Trying something a little different this week. I’m doing a Q&A show with questions you submitted through a recent survey.
I’d love to get your feedback on this format. If you like it, I’ll do more of these in the future.
Also, if this is your first time listening to the show, please know that the sound quality is NOT usually this bad. I had a mic problem this week that eventually resolved itself. But not after I spent a lot of time trying to fix it. So I had to resort to my Mac’s built-in mic. (Ugh!)
The show notes format is also a little different this week. Rather than a summary of my answers, I’ve included a full, word-for-word transcript of the episode.
Anyway, enjoy!
You can listen to the show using the audio player below. Or you can subscribe in iTunes or on Stitcher to get this show delivered straight to the Podcasts app on your smart phone, tablet or iPod.
Daniella: “What is the best way to balance the startup business with working full time, especially if the copywriting clients are the people you interact with for work? My writing prospects are the suppliers whose equipment I specify as part of my job as an engineer. How do I have conversations with them without overstepping my bounds and upsetting my boss? Should I tell my boss about my business?”
This is a great question, and I’m glad you asked, Daniella. It’s hard for me to give you a blanket answer. Let’s start with the last question, should I tell my boss about my business? It depends on your relationship with your boss. It depends on how you think your company, your employer feels about you doing something on the side.
I can tell you from my own experience, my own situation, I didn’t go out of my way to tell my employer what I was doing, until I would say it was about a year and a half into it, and it came at a point where I was generating enough part time income from my side freelance business that I felt comfortable talking about it.
I should, also, tell you that I had a great relationship with my boss. It’s someone I respected very, very much. In fact, we still stay in touch. He’s one of my favorite people in the world. He’s an incredible guy. I consider him a mentor, and just a top rate guy.
Even with that kind of relationship, I wanted to be very cautious for a couple of reasons. Number one, in my line of work, I was in software sales, I was judged quarterly, actually even monthly, and if my performance suffered, I didn’t want it to be seen as something that was suffering because of my side business, so I waited, number one, until I had enough steady business that I could talk comfortably about it, and let me boss see that this is serious. This is not a hobby. This is not some kind of fluke, and I think I was earning about two thousand a month from the side business. He was really impressed by that. Number one.
Number two, I was doing really well. My sales were growing. I was exceeding my quotas. I was in a good place. I came from a position of strength, where I could tell him and I could show him, this is not impacting my work. My work here in this company is number one. This will always come first. This is something I’m doing in my spare time. It was a time that I’m making available weekends, evenings, early mornings before I start work. That was the first thing.
In terms of who you could approach, I would hesitate to approach suppliers with whom you have influence, and specifically in the nature of the influence you specify. You actually specify their equipment as part of your job as an engineer. I think it could be seen as a conflict of interest if you approached them with potentially doing some work for them, paid work for them. I would not go that route at first. I would encourage you to tap your network, first of all.
Tap relationships that are non-competing, non-related, directly related to your work. I know that may not be the best area, because this might not be where you have domain expertise. It may not be where you have the strongest relationship, but I would start there, and then in terms of your work relationships, I would start where it wouldn’t impact your work or it wouldn’t create a conflict of interest.
The way you’ve described it to me here, it just feels like it could get weird, and it could put your suppliers in a very difficult spot, because they want to help you out. At the same time, they don’t want to look like they were influenced by that, so you have to be really careful.
I was in a very similar situation myself. I had a lot of relationships that were tied directly to my employer, but, again, because I waited a while before I told my boss, I didn’t want to tap those, so I had to go to other places, other areas of my network, and I had to do a lot of cold prospecting. It’s a little bit harder, but it does have some advantages. You’re not necessarily known there, so I think you have a little bit more leeway in terms of the number of people you contact, so you can make up the quality of the conversion, converting leads to clients. You can make that up in volume. You can do direct mail campaigns. You could do email efforts. I think there’s some advantages there.
The other thing is when you go out of state or out of town, you don’t get into the situation where you’re expected to come in and meet with a prospect. That was another thing that I wanted. I wanted to prospect heavily out of state, because I wanted to avoid a lot of in person meetings, because, again, I had a full time day job, so I couldn’t afford to spend that kind of time during the day, during work hours.
Linda: “From your book and your Warm Email Prospecting course, what is the best first step for marketing your new writing business?”
The first step, frankly, is just to get started. Start telling people what you do, and even one step before that, I would give some thought to how you’re going to position yourself.
You’ve probably me heard me talk about this before, but it bears repeating. You need to clearly define whom you can best serve. In other words, your target market. This is the group that I can best serve. It does not necessarily need to be an industry. It can be described many different ways. It could be described by a need they might have, or a common attribute, anything like that. This is who I can best serve, and this is what makes me different to that audience when it comes to the services that I provide.
It should also include what kind of work you do, and I would just describe that simply. In terms of the difference, what makes you different, make sure you explain why that matters.
So, give some thought to your positioning. But don’t over think it. You have to start somewhere. It’s better to start, and to just start having those conversations.
The next thing I would recommend is to tap your network. I mentioned that in response to Daniella’s question before. Tap your network. People always cringe when I tell them that. They say, “I don’t really know a lot of people. I don’t feel comfortable tapping my network.”
I’ll give you a little hint. When it comes to the people you know personally and professionally, don’t ask them for work, even if you think they could hire you directly. Instead, ask them for a referral. “Hey, Cindy, who do you know who meets this description,” and just explain it in plain terms. “This is what I do. This is why I’m a little different. This is whom I can best serve. Do you happen to know someone in your network who fits this criteria?”
I will tell you right off the bat, most people, when you tap your network, aren’t going to be able to help you. They want to help you. They’re happy for you, but they’re not going to be able to help you. Do not get discouraged. What you’re looking for is that one golden nugget in your network, who gets it, or gets it well enough that they can refer you to someone who might be able to hire you directly, or might have a conversation with you, and then they might refer you to somebody else.
My biggest client ever, and my longest running client, came from a conversation that I had with a friend of my wife. I didn’t know her that well, so I knew her through my wife. My wife hadn’t even talked to her for two or three years, so I reached out to her. She couldn’t help me directly, but she referred me to a good friend of hers, who referred me to a good friends of hers. I don’t even remember how many degrees she now was, but that was a lot.
To put it into perspective, that client was with me for seven years. They started with me in 2005. I was with them for seven years, and they helped me generate almost two hundred thousand dollars in income as a freelancer over that seven year period. It came from a friend of a friend of a friend. That’s just insane.
Ask for referrals, and that’s a really good way to bypass the whole weirdness factor when reaching out to people you know.
Julia: “I’d love some help in converting followers or fans that I have conversations with on Twitter into paying customers. I do a lot of Twitter marketing, and I find that I have trouble doing this. You may want to talk about how to convert from social media generally, though I’m looking for tips on converting from Twitter, if that makes a difference.”
The biggest suggestion I can give you, Julia, is to create some sort of “lead magnet.” You’ve got to get people to your website, and to raise their hand and request something from you. You got to figure out what kind of information would my ideal audience be interested in enough to download, that they would be willing to give me their email address and their first name.
The biggest hint I will give you is DON’T make it about how to write X. What you do when you put out information out there about here’s how to write a case study, or a white paper, or whatever, is most of the time, the people who are going to request that are going to be colleagues. It’s going to be other writers and copywriters. Instead, think about how you can make their jobs easier.
A good way to start is just by asking your current clients, “When it comes to the kind of work I do, what do you wonder about? How can I help you? What questions do you have?” Ask them open-ended questions, and see if you can find some common topics or questions.
Then maybe do some brainstorming, and come back to them and say, “If I created, hypothetically, a quick tip sheet on this topic, do you think that’s something you or your colleagues would be interested in? Would you download this?” Just ask it. That’s one thing.
The second thing is make sure that it’s not something crazy long, or crazy dense. It’s counter intuitive, but what I’m finding is clients, prospects, they want something that can be consumed immediately. They’re not necessarily looking for new information.
Number one, if they’re going to download something, they’re just curious about what you have to say. That’s the first thing. They’re not there to learn, at least in this market. Business to business, you’re selling professional service. They’re not there to learn necessarily new information, as much as they’re just curious about what’s your take on things. They’re going to skim whatever you send them, so there’s no point in trying to put together a twenty page report. I would be focusing on checklists, process maps, tip sheets, that sort of thing, something that can be consumed immediately, and would be helpful and practical or insightful to a client of yours.
Do that. Get people into your world, by offering something, and social media is a great place, obviously, to spread the word for that.
Sandra: “On your podcast with Bob Bly, you briefly talked about doubling your effort when it comes to marketing. How do you quantify that? Do you do two X more of what’s worked in the past only? Do you integrate new tactics into the mix? What constitutes a double effort when you’re still trying to stabilize your monthly income?”
It’s a great question, because I’ve talked about this a lot before, but I never really gave specifics on it, so I’m glad Sandra called me on this. And the answer is there is no answer.
When Bob talked about this in a CD course that I bought from him, gosh, back in 2003, and really the story that I’ve shared with you guys before is the biggest takeaway from this whole … And he had so much content there and it was all great. The biggest takeaway that impacted my career was figure out what you need to do to meet your goal, and then double that. The biggest takeaway for me was that we always underestimate what we can accomplish in a short amount of time.
We’ve all heard that saying, right? We underestimate what we can do in a short period of time, or we overestimate rather what we can do in a short period of time, but underestimate what we can do in a long period.
I found that he was right. Up until that point, I was doing what I thought was a decent amount of work, but I wasn’t getting the results that I was expecting. I found that was the key, is what feels comfortable, what feels right to me. I wasn’t consciously thinking about that. That’s not how I was arriving at my formula for effort, but when I was honest with myself, I realized it’s based on what I think I can do and what I can fit into my schedule, and what I could fit into my schedule, what felt comfortable enough, what felt like good enough, I realized wasn’t, so I started doubling or that was at least the intention, doubling the effort, doubling the focus.
Could I measure that? No. I really couldn’t. I would say most of the time I couldn’t. It just meant that whatever answer I came up with, I would double it.
What started happening, I do know this, is there came a time where I got used to this new level of effort, and at that point, it became very, very difficult to double that, because that became my new norm. When that happens, you’ll know. You will. You’ll have the work. You’ll be busy. You just aren’t going to need to double that effort yet again. You want to maintain that effort as best as you can.
The answer is I couldn’t measure it. There’s just no way it could. It was just more of a philosophical wake up call. It was a mindset thing, to make me realize and shine a light on the fact that I’m doing what’s leftover. Whatever time I have left, that’s what I’m going to dedicate to prospecting, for instance, and I realized I can’t do it that way. That has to come first. That’s the one thing that I have to really hit hard on, and then fit other activities of my business into the mix, but that has to come first, and it has to be more than feels comfortable to me.
Carla: “I want to write articles for trade or professional journals. I want to focus on the ones that, A, my potential writing clients read, and I have a target market to find, and, B, that pay for a byline article. I’m aware of the process of submitting a letter of introduction, but I’m not sure how to find these journals. I’m, also, aware that these journals do not pay a lot, but the work can be steady.”
A couple of ideas there. First, you’ve got to define what you want out of this effort. The feeling I got when I read your question, and I’m just going to guess here, but it sounds like you’re trying to get business. You’re trying to get exposure that’s going to drive traffic to your website, potential clients who will hopefully eventually hire you. If that is your biggest objective for this effort, and I suspect it is, I would forget about B. I would forget about looking for publications that will pay for your byline article.
Here’s the thing. If you’re doing this as a thought leadership exercise, if you’re doing this to get your name out there and get exposure and drive traffic to your website, and position yourself as an expert in your industry or in your field, then you can’t go after paid placings. You have to do it for free, and the value you get is in the exposure. I think there’s a mixture, at least that’s what I’m reading into your question. You have dual objectives that are somewhat incompatible.
My focus would be let me figure out, in terms of my writing clients, what publications do they read. You just make sure that the people who would hire you would read those. Let me give you an example. If it’s a technical magazine, you want to make sure that it’s not just the technical people reading it, but, in your case, the marketing directors, and managers, and the marketing organization. The people in the marketing organization are, also, reading that publication. Just make sure of that.
Secondly, the best way I’ve found to research publications and to find names of some that I’ve never even heard of is Google. I type in the industry name, for instance, and then the word magazine. Start there. It’s just amazing how many trade journals are out there. I found that using the word journal doesn’t work as well as magazine. For instance, green tech or green energy, sustainable energy, any of those words, magazine. Do that, and you’ll start coming up with ideas. This is a tedious process, but this is how you find these publications.
Once you’re there, go through their site, and you want to look at the page that talks about whether or not they take guest articles, and, if so, what the criteria and submission process is all about, and then you want to follow that, and make sure you contact the editor the way they want to be contacted.
I haven’t done a ton of that, I’ll be honest with you, but I know several colleagues who have done this very, very well, and that’s the advice they give. One of the things I’ve told me is, “Come to them with a couple of ideas. Be a resource for them.”
Your goal, at that point, is just to land something. You want to land one article. Once you do land that, do amazing work, and then you’re in the door, and then you have a place where you can come back to and pitch some other ideas. You’re goal is not necessarily to get a whole string of them. Your goal is to get in the door.
But, again, going back to my original suggestion, try to focus on just doing these pieces as a credibility builder, as a way to get your name out there. You get the exposure, and you get that traffic to your website with traffic from people who could potentially hire you.
Isabel: “What reactions from prospects should send alarm bells ringing in our head?”
I think a lot of the reactions, comments or questions from a prospect depend on what kind of work you do. However, I would say that there’s a couple for me. One of them is if they’re sending in an email inquiry, and they’re telling me or strongly suggesting that they’re going around and just pricing this out, that they’re reaching out to a bunch of other people to get pricing.
That is a huge red flag for me, because if that’s the way they’re approaching it, they’re just treating me as another body or as column fodder. They’re trying to fill columns in a spreadsheet, and make this more of a pricing game. I’m just not going to be even close, because I can’t compete on price alone. That’s the first thing.
Another thing for me is something they say that it’s very obvious that they don’t understand the value of marketing content or copywriting, or basically (fill in the blank), the work you do. There are many business models and industries where it makes perfect sense for you to educate your prospect from scratch, and just educate them until they’re actually ready to buy from you. Until they understand the value.
But when you’re a solo professional, and especially a creative professional, we just don’t have the time or the resources to educate people to get to that level. Prospects have to come pre-sold on the idea of hiring an outside writer or copywriter, and the value that will provide their company. They just do. I’m not saying that their idea of what they are willing to pay has to be high, but they have to understand that this is a skill that costs money. This is a professional service, and if you’re looking for a professional who can do a great job, it’s going to cost more than just a couple of hundred bucks, or worse yet, more than five or ten dollars.
Michael: “Do you see a trend for writing budgets getting lower, and clients trying to squeeze writers to accept lower fees?”
Yes, I do. I really do, but let me qualify that statement.
I certainly see that kind of pricing pressure in what I call the bargain basement segment of the market. I think it’s a big mistake to look at the writing or copywriting market, the commercial writing market as one big bucket. I think there is actually several buckets, and, just like buckets do, they’re constrained, there are walls or borders around each of these buckets. It doesn’t mean that prospects can hop from one to another. It just means that you got to be mindful about which bucket or segment of the market you’re playing in or competing in.
If bargain basement … I think the name says it all, right? This is the cheap stuff. This is the ten, twenty dollar articles, all the way to websites for a couple hundred bucks. It can be even higher than that, but we’re talking maybe ten, twenty percent of the fee that a professional would charge in the higher paying markets. Even five, five to twenty percent of not less, five to twenty percent of professional level rates.
That will continue to get commoditized. There is no doubt about it. There’s an incredible thirst for content. I don’t need to explain that to you guys. It’s just the way it is. The only way to quench that thirst is by more and more writers and, in many cases, technology, really, artificial intelligence and there’s technology already out there that can produce pretty darn good decent content. That’s where things are. There is pricing pressure, but if you guys listen to this podcast, I hope you’re more ambitious than that. I hope that you’re not willing to stick in this market. This might be an okay place to start. Sometimes you got to dip your toe here in order to get started. Or you’ve got to do what you got to do to keep the lights on.
But you have to move away from this market, period. This is no way to run and grow a business. You will burn out very, very quickly. I don’t care if you do this full time. I don’t care if you do this for five hours a week. It has nothing to do with what you want to earn on an annual basis, and it has everything to do with how you value your time, your expertise, your insights, your perspective, how you value yourself. Even if you only work this business a couple hours a week, it’s about making those two hours really, really count. It’s about maximizing the value you extract out of that time and energy. The bargain basement market is definitely getting squeezed.
The next level is what I call the … I have several names for it, but this is where it’s going to be the “vendor” marketplace, where a prospect will shop around a little bit. They might contact three different writers, for instance. There’s definitely pricing pressure there. It’s not as high, and where you want to be is in the next level up, is in the trusted advisor segment. Don’t let the name confuse you. I’m not talking about being a consultant necessarily, but the reason I like to call it the trusted advisor segment of the market, is that this is where you’re seen as much more than a writer. You’re not just typing words on a blank page. You are providing much more than that. You’re providing insights. You’re providing ideas. You get it. You can almost get inside of your prospects or your clients’ head, and understand what they’re trying to do. You’re much more strategic than someone who is just writing whatever they’re told.
The more nuanced and targeted you can be, the less pricing pressure there will be, period. It’s just across the board. I see it every day. The writers who are doing well are the ones who have clearly defined whom they can best serve, and what makes them different to that market. I’ll tell you more.
Also, those writers tend to be really good about communicating this simple fact: Their real value is not so much in their writing. Their real value is in all the other intangibles they bring to the table, the ideas. I mentioned this a few seconds ago, the ideas, the perspective, the knowledge, the ability to solve problems, and to help the client out beyond just the words, and the ability to come into the project with a lot of background information and knowledge and perspective. If you already know a lot about working in professional services organizations, either because you’ve worked with a lot of them, or because that’s where you came from, that’s worth a heck of a lot more than I’m a Pulitzer Prize winning author.
To the client who is really trying to get something done, and trying to make an impact in the professional services space, and they need great marketing content for that audience, the fact that you know that audience really, really well, that’s a lot more important than your writing chops. Yes, you’re expected to be a good writer, but there’s a level of writing ability that once you meet or surpass that, you get diminishing returns in terms of your ability to leverage the improved performance, or the improved skills, or the awards that you’ve received.
Yes, there’s definitely pricing pressure, but don’t look at the market as a whole. Look at it as a series of buckets. You want to make sure you are competing in the right bucket.
Jane: “Do you have ideas on combining business writing or copywriting with other career or business options? I’m working on a nonprofit project right now, and my writing skills have come in handy, but I’m not sure I want to write full time. I’d be curious to hear how you or others have perhaps leveraged your writing skills to create a more unique work portfolio.”
Yeah, it’s a great question. In fact, there are a lot of people in my audience don’t want to write all the time. They want more variety in their work. The first thing that comes to mind is you need to incorporate some sort of consulting into your services. If you can add any level of consulting, whether it’s marketing campaign consulting, messaging, positioning type consulting, SEO.
My colleague, Dianna Huff, for instance, no longer positions herself as a copywriter. She positions herself as a consultant. Her website is not in front of me, so I hope Dianna, if she’s listening, forgives me for this, but she positions herself as a marketing professional who works with family-owned manufacturing companies, small to mid size manufacturing companies. She knows that world extremely well. This is going back to Mike’s earlier question. She knows that business extremely well. She’s worked with a lot of family-owned manufacturers. She can add a tremendous amount of value there, because of her experiences in working with those types of businesses.
It’s that consulting piece. It’s the advice. It’s the insights you can provide. You can really build a very nice business that requires maybe thirty percent writing, and the other seventy percent is in the advising side of things. You can put together campaigns for them, lead generation campaigns, lead nurturing campaigns. Some of that is actual writing, but the other is a strategy. You’re providing strategy.
Also, my advice is, when it comes to strategy … let’s talk about that, because there are a lot of people who I know, “Hey, I really want to focus on the strategy.” I think that’s great. My experience has been that it’s easier to get in the door in many cases with the tactical stuff. Specifically it’s easier to get in the door with the writing work. Once you’re in, it’s much easier to then look for other opportunities to provide strategic value, and offer strategic services to that client.
It’s very hard to get in the door with a strategy, and this is not just in my case. I’ve tried it. I’ve worked with several coaching clients. I have colleagues who have tried the same thing. It’s very, very difficult to get in the door that way. It’s a different model. I’m not saying it cannot be done, but the easiest way, the lowest risk way, is to get in the door with the writing, and then look for other opportunities to provide strategy and consulting.
What happens is once you build that street credibility, that following and that track record as a consultant and a strategist, then it becomes a little easier to get in the door with those things, but in terms of progression, that’s the way I would approach it. Start with tactical. Get in the door. Start looking for opportunities to provide other services, and then build a reputation around those services, and then you can start leading with some of those higher-level services.
Matt: “I am so busy. What should I do? The classic advice, of course, is to raise your prices, and don’t worry about clients that can’t pay. Here’s the problem. The clients that pay the least right now are the most fun, easiest to work with, and the most visible or public. It is the journalism clients that lead to the high pay white paper work that is less fun and more compromising of myself. Any advice on making tough trade offs?”
Here’s the way I’m reading this. Hopefully, I read it correctly. Matt is saying, “I’m busy, but I’m not earning enough, so if I’m going to be this busy, I want to improve my income. But the problem is that the people I really like working with don’t pay that much. However, the reason I take them is because they are good names. They give me a lot of credibility, and help me get in the door with other companies that pay more, but I don’t really like that work.”
I think there’s really a bigger question here, which has to do, and he even mentioned it, trade offs. Sometimes it is a trade off. Many times it’s not. I think the biggest thing you could do, and this is for anybody, is to figure out what’s really important to you. Are you looking to maximize your income? Are you looking for fun work with fun people? Sometimes you can do both, but it is a useful exercise to ask yourself, if I have to choose one or the other, which one would come first? I can’t tell by his question which one is more important to him.
It sounds like the fun factor is very important to him. I do think there’s an opportunity here … Without knowing all the details, I can’t really give you very specific advice, but I think there’s an opportunity to dig deeper into the accounts that you really enjoy working with, and see if you can provide a higher level of service there.
If not, then how can you find more like them? Sometimes it’s hard to really increase your prices significantly with existing clients, but what if I can find others with the same attributes, and start a higher level with the first project. That might mean that you have to let one of the other ones go that’s lower paying.
I have been in many situations, not many, but I’ve been in a few, where I have told a client, “I’m going to have to move on. I can’t continue to do this at these rates, these projects,” and the client has agreed to go up to my new rates or fees.
I would follow your heart here, but be smart about it. It’s important to work with clients that are fun, but, at the same time, if you’re going to work really hard that you’re maximizing your time and your resources, so I don’t necessarily think it’s a trade off.
I think it’s just the way you value yourself, and the way you see your value, and the way you communicate that value, and sometimes it’s about making really tough choices, and letting go of some. You love working with them, but you can’t pay the bills that way. Sometimes making room by saying no … Let me rephrase that. Sometimes when you say no and walk away from deals that just aren’t good for you anymore, you make room for better opportunities, as tough and scary as it might be to do so.
Barb: “I’ve been trying to start for a couple of years now. I’ve studied and studied, and bought courses, and reports, and books. How do I get myself in gear and get going? Website first? I must take the first step today. I know my niche.”
The first thing I can tell you here, Barb, is start. Just get started. The motivational speaker and strategist, Jim Rohn, used to say if you want to know where to start, go outside, find a rock, throw it up in the air, and wherever it lands, start there. Start anywhere.
Don’t feel bad, Barb. What you just described, I see this a lot. There are a lot of professional students out there. There’s comfort in taking another course, and reading more information, and absorbing new ideas. I get, “It’s easier to read a new book. It’s easier to take another course than it is to put yourself out there and profit for clients.” I get it. I get it.
Unfortunately, to make it in this business, to even stand a chance, you have to put yourself out there. It is uncomfortable. The fact that it is uncomfortable is a good sign. In fact, I would tell you, as you grow, when things start feeling very comfortable, it’s time to start doing the uncomfortable again. The first thing I would say is just start. You asked about website. Sure, if you don’t have a website, fine, do that first. That’s a good first step. However, give yourself a deadline. Today is Monday. By Friday, I’m going to have a website up. There’s lots of very intuitive and cost effective website builders out there, strikingly.com, squarespace.com. Just go out there, and get started. It’s the best thing you can do is just start and start today.
Angus: “I’m a content writer, who has always been curious about adding copywriting to my business. What are the pros and cons, the earning potential, strategies for adding copywriting?”
Here’s what I would say, Angus. The big question, the pros generally is that you can generally earn more in copywriting work than you can from marketing content work, generally speaking. It’s, also, depending on your personality, depending on what your preferences are, it can be more fun. It just depends. Everyone’s different there. I like a variety. I like to have both. I like to have some copywriting work. I like to have some content work.
The earnings potential, I talked about earning potential. It can, also, make you a little bit more marketable, because you can offer a couple skill sets to clients, but, you know what, I’ve, also, found that it can be limiting, too. Sometimes a client hires you for one thing, and they see you as the person for that thing. Let’s say marketing content. It’s very hard to get them to see you as a copywriter, so that, for many clients, that could be an obstacle.
Having said that, here’s what I would encourage you to do. I would go for it. It’s a skill that it’s not going to be a waste of time. You’re going to learn a lot of stuff, a valuable skill, and a good project or type of project to start with, or start offering in terms of copywriting is website copywriting.
Every business out there has a website, every business that you want to go after at least, and it’s something that you can learn fairly easily, and it’s I think the middle ground between marketing content and pure direct response copywriting. It’s a happy medium. It’s a good gateway project, if you will, and, yeah, I would look at that.
The other thing I would tell you, and not too many people really say this, but it’s very true, and I know some of my colleagues disagree about this, but it is much easier to get in the door with a client with marketing content work, than it is with copywriting work, with pure copywriting work. I found that pure copywriting work, they either like to do that in house. Those are the projects they can actually do themselves.
Think about this. What’s easier to do, to write a 100-word lead generation email, or to write a six-page white paper? If you work in cubicle hell, which one is easier for you? I think the email, right? That’s actually a little bit of fun. It’s quick copy. It’s fun. It’s punchy. Or many times, they’ll have someone, like a staff writer, that’s what they prefer to do, or an agency, they do a lot of the copywriting for them.
But what nobody wants to touch, and I’m generalizing here, is the content marketing work. I find that it’s much easier to get in the door with content marketing, and then once you’re in, you can explore different copywriting opportunities. “Hey, Bill, did you know that I, also, offer web copywriting services?” Once you’re trusted there, once they know and trust you, it’s much easier to have a conversation and maybe land a project that way.
I’ve got a couple more questions, and we’ll wrap up. The first one is from Nelson. He asks, “Sometimes it’s hard to find freelance copywriting projects, but sometimes it’s not. You know the old adage, when it rains it pours. What do you do when you’re swamped with work for the foreseeable future, but you don’t want to turn any of it down?”
It’s a great question. It actually has a lot of different possible solutions. One of them is to … This could be a time to start looking at your clients, and figure out who do I want to keep? Many people who are in that situation still have clients from years before, who aren’t paying anywhere near what they’re earning with new clients, and that’s just a decision you’re going to have to make, is it time to let them go, or is it time to raise my fees? What do I want to do here?
The other thing is sometimes we assume that clients aren’t willing to wait, and many times I’ve found that clients are willing to wait. Just because you got a three- or four-week backlog doesn’t mean that they aren’t willing to do that. Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking them, “Listen, I’m booked solid for the next four weeks. I’d love to take this on. I know I’d do a great job for you. What’s your timing like, and how set is that deadline?” Just ask them. You’d be surprised what they’d say.
By the way, the other benefit of that, it can make you more attractive to them. “Wow, good for you.” Almost every time I’ve had to say that, and by the way, be honest with this, be ethical. Every time I’ve had to say it, clients, and I didn’t expect this, they said, “Ed, that’s fantastic. I’m really happy for you. Yeah. We could probably wait. Can we get started on this part for now?” And maybe it’s something that I can actually start doing sooner, but maybe the main part of the project I can’t, maybe a kick off call or something like that.
Then the other thing, and this is more of a long term solution, is consider hiring a junior writer to help you out, and do the grunt work, depending on what kind of writer you do. There are opportunities out there to bring someone on board who could help you do some of the grunt work. You can come in at the beginning, provide direction, provide the outline, all the background information, et cetera, and then have them go to work, and then come in on the back end and help do the editing and polishing and all that.
Again, depending on the type of work you do. I will tell you it’s not as easy as it sounds. I’ve found ways of doing it that actually work. The hardest thing is finding the right person, someone who could write and using your own tone, and sticking to your style. That’s another opportunity to look into, and it allows you to really leverage yourself, and essentially multiply your income significantly.
Mandy: “What are some questions to ask a new client that will help them come up with good ideas for content?”
My best advice there would be to ask if you can interview a couple of their salespeople. Salespeople are usually plugged into what’s going on in the marketplace. What are their prospects saying? What are the objections, and the questions really boil down to what are customers and prospects complaining about, in terms of their challenges, as it relates to courses, and products, and services you offer? What are their pain points? What are their biggest ones? What are you hearing out there?
Another question would be, what are your good prospects seeing or not seeing? In other words, how are they seeing their problem? How are they seeing the potential solutions to that problem? Why are they missing the mark or not missing the mark? Those kinds of things. Ask open-ended questions like that of their salespeople.
From that alone, you could come up with tons of topic ideas, but, yeah, there are many ways of doing this. I personally like to ask to go straight to the sales force, and I get a lot of useful intelligence that way. Just ask them to open up, and help them feel comfortable opening up to you. Ask them these questions.
Salespeople want to be heard. I’ve been a salesperson before, and I can tell you, I’ve felt many times like the marketing people didn’t really care. They’re living in their own little world. If a marketing person team to me, and they sincerely wanted to know, “I need to understand this market better, your prospects better. Tell us. I want to help with marketing materials that will actually work. What are the concerns? What are they complaining about? What are their pain points? What are they seeing? How are they seeing their problems? What’s their perception of their problems and the ways to solve them? Why is that wrong, or why is that right?” Yeah. That would be my general advice to you.
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