Hey friend,

How’s it going? 🌻

I am excited to introduce you to my next subject matter expert guest: Brinda Gulati, Freelance Writer and Editor for Brands like Wordtune, Userpilot, Dock, and more. Follow her on LinkedIn.

I have been following Brinda on LinkedIn for a long time, and she is one of the rare creators who shares thoughtful posts to educate freelance writers and help them create better content. I particularly love the memes she shares. I mean, look at this post: Brinda's meme.

Brinda has shared some great insights through the interview, and I can't wait to share them with you all. But before that, let's hear her story in her words:

Let's now get to the questions!

Question:  Many freelance writers wonder how to land high-paying clients. You have written for brands like Wordtune, so my question is, how do you land better freelance opportunities? Be it a portfolio, writing skills, creating an offer, or whatever you can share that would be helpful.

Answer: Very frankly, Wordtune was a fluke landing for me. It's one of my wildest customer acquisition stories, but I think the more streamlined answer to your question would be that building a personal brand is non-negotiable. I'm looking at a lot of opportunities that are being posted first on Slack and in internal community and company settings before they're rolled out onto LinkedIn. So, I would say I started building my brand in sometime June last year, which was still late. I should have taken the plunge sooner.

I know it sounds very cliche and trite, "find your voice, build a LinkedIn personal brand, B2B sales, blah, blah". But you have to reframe posting on LinkedIn for yourself. If you look at it as an investment in your business and play the long game instead of just posting, I can take on more clients, "I can do this," or "I can do that". Yes, that's all good.

But what can you offer those clients? What do you do? Why should people care? All of this becomes part of building your personal brand. The other thing I would recommend is joining communities because freelancing gets very lonely, especially if you're working remotely and for long hours. Even if it's by yourself on your terms, it becomes very isolated and insular. So the good thing I did was join. I joined Superpath last year.

And from there, I sort of just got a feel of what the conversation is, what the pulse of the industry is. Superpath is great for that. And eventually building connections organically, not DMing everyone, "I'm free, hire me". That's not networking. That's, again, very aggressive sales, which don't do much.

So I would say joining communities is very important because you get to see the people who are very active on LinkedIn talk about some behind-the-scenes stuff. And for the first couple of months, you can just be an observer. You don't have to be an aggressive poster. That's how I approached it because I would be a fool to go in and go against all of these marketing leaders and be like, "OK, I can help you do this. I can help you do that. Listen to me". In the first couple of months, observation is very important.

After that, when you feel confident in your work, you want to share something, you want to chime in on the water cooler channel, then I think you should sort of completely go with it. That, combined with your LinkedIn presence, helps you stay top of mind. What I figured out is that people are busy.

And when they're thinking of referring someone or thinking of someone for the job, they'll probably make a mental list of whom they've last seen or interacted with. LinkedIn and being active on Slack kind of give you that double whammy. So you stay top of mind in a sense. And you're there, but you're not always selling yourself. You're also building something unique to you.

Sorry, building the brand and everything gives me the personal ick because it's been overused so much. But what I mean to say is that you sort of make LinkedIn your own. I was very hesitant to start posting. I think that's why it took me a bit of time because I didn't want to use that same B2B sales language, which is very tight-collared, not relaxed, not how humans talk to one another off-screen.

So then, I figured that there are no real rules to posting on LinkedIn. It's just rules that you set for yourself by observing other people. So I changed the people that I was following. I followed more content marketers, and it turns out they love memes.

They're very receptive to like shit posting on LinkedIn. And they can see through the fluff. They can see through your attempts to try to sound smart. So it forces you to be yourself because there's no other way, really.

Question:  How seriously do you take LinkedIn for your freelance business? Is it like a lead generation channel for you, or is it not that important? Where does it stand in your freelance business setup from a lead generation perspective?

Answer: I would say 70 % LinkedIn and 30 % referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. That's lead generation for me. I don't think of LinkedIn as active lead generation because that puts a lot of filters on me when posting certain things in a particular manner. So, I think of it more as networking.

I've made friends through LinkedIn, which I never expected. I'm on this call with you; it all happened through that platform. So, I try to weigh the pros and cons and look at the community side instead of just looking at the platform as a business engine. That being said, most of my leads in the past six months, since I've been very active on LinkedIn, have come through the platform itself. So there is definite value there, so much so that I don't use email anymore.

So it's primarily inbound leads and applying to freelance gigs when there are open calls if I have the space on my roster. Otherwise, it's word-of-mouth marketing.

Question: What are your thoughts on AI or AI replacing writers? That is one. And second, do you use AI in your workflow?

Answer: I think we keep discussing AI replacing writers, and it's not very current, either. It happened centuries ago when technology first came in. It happened during the industrial revolution, and it's always the case that technology replaces humans. To a certain extent, that may be true, but frankly, the more ubiquitous it becomes, the more people want to return to the source.

So now, if you're looking at a lot of companies, they are pivoting. They're like, "OK, we don't want AI content. We want human content." Even if we have AI content, we want it to go through a human editor. So this is very cyclical. It comes, and it goes. And it's with different technology at different points in time throughout history. Something comes in and changes everything for a certain period. Everyone panics. And then everyone is like, actually, you know what? We prefer connection. So human to human, because if I were, let's say, reading a novel by AI, I wouldn't buy it.

Secondly, I would be able to tell you more. And that puts me off because it gives you this uncanny feeling. I'm not saying that AI doesn't replace writers because it clearly has, but I feel like the companies who go that route are short-sighted.

Clearly, you can't offer value at such warp speed just for the sake of numbers. Again, it's a different sort of chase towards metrics that you want to achieve. You're still focused on numbers. You're not focused on the content. And that is always, always short-sighted.

This brings me to my next answer to your question, which is where I am with AI in my workflow. I'm very vocal about using AI in my workflow. I don't outsource my research or writing habits to AI, but I tend to take the data entry and the manual tasks out of it a little bit.

However, the research was still based on first-party data that I had collected by myself. The idea was mine. The implementation was also mine. AI just did the tail end of the execution where I was just like, put this into a table. That's it. That's how I mostly use AI in my workflow. It's to automate the repetitive data entry tasks that take up hours and hours. But I don't outsource my thinking to AI when it comes to research, writing, and giving real-life examples or analogies.

Question: Would you like to tell me a bit about which kind of AI tools you use that you have found useful?

Answer: The one I use quite frequently is Wordtune. That's how I landed the client because I was using the product so much that they actually contacted me for a customer interview. And I said, "OK, sure, I'll do a customer interview if you give me three free months of Wordtune, because I'm paying for the software anyway". Then, I got a call from the head of content. And he said, "Actually, your job sounds pretty interesting, so why don't you start writing blogs for us?"

And that's how I landed work. It was a genuine love for the product. So, that one I can vouch for. I tried switching between Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek. I'm just seeing where everything is. So even with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, I'm just trying to see what they're good for. For example, Claude is good at catching the tone of specific prose. ChatGPT-4 is better at reasoning now. So sometimes I feed in a blog I've written, and it will give me raw, brutal, honest feedback and then point out logical fallacies. Are there too many keywords stuffed together? So, stuff like that. So it gives you like a sparring partner.

Again, it can't replace actual humans, but it does some of the work that you wish you had some sounding board.

Question: Would you like to take my readers through your research, like briefing, writing, and then self-editing process?

Answer: Yes. The important thing now is that I don't start with AI because as soon as you let AI fill your page, you've sort of taken the magic out of all of those pre-edited first draft crappy attempts that you'd do otherwise. What I do is I start a different note on my phone for every blog I'm writing. And there, I note down simple thoughts, like the first things that come to mind.

The final touches, of course, are SEO and internal linking; all come afterward. All the polishes come afterward when you have something to polish. So that's a very high-level overview of my writing process. It's very reductive, but I hope there's some value in that.

Question: What are the differences you see between an Indian brand and an international brand? What are the differences you have noticed that have helped you become a better writer and freelancer? It could be in terms of communication, editing standards, clarity, or anything you would like to mention.

Answer: I think a lot of that is context-dependent. It depends on the company and the company culture. It also depends on the individual who's doing the editing or who is managing freelancers, but they're also constrained by management. Overall, I feel like Indian clients are very reticent to splurge, or they do not even splurge, so invest appropriately in content marketing.

I've had a lot of sour experiences with a few content managers coming and telling me that you're very overpriced because Indian freelancers charge up to six rupees a word. And I understand that that's the market. I have to tell them that geography does not dictate my rates. So I feel like there's a gap here.

Where they would instead invest in product design engineering, fair game, content marketing gets the boot. This is something else I noticed in one of my in-house roles as well. The engineers and the product developers, the UX designers, they were all held to a higher, not standard, but they were on a higher pedestal. Writing, research, and editing seem like afterthoughts for all the Indian clients I've been in talks with. And when you have to prove that what you're doing is worth the money, it takes the fun out of the work.

Question: Any tips you want to share with my readers regarding upskilling?

Answer: I would say the first thing is to hone your writing skills because you can do all the research in the world, you can write for whomever you want, but if your writing isn't solid.

It won't get you far, and AI can't close that gap for you because it will crack somewhere. You don't have to invest in expensive courses immediately because I didn't have the means even when I started. So many free resources are available where I learned to focus on writing and better thinking.

And that automatically transfers to a lot of the work you do in B2B SaaS or any other field, to be honest. Because if you're a good communicator, you can get those ideas across. You can simplify complex subjects. There's an excellent newsletter. If I'm not wrong, it's a website called The Marginalian by Maria Popova. It talks about science, philosophy, religion, and everything else, as well as beautiful writing. And what I recommend is doing some thinking model exercises, like there's an exercise called the Ben Franklin exercise. So you reverse engineer the prose. If you like a piece of writing, you read it once, try to replicate it without looking at it. You do it enough times, and it gets ingrained in you somewhere. That's one thinking model.

The other is that following people on LinkedIn who give good advice is helpful because you want to learn from the best of the best. Lizzie Davey is great. Rosanna Campbell, Ben Goodey, Brooklin Nash, and Tyler Hakes. All of these people are very kind. They're always ready to help. And their content is valuable. Tanaz Khan as well. These are people who I look forward to seeing on my LinkedIn feed. And there's not very many people that I can name.

So, if you can't invest in courses, it's fine because you can't become a better writer overnight or magically with one course for $500. You don't have to make expensive investments. The focus should be first on honing what you already have. So, writing and thinking about writing.

And that can be done through a variety of means. The Marginalian newsletter that I just said. There are a few. I read a lot of journalistic pieces because they combine storytelling and research-driven data into one tiny piece. So you get to learn concision, you get to learn clarity, and you also get to learn how to get to the point quicker while making sure everything is there.

So, for example, The Cut is perfect for reading essays. All of these resources are mostly free. There are no shortcuts to better writing except reading and writing more. That's the best advice because I didn't invest in expensive courses.

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Onwards and upwards,

Sreyashi
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