How one social media post launched my writing career
By: Arianna Rees
Tags: Freelancing, Entrepreneurship, Writing, Blogging, Social Media

How one social media post launched my writing career

And what I’ve learned about writing online since

I was an angsty college freshman when I first started blogging, and my blog was exactly what you might expect from an angsty college freshman: posts about cute boys, posts about dumb boys, and random musings about college life in between. I made observations about on-campus fashion, described my professors with little cartoons I made in MS Paint, and ranted about reply guys before we had a name to call them by. I blogged consistently — at least once or twice a week — and shared my posts on Facebook with my friends and family. As far as I knew, I could be writing for an audience of none. I wrote on regardless.

All of that changed three years later when I did something I hadn’t really done before: I wrote about something that really mattered. It was something that kept me up at night, something that made me frustrated, and something that concerned the well-being of other people in my community (specifically, the treatment of individuals in my faith community who do not serve missions). It was a type of niche, cultural injustice that I didn’t like, and spurred by a wave of irritation, I whipped out a post about it overnight.

I threw the link onto Facebook and snarkily wrote something like “summer isn’t here yet, but get ready for some heat.” I didn’t think a whole lot about it, but as I slept, it spread. I only realized how far it had gotten when a friend stopped me at an event the next day to congratulate me on having my blog post published in the largest religious web magazine in my community and I had no idea it had been.

Within a week, my blog had over 600 comments and had been viewed over 120,000 times. I knew I’d “made it” (in a very small way) when I started getting hate mail that made me cry. Suddenly, I wasn’t blogging about the mundane details of my life to the friends who cared enough to read it. I was writing for an audience, friends and enemies, fans and critics, and it was just the beginning.

Doors kept opening

Within a few months of my blog going viral, I was hired as an intern by the same magazine that initially shared it. During my internship, I learned the ins and outs of web publishing, like how to write a compelling headline, structure articles in forms like lists that people can consume more easily, and choose images that people want to click on.

After my internship ended, a friend who had seen the work I was doing reached out and asked if I wanted to help him start a web magazine producing similar content. I agreed. For about three years on and off, my friends and I built a brand and produced thoughtful, funny, and informative faith pieces that we primarily shared on social media. Because I was familiar with the relevant topics and less talked about “taboos” of my religious culture, I wrote about them. I used the skills I’d learned from my internship. I got passionate. I got vulnerable. I wrote things I loved and things I wish I hadn’t written. People read them regardless.

Our website had over half a million organic views in the first three years of operation. The magazine I had interned for picked up several of our stories. Then the oldest newspaper in my state, Deseret News, republished a piece of mine and things went wild. People who were covering faith events reached out to us and invited us to cover them. My church reached out and asked us to publish stories on various faith campaigns. In every job interview I’ve had since my friends and I started our website, the interviewers have brought up the site and asked about it. It was a passion project that opened up more doors than I ever expected it would.

Social media became more lucrative

Because my articles were getting attention, I got a decent-sized following on social media that was supportive of my work, and in 2017, I got back into Twitter. I got really into Twitter.

Whenever faith-related events happened in my community, I was there tweeting about them and using the hashtags. I did what I had done with my blog — I got vulnerable about things that mattered to me, things that bothered me, or things that made me happy. I tweeted (and still tweet) some dumb things, but I also tried tweeting about things that were relevant and interesting to my community. Doing that slowly helped me to build up a good network of people on Twitter who are supportive and also super helpful in connecting me to more opportunities.

I started writing full-time.

This past spring, I interned on Deseret News’ trending web content team, another opportunity I got because they’d published my work previously, but also because I was so active on Twitter and they’d noticed my content. Working there gave me a great opportunity to learn more about journalistic writing, write alongside professionals who taught me a lot, and build up my portfolio.

Now I’ve transitioned into freelance writing full-time. It’s been good and exciting and bad and hard, but I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do: I’m writing. The networking I’ve been able to do through my internships, blogging, social media, and even job interviews has gotten me great clients that I’m excited to work with.

What I’ve learned along the way

My journey from blogging for fun to writing for other people as a job has taken many twists and turns. I never expected to take two internships after college, for example. I always thought that I’d be ushered into a really cool copywriting position right after graduation and that my degree would just speak for me, but that wasn’t the case. Every opportunity I’ve gotten post-college has come from writing consistently, writing for fun, and writing vulnerably about things that matter.

I’ve learned that doors open when I’m telling stories that other people aren’t and when I’m using my own voice, not someone else’s. Doors open when I’m consistently putting my work out there for others to read, whether it be on a blog or on social media, whether it be stuff I’m writing for work or for fun. Doors open when I care less about going viral — which is frickin’ scary, by the way, even on a macro scale — and more about having fun or speaking up about something that matters, even when my efforts are messy, as they often are.

I still have lots to learn and I don’t think that ever ends for a writer. It certainly never ends for people. Had I not taken advantage of the learning opportunities offered through my internships, I would not be doing what I’m doing now. But had I not been willing to put my work out there in the first place — as scary and overwhelming as that is — I would never have gotten those opportunities. I too often forget that.