Getting More Money
as a Freelance Copywriter
Dear Copywriter,
Your clients aren’t looking for spectacular sales copy.
Your clients aren’t looking for eye-popping headlines, or killer sales logic.
Your clients are looking for results, or rather, what those results mean to them. The tip of the iceberg includes:
- They want the cash to plunk down on the expensive car … the bigger home … the exotic vacations …
- They want to spend more time with their families, friends or spend more money on their passions …
- They want the personal satisfaction of building their business into a multi-million dollar cash-cow – without having the life sucked out of them in the process …
That’s just for starters. And great sales copy is just one mechanism to help them make more money, faster.
Let that kick around in the back of your head for a few minutes.
Consider for a moment, the basic ways you can make more money as a copywriter working for clients (excluding selling your own products, which is a big subject in and of itself):
- You can get more clients to pay your current fees …
- You can get clients to pay you higher fees …
- You can get a bigger piece of the action (royalties/commissions) …
- You can deliver, and charge for, more services to your clients …
Once you understand your client’s broader needs, you’ll start to see the tremendous amount of opportunities available to you as a copywriter.
Because your clients need other mechanisms to achieve their goals and dreams.
For instance, in order to get your copy in front of folks offline they need to mail it. And that means they need list brokers, print shops and fulfillment houses to start.
If you read my interview with Caleb O’Dowd you already know what a goldmine list brokers can be for building your business.
List Brokers are in the business of working with direct mailers. Their clients are people who hire copywriters.
Online, your copy is either going to their house file or as part of their acquisition efforts. And what do they do for acquisition? Pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, sponsored e-mail blasts, banner ads, affiliate marketing and more.
Many clients and potential clients are hiring a lot of other people in order to help them run all of these things. And those other professionals can be fantastic sources of new business for you.
But you can also leverage their skills to add more value to your clients, and offer more services.
Bundle Your Services
to Become More Valuable
Good ole’ fashioned networking targets two general types of people – people who might hire you directly and people who know people who might hire you.
And all of the other people your clients and prospects hire to build their businesses are potential strategic partners for you.
You’ve probably already got a few lead generation systems in place to promote your copywriting business – you’re sending out targeted mail to potential clients, maybe you’re doing your own pay-per-click campaign, posting on forums, or are sophisticated enough to have built your own e-mail list to market to.
By networking with other professionals in the online and offline direct response business, you can start to generate multiple streams of clients through referral.
You can set up anything from a loose affiliation where you each refer work to each other when possible, to a more formal arrangement where you actually generate leads and bid on jobs together.
Imagine if you hooked up with a pay-per-click consultant:
If you had a loose affiliation you could each refer clients to one another. Clients running pay-per-click campaigns need copy. And clients using copy online are always after new customers and more sales, and PPC is a powerful online media.
Now, if you found someone you have a good working relationship with, you could actually choose to bundle your services together and offer them directly to clients.
That way you’re able to offer a more complete solution to potential clients. They won’t have to coordinate between multiple vendors because you’re handling the entire campaign for them.
You’re now able to offer additional services to your clients.
Being able to handle more of the work load for your client makes you more attractive.
And you can form these kinds of relationships with pay-per-click consultants, SEO consultants or web designers and others.
Other great sources of referrals are your clients – you are following up with them, right?
Your value to your clients
is determined by your results
As a copywriter, the effectiveness of your copy is determined by things out of your control. Offline, poor list selection alone could doom even the strongest sales copy to miserable failure.
Online, the variables seem to increase every day. But the traffic source that leads to your copy is just as critical to your copy’s success as list selection is offline.
If your promotion isn’t getting in front of the right people, it’s going to flop. Or, if your promotion isn’t getting in front of enough people, the sales will be dismal. So as a copywriter, an intimate understanding of where your copy fits into the overall process of your client’s marketing is critical.
If you can find someone to help you ensure the success of your copy by increasing the quality and volume of the prospects that see it – you’re doing your client and yourself a big favor.
And by increasing your value to clients, it becomes easier to charge higher fees.
Bundling your services together with other marketing consultants is one way of doing this. The other, of course, is to become an expert in one of these other areas besides copywriting. Though be careful of becoming a ‘jack of all trades, but master of none.’
Relationship building will always be critical to your success
- Internet Marketing Seminars: If you’re a copywriter, getting clients at these seminars is like shooting fish in a barrel. You’re in a giant room with hundreds of online entrepreneurs who have proven they are willing to spend money to build their businesses.
And because internet marketers and entrepreneurs generally understand the importance of effective sales copy, you should have little problem finding potential clients here.
PLUS, you’ll find a lot of other types of consultants attending these events and these are the perfect folks to build relationships with strategic value.
- Direct Marketing Association Events: These events are decidedly more ‘corporate,’ so if that’s not your thing skip ‘em, but they are a great place to network with people in other aspects of direct marketing.
You’ll meet everyone from marketing directors, list brokers, database managers, to owners of small creative and design groups at these events. All folks who can refer business to you.
- Industry Trade Shows: Just about every industry has at least one major trade show. And they are usually cheap to attend and full of opportunity. You have pretty much every type of vendor that services an industry show up at these things.
- Networking Groups, Coaching Clubs: Most business owners know the value of networking at groups like Business Network International or the local Chamber of Commerce, so I’ll just remind you to think about them when looking for places to network.
But another great resource to consider are the many business building/marketing coaching clubs out there. Participating in them not only adds to your skill set, but puts you in contact with entrepreneurs and business owners committed to building their business, i.e. great potential clients.
If you want to speed up your success, speed up your networking and find ways to make yourself more valuable to clients and prospects.
To your faster success,
John Newtson
Editor, Life in the Fast Lane
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
Looking for resources related to this article? Try some of these.
Looking for more of John’s articles? Check these out.
Looking for past issues of The Total Package? Click here for our archives.
 |
Want to share or reprint this article? Feel free. Just give us full attribution and a link to our Home Page when you do. |
Attribution Statement: This article was first published in The Total Package. To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package and claim four FREE money making e-books go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.
Related posts
1 Comment »
Join the Discussion!
Let us know what you think. Or ask us anything. Or offer your own sage advice.
The only rule: RESPECT THIS HOUSE! Postings that contain abusive language and/or personal attacks will be cheerfully VAPORIZED. One cross word and – POOF! – your well-thought-out post will be gone in a puff of smoke.
– Clayton
Comment by Jeffry Hayes — November 12, 2008 @ 6:30 pm
y8il8rlzbout4tat