What hobbies do you have/areas of real knowledge?
If your English is almost native and your copywriting is above average, compile a list of a lot of sites that relate to topics that you have an intimate knowledge of. They should be businesses, not blogs. Businesses have money to spend, blogs expect new writers to work for free and get hit up by multiple writers each week.
Then get their email addresses (manually, hire a data entry helper, using Hunter) and mass outreach to them (Gmass or similar, don't forget to set your DNS up properly), taking extra care to make the initial email engaging and professional, offering your services as a copywriter with first hand knowledge of their field/business niche, and charging $0.05 per word.
Of the hundreds you reach out to, some will give you positive responses, but if anyone asks for previous work or outright says no then just ignore those, or optionally do something more efficient with them.
All you need is one or two clients to start out with and you'll have a good source of income each week + every week you're building a portfolio.
After a few months, rehash the list and go for clientele that have more money to spend - bigger brands in the space that you're now an expert in, or maybe other niches where more money is available - keep going for more, don't settle for what you're already making.
Up your price with every round of outreaching you do, and stop taking smaller clients once you start securing larger permanent fixtures. Treat them like royalty, never be late, agree to anything they ask you to do, be distinctly polite and friendly in emails but still professional.
There are a lot of clients out there that will pay substantially more if you directly outreach to them than if you find them on Upwork etc amongst all that competition.
With one good client, and for minimal work each week, you'll be making 5 times more from copywriting for 20 hours each week than you would working 60 hours in a 9-5 job.
