisation. I love both, and I learn from both.
The Proof
Here’s where I’d normally tell you to take my word for it. Instead, here’s the data.
That’s sixteen months of Google Search Console for a single client’s blog. Service pages stripped out, just the blog, and every post written by me. In that window, those posts were served in search 5.3 million times and pulled 35.7 thousand clicks. One client. Sixteen months.
I’ve been writing blogs for sixteen years now, across a full roster of clients, into the hundreds if not thousands of posts. There’s no tidy little pixel I can point to that totals it all up, but if one client’s blog clears five million impressions in sixteen months, my lifetime impression count runs comfortably into the tens of millions. You may well have read something of mine without ever knowing my name was anywhere near it. Perhaps a piece on the benefits of creatine for women, or what gutter cleaning actually costs, or why a particular glitch was plaguing your Facebook Ads account. Any of those could have been me.
And my clients tend to stay. My longest relationship goes back to 2015. They were my employer first, and when I went out on my own a few years later, they became my first client. They are still with me. My shortest engagement to date has run six months, and they’re a returning client. In a freelance market where churn is the default setting, retention like that is a data point of its own.
A Word on AI
I’d be telling this story dishonestly if I pretended AI hadn’t changed the job. It has, enormously, for the better. Where I once had clients who were hard to pin down for time or opinions, AI helps me fill the gaps, sharpen for SEO and for the way LLMs now read content, and handle the fiddly scaffolding like tables, heading structure, and schema. It has cut my time down dramatically while lifting the quality of what I produce, and it hasn’t come close to making me redundant. Hiding from AI would be the worst thing I could do for my career. Using it well is no longer optional. I’ve written more on exactly which tools earn their place, including the AI I actually recommend, in the software I use as a freelance content writer, and there’s a full post on the AI question coming.
For example, this very post was built with AI’s help, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Every piece of experience, information, and advice in it is mine. What I did was throw a whirlwind of half-formed thoughts at Claude and let it order the jumble, then help me lay it out. The drafting that would have eaten an evening even six months ago is now a fraction of the time. My book reviews work the same way: AI generates the summary tables at the top and bottom of each post, trimming the build time considerably. The thoughts, the opinions, the verdicts are all genuinely mine. They are just delivered faster.
Where That Leaves Me
So that’s how I became a content writer: not by design, but by following the work, the writing, and a fair amount of luck, until the thing I kept being asked to do became the thing I’m known for. It pays the bills, it fits around my kids, and it leaves room for the fiction and the book reviews that probably brought you here in the first place.
If you need words that earn their place, whether that’s content writing, editing, or optimisation, that’s the part of the job I’d happily be your gaffa tape for.
You can also visit my digital marketing website here
