Freelance Copywriting in 2017

by Martypants | Apr 27, 2017 | Finding Freelance SEO Copywriting Work, Freelance SEO Copywriting Tips

Back when I started copywriting for a living, I had to use a phone book to find leads. Cold-calling, 101. I was convincing people that they wanted to bring their businesses to the web: and yes Virginia, it is a conversation that I had back then, daily. I used to have to explain what SEO was, and why it was important. I am Old Man River, like the tired old guy in the pic above.

Luckily for all you young writer pups out there, this is not the case any longer. Work is now simply a screenshot or an email away from you, always.It is pretty wonderful, comparatively.

And work, that was something I once had to explain to potential clients is now more prevalent than ever. Platforms are springing up that all require some form of communication and copywriting to effectively maintain. Blogs, feeds, Press Releases, features, interviews and more await the able scribe of today.

The role and importance of a copywriter in a successful corporate environment may have a slightly different assumption (online proficiency) swaddling it today, but the copywriter has not lost any footing as the years tumble by.

So the question then becomes, how do you find work as a copywriter in today’s climate?

Find The Source

One thing that is the same-same, always, is finding the true source of the work. You need to locate the people who actively hire writers and then try to understand a bit about why they are looking for strength in their ranks.

If you have companies you admire or want to be a part of, these are actually what I consider to be the best targets. A natural passion to be a part of things is easy to see, even from a distance, and can sometimes be the extra juice that carries you into the first client meeting.

But if not a personal target, there are often professional reasons to pursue one type of copywriting more than another. As an example, I personally have a specialty in alternative finance from years of doing it, so I tend to start there. However, I have passion (and experience) in education, SEO, music stuff, and dog-related writing too…so you can see in just a matter of a few minutes, I can narrow down the places where I am aiming. I should be increasing my chances of success as well, as I am going where I am stronger.

You might be surprised at how many larger/successful businesses use freelance copywriting to bolster their efforts. The diversity offered by “proper online application” feels almost limitless. Certainly they hire for specialized pages (like SEO stuff or expertise), but many businesses will also hire for more routine blogposts/site pages. Why? Because their own staff is often overwhelmed with conflicting agendas, so newer things get pushed back – or, maybe they need the spark of a new voice to warm up their cold, tired copy. Maybe they need a professional steering the effort to keep it moving.

There are many reasons why a business might look to outside help to strengthen their efforts. Your job, immediately, is to become an unconscious option for them to consider when it is time to get busy.

I am assuming too, that the area of expertise that you are after is one where you have both work samples and satisfied clients under your belt. These things certainly make it easier to have potential clients perk up on the value of your services – expertise in both a specific niche AND a foundation of better-than-general writing (seeing it as an art form), works together incredibly well.

Target the places/niches where you have shined before, and it is ALWAYS easier to suggest why this is a trend you can replicate. Cherish every connection made; be quick, available, and to the point – you never know when the person you are dealing with becomes the one who needs help or makes a decision on future project specifics.

Keep your communications VERY brief, and right to the point. Understand that the only things folks REALLY want to know, is 1.Are you capable of the work and being self-sufficient, and 2. When will the finished product/next milestone be ready? Not to say clarifying points are not welcomed (they almost always are greatly appreciated), just that the more you understand clients are seeing only the project and associated timeline, the more your communications stay focused on the point.

Who, Exactly Do You Try To Find?

So who actually hires copywriters? Usually, in medium to larger organizations it is the marketing team…but it is not limited there by any means. In one company I worked, we did direct mail, lots of website (company-focused) material, had a bustling Intranet, HR-fodder and a wide range of consumer-focused stuff…yet the marketing department was where most of the creative originated. I soon became the gatekeeper for all corporate messaging – a position I hold in a lot of places I work. Over the years, I have been thru intense legal reviews and have developed an eye for detail that makes me pretty valuable in language control.

If a business is smaller, they won’t have a whole department for marketing, but someone in there will surely be responsible for it. These types of situations are actually easier to find work – though it is usually harder to get long-running contracts out of smaller businesses. They simply don’t have the cash flow and budgeting options you’ll find in a larger place, but they are often more harried and stretched thin, so may be more eager to find writers to help ease the strain and drive the agenda. My personal focus has been more with web developers, so I look in forums and places where multi-site owners seek-out people like me. 

I have also seen a trend in the last few years where more businesses are bringing in lower level copywriters and “media kiddies” to handle ongoing efforts. Not unusual for me now to plot out a long range direction and get the first few pages written as a guide – then the business hires someone else to take it over, more cheaply, in-house.This should alert you to the opportunity here – it is real.

For example, in smaller businesses or for the webmasters/web lords I tend to work with, I have been that answer for them in ongoing relationships…remember above, when I suggested becoming the unconscious choice for copywriting needs as they arise? I am that guy for many business owners I know, and though their needs are not always as regular as a larger company, I can be the answer time after time, which all just adds to my own small, but constant stacks.

Once you have targeted a few businesses in the niche(s) where you are experienced, look at the corporate structure of the companies. Many sites have a “Meet the Team” page where you can get a feel for the hierarchy…maybe even get the name of the person you want to reach out to. Look for Creative Directors, Marketing Managers/Directors, and Online/Web Teams. If a company is smaller, you can target the owner – dictatorships in small business are the norm, so one guy will make more of the important decisions.

It’s your job to take the time to make your first impression a solid one…don’t use an email blanket and mass-send it. A template is fine, but modify it to be a specific pitch to the place you are reaching-out to. If you are polite, eager, talented, and experienced, it is pretty hard to go unnoticed. Remember too that people talk, so every relationship is gold, even when all you see is the shaft.

Bring Your Own Party

As media diversifies across many channels, sometimes copywriting gigs today have an additional promotional or audience-generating aspect to it. Meaning, it may not be enough to be able to create something noteworthy: you may also need the skillset, time, audience and/or resources to promote it after it is published.

Personally, I find this a blessing and a curse. I am a ghost writer, so my name has not often been attached to anything I have written. I simply can’t bring an audience with me as so many other writers are able to do.  However, I am well versed in promoting content through outreach and other means, so my lack of visibility can become a strength, as I am able to more nimbly and aggressively go after the prize.

If you are in the earlier stages of your career, whether to be a ghost writer or to consciously build your own following is something important to consider. Your ability to create and maintain an audience who listens to your writing can lead you to things where you do not rely as heavily on client work. You often develop a more powerful sway on your own. I have seen this work very well for people – but personally, I have never  regretted being a ghost either.I have questioned it occasionally for sure, but over time am remaining very happy where I am going.

It is more of a personal choice these days, whereas I felt it was definitely more strategic for me in the early aughts to be the ghost, the invisible support businesses were seeking. There is a different feeling today, and the web/internet often brings its own levels of celebrity.  I have seen shrewd copywriters turn their attained celebrity into personal earning power…it’s up to you. Building a following is not like falling off a log or anything, but passionate voices emerge every day, and a strong message can find followers more easily and quickly than ever before.

The main point being though, assuming you understand how things are shared/promoted online, if you can include that as a value-add or part of the gig itself, it is super attractive to potential clients. Know too, that clients today can see how well something works more clearly than they ever could. Writing projects with no decent measure of success are a thing of the past – analytics and tracking have become adept at seeing the true efficacy of each effort, often in realtime.

Nothing sells success like previous success, or the promise of an engaged audience for every post written. If you have the people or the skills to bring this outreach/connectivity to each project, your perceived value increases greatly over run-of-the-mill copywriters.

I will warn though, see promotion (at least in budget/billing) as a totally separate thing from the copywriting part – because it is. Though tightly related, they really involve 2 different skillsets, and each should be compensated justly. I have done promotional jobs that were tied to outreach success rates – however, I tend to go for jobs that are more black-and-white based on outputs, because it is hard to predict how people will react. Just saying, you don’t want to bundle the services of writing and promotion and not get paid decently for each – they are definitely separate areas of subject matter expertise.

Get Out There

The other main difference between when I started and today, is the ease in getting something self-published. You can start a blog or a website, contribute to someone else’s or offer opinions/catch attention in ways that make my old phone book and a cold call seem archaic, indeed. So maybe the best plan, like it always has been, is to get out there and work.

This blog post is a great example – I don’t write it for people to read it necessarily, I write it because it helps me in some manner to get to my next place. But who knows who sees it, and what they think or do with it – I did my part in getting it out here. And if there are some nuggets to glean, awesome.

More to the point, is I am writing because I like to write – it helps me work for others, to write whatever I want to first. It doesn’t always have to BE something, as much as it has to be.

I came up with an acronym to keep my writers focused: AICHOK. Ass In Chair, Hands On Keys. I consider it like a soup base in cooking – generally makes the rest come easier, and brilliance is perhaps in the offing. You can’t be brilliant if you aren’t typing, and you won’t typically find work either. However, being active and passionate about whatever it is that floats your cakehole, you will often be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Finding Copywriter Gigs

by Marty | Feb 26, 2014 | Finding Freelance SEO Copywriting Work, Freelance SEO Copywriting Tips

Been a while since I have talked about how to find good copywriting gigs- be they for SEO or otherwise. But of late, I have been talking with writers emerging into it all – all the splendor and the glory – so thought I would do a post to be more of a conceptual overview of finding work…how to think about and approach it.

Assumptions here for proper perspective, do include that you are not pursuing writing in a part-time or full-time position in a specific place: you are approaching it from a more standard issue freelancing POV. I may do another post later, about the benefits of going in-house…because different times of your life may find different things attracting you one way or the other. Today though, we are focusing on independent freelancing.

So let’s just dive right in, shall we?

Step One: Identify the Work, and Your Own Power To It

This one, is really dependent on where you are in your career. Much more important to you when you are just starting out- but certainly something that you will consider multiple times as you march through the perpetual madness of professional copywriting. You need to target a type of writing, and see why you have power to bring it.

If there is a specific type of writing or a niche in which you are prolific, this makes the most natural and reasonable starting point. You have to be reasonable – if your passion is model airplanes, it is going to have a smaller range of professional options than if you are into women’s fashions or marketing. But passion always drives a tough bargain, in most areas…don’t discount your own power through passion.

Maybe you have a few years experience in shipping, or customer service and can write about it – or spent some time in a restaurant (much more common). In any case, you can use most any kind of experience and flip it into a more powerful position to find writing gigs. Since I spent a number of years in restaurants, we’ll use that one here as our example du jour.

Let’s say, you worked in a restaurant for 8 years- both back and front of the house. Then you went to school and started writing. Or maybe you got a degree in English, or had a knack for writing and the degree never quite panned out, so you went to restaurant work, and just stayed there. In either case you are emerging with no true experience (but talent and training) as a writer, and lots of relevant industry experience in restaurants and hospitality work.

To find reasonable work then, you are not going to focus on the weak point, being your lack of pro writing experience…you are going to build more on your strengths as a knowledgeable industry insider and ability to weave the power of professional writing under it. You offer perspective the audience will see immediately, but your voice is better trained to communicate than most. So build up the portfolio while also getting more entrenched in your niche.

Staying reasonable, means knowing the potential of your reach. The well established, leading voices in the industry are not going to listen to you (as a rookie), unless you have something truly remarkable to share. That is really, really rare- and not something you plan for or can build upon. So maybe consider it a long term goal for reaching the top dogs- and never any harm in thinking like that, but do properly count the eggs you are putting into that basket. You should not expect to jump into a field and be at the top of it simply because you have industry experiences.

Yet the restaurant industry has so many diverse parts to it and it offers a very rich and thriving community both online and offline. Sticking to the example: if you have the restaurant experience and drive/skill to write about, find the places where people are publishing about restaurant issues. Right? Simple stuff.

It might be wine service, pairing foods and beverages, managing liquor costs, handling drunk clientele, hiring wait staff, doing fun promotions, menu planning, scheduling – there are a wide range of options for you to explore, and use as search queries. It would start with your own expertise or desires, and be loose enough to follow the paths illuminated by your queries. Refine, rinse and repeat.

By the time you go through this kind of free-thinking research a couple times, you will tend to find a direction coming out in your notes if it was still murky to you. And of course, you should be writing daily – if you want to get paid for it, you’d better start doing it.

Step Two: Identify the Places and Faces Publishing Work, and Buzzing

Knowing we are looking to write about our restaurant experience, we find the publications, websites, forums, online groups and anything else where they are talking about the things that interest us and allow the expertise to shine. Keep track of it- use something online, even as simple as a text file or spread sheet, where you can keep URLs, links and other notes of the community research.

In addition to finding the specific places where restaurant experts are discussing pertinent issues, we will find certain folks who are sparking discussions in certain parts of the topics- idea leaders, typically with passionate followers. Plug in to the ones that make sense here- start becoming more active within the community in which you hope to become a writer. Follow them. Key idea here, is to go out softly…and carefully, and truly add to the discussions. Become a part of the groups where you feel comfortable and can add value.

While you are gently but affirmatively participating within your communities, you are going to be able to see and follow (through links and referrals) different folks within them. Here are the seeds of networking- and getting your work out there. If someone has a great share, go see what they do in their own world- chances are good, you will find more things you like. Not always of course, but it can open up more diverse and active thinking in your subject matter.

The important thing is to not go after the top folks and push your pieces on them and ask for review – they get that a lot, and don’t pay any attention to folks who present their work that way, believe me. I have seen it- and it is sad, because the writer always has an earnest heart: just no experience. I did the same thing to Joyce Carol Oates once- she sent me a very nice postcard, and I learned not to do that again. You can nip it sooner than I did, haha.

Better is to study them- see how they interact, how they communicate and work- and why they are leaders. Emulate them, don’t inundate them. Don’t force your art on someone.  Put your work out there for sure: but let them find it, not be backed into evaluating it on-the-spot. The top folks will see anything in their niche, so you simply need to make it good enough to be better than most all of it, and the rest often handles itself. They will tend to come to you, if you write right.

While you are studying the top, and long term planning the reach of it, you need to keep busy. Plus, you need to be building up that portfolio, so when the top dogs do turn to look at you there is something there for them to see. We’ll assume you have a bunch of written stuff, and are looking to get it placed. We’ll also assume you have a little site with some samples or ways to get work in front of clients, and booked – because a freelancer needs that.

The type of work you are submitting and trying to get published matters a good bit here. Online work is much different than offline stuff and the folks who process it are typically different in the marketing department, depending on the size of the business. Let’s say you want to start blogging about restaurant work, but get paid to do it.

The target now, narrows further and you find the blogs and forums and websites chattering away about it all. You may even already be involved in some of them as your gentle community-joining outreach continues, but now, you begin to seek out the places where a LOT of work and a LOT of writers seem to be cycling.

As an example, I went to Google and typed in “Restaurant industry” and got a few good ideas in the first page alone. The NRA is an association of restaurant professionals – thru its site, you could find paths to more, similar minded sites and writers for sure. Or, aim at the NRA – they are a huge organization, and there are many places they will be needing fresh content and ideas. It may not be a place a rookie finds an easy in, but it likely depends on where you are trying to get in there. FohBoh was up there too, and had a ton of featured blogposts about all kinds of industry topics.

Let’s say that is not turning up what you want- add “blogs” to your query to refine the results, and boom – lots more to look at, and evaluate. You now find individual blogs in addition to more organizations – so the rest should be a matter of trial and error to find great, active places to target.

Step Three: Join In the Conversations

OK- now you have a variety of industry-related places where people like you get things published. By people like you, I refer to someone with the experience and training necessary to be considered – just because you WANT to write, is not enough reason for them to ALLOW you to write for them. Not for the better targets, anyway. You are better than that; you are above the rabble.

But start paying attention to your thought leaders, and watch how they are presenting ideas. See which of them have sparks that ignite deeper discussions. Join in when appropriate, and comment- but again, be wise here and add depth and meaning to the discussions. If you have nothing to add, just read.

In many places, the commentors actually have wonderful insights, and get their own traction from being a part of it all. I can speak to that from personal experience- I have both followed folks and had folks come to me, due to comments somewhere. Very, very powerful thing if you are not abusive with it. I think most of the folks I respect today, I found thru a comment somewhere. Or rather, a bunch of comments that helped illustrate deeper things they believed.

If you have a site, which as we said for an aspiring freelancer is not really an option, you can link to it in your comments. If you are adding value, people will follow the links, and look at your site. This makes a very subtle way to bring prospective clients to you- organically, as it should be. You are not actively trying to get the clients, per se, rather, you are simply being involved, honestly, in the discussions in the industry. If you have a strong voice and solid opinions you will be noticed much in the same way you are noticing others.

Granted, a passive approach like that may not be getting you work though, at least not right away, and this is in fact the goal. So you again, just count the eggs you put here, in this one basket. It is one strategy and pretty passive, but not the only effort you are gonna do.

Dig a little deeper on the sites where you are finding the best conversations and activity. Find out more about them and their editorial policies. Many times, there is a page or some content dedicated to explaining how they handle outside submissions, sometimes there is simply a contact form- sometimes there is only an organizational chart and you have to do a little sleuthing to figure it out.

You can often reach out to the successful leaders in the niche too, and ask them for any tips. If you are not an oaf, this can be very effective, depending on the people leading your niche. Simple rules of etiquette include to respect people’s time, and be to the point. They don’t have to give you any help, so don’t act like they owe you and you will find most people respond very favorably to being asked how they did something well.

Rinse and Repeat

The idea now, is to be landing some exposure on one or more of the sites you found, so your own voice can start to ring out more. Your activity and comments should have seeded the clouds well, and if not, then a more direct approach in the content of the site (not the comments) helps it to rain.

I would not look at this task as one where you are seeking the paid part of writing as your only goal. More, this is the means to find exposure, and bring new and interested people to your work, which is actually showcased better on your own site. You simply want to be heard, and put forth your ability to write/blog well about related topics. Your site holds the page(s) with the pitch so you don’t need to worry about having it in your work, which should be standing on its own merits.

This kind of interaction then, will simply continue for you- you will be putting out pieces showing your experience and insight, and have a site of your own to present work options to new clients.

I am not going to sugar coat it: these earliest times are financially tough. But you are building up your portfolio, increasing your trust and visibility in a niche so be reasonable. If you want to get paid to blog about restaurant issues, you have to prove you can do it before anyone will offer you compensation for the efforts.

However it is not all bleak, either. If you are entering a niche for which you have a true passion, your ability to write about it is a natural extension of your passion. Putting a saddle on that, is not always easy but if you persevere, and keep on writing it can work out for you for sure. I see it happen all the time.

Writing is about communicating, so if you want to do it for a living you have to get involved in it and build up experiences. The first ones may not pay much if anything, but they have a purpose because no client likes to be the first one you have. Showing them (not telling them) how you have worked in the past, helps you show your value and helps you hammer the keys for cash more often.