In 2018, I came across a woman called Caitlin Pyle. Caitlins claim to fame is that she was making a full-time living with her freelance proofreading business. She was forced into proofreading when she was brutally fired from her corporate job.
Over the last few years, Caitlin has grown her freelance proofreading educational system to millions of dollars in revenue every year. She teaches people all the skills that are required to become a freelance proofreader.
Check out our Caitlin Pyle review for more information from a former student of hers!
I know a few people that do run freelance proofreading businesses. My friend Drew recently wrote a piece for my blog about his experience with general proofreading online. He explains how he finds work online by checking out websites like Upwork.com and Fiverr.com.
The majority of his business comes from networking in Facebook groups for writers and bloggers. Word of mouth tends to spread when he does a good job for someone and that leads to more work.
General proofreading is the art of finely polishing a document - sometimes it is a blog post, eBook, online course, legal transcript or other document that requires a high degree of precision. The pay for general proofreaders is not too bad - typical rates vary from $0.6 per page to $1 per page.
You can earn more as you gain more experience but unless you can read very quickly or happen to get some very lucrative jobs then you are unlikely to be able to make more than $3000 per month as a freelance proofreader.
This nothing to sneeze at and there are stories of people making $65 per hour for short periods of time. The fast you can read and correct a document, the higher your hourly rate works out to be.
Many people start a general proofreading business with the idea that they were 'always good at writing in school'. Unfortunately, there is a lot more to proofreading than that. It is pretty much required that you take a high quality proofreading course in order to learn all the rules and nuances involved with the different types of proofreading.
For example, if you are proofreading a legal document that a transcriber provides to you, you must correct the grammar but not alter the persons words! Since it is a legal document it is imperative that the document is not changed to alter the persons meaning in the words. It gets quite complicated!
My friend Stephanie has done a lot of proofreading in the legal field and she says that it is hard to justify the low rate of pay. She is very thankful that she learned and practised in this field for many years as it saved her from financial ruin.
Through proofreading online she was exposed to the world of online entrepreneurship that has changed her life. She told me that while starting out as a proofreader is a good idea - she has graduated to blogging and freelance writing.
If you like spotting grammatical errors or spelling mistakes then you might want to consider becoming a part-time freelance proofreader. You can make a few hundred dollars extra per month doing it from home. If you want to check out some other side hustles, be sure to check out UnconventionalProsperity.com.
