For the 67th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob sit down with copywriter and content specialist, Emma Siemasko to talk about her business, working with clients, and the advice she would give to someone just starting out as a copywriter. During our conversation we covered:

•  how a trip to South Korea launched her freelance writing career

•  Emma’s and Rob’s favorite poets—yeah, this one is a little different

•  what she learned working at a bad content marketing agency

•  the things she learned from starting her own business

•  what she did in those first few moments as a freelancer

•  how she landed her first few clients after going out on her own

•  her advice to copywriters who are just starting out

•  the mistakes she made in her first year that cost her a lot of time and energy

•  the boundaries she has set up to keep her client relationships working well

•  how her clients have reacted to the boundaries she set

This isn’t the first time we’ve talked with Emma about boundaries—she’s really got this down. We also talked about how she packages case studies and sells them to her clients and the opportunities she sees in the future for copywriters. To hear this one, just click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Mary Oliver

Sharron Olds

Mira Gonzalas

Billy Collins

Another Reason I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House

On Turning Ten

OKCupid

Frog2Prince.net

Grasshopper

Joanna Wiebe

Maggie Patterson

Roy Furr

Stories by Emma

The Worst Company I Ever Worked For

Kira’s website

Rob’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

Intro: Content (for now)

Outro: Gravity

 

Full Transcript:

Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Kira: You’re invited to join us episode 67 as we chat with freelance copywriter and content creator Emma Siemasko about her decision to go out on her own, working with clients and setting clear boundaries, writing in the tech space and what she’ll be doing differently in the new year.

Kira: Welcome, Emma!

Rob: Hey Emma!

Emma: Hi Rob and Kira, thanks for having me!

Rob: We are thrilled to have you.

Kira: (laughs) All right, Emma, a great place to start is, of course, with your story. So, how did you end up as a content writer and then business owner?

Emma: Sure! So I have been writing in some capacity basically since I could read, so when I was in first grade, I was writing. Like, I wrote a story about how my grandmother died, which I got a lot of attention on because most six year olds weren’t writing about that... so I was doing some pretty heavy stuff as a little kid... but I went on to study creative writing in college where I specialized in poetry, and after I graduated I actually went and taught English in South Korea for one year. And the funny thing about that was, I was hired to teach, which I did a lot of, but the school where I worked also published their own English language textbooks and I quickly began doing most of the writing and virtually all of the editing for the textbooks because my boss recognized like, whoa, she’s like the best writer that we have, not to be totally braggy, but, so I actually kind of got my first taste of professional writing in South Korea, funnily enough.

And when I came back, I worked for a content marketing agency for a little while. I started my own online dating consultancy and then I worked for about three years at a software as a service company and that’s how I got introduced to the tech space. And the company was acquired and I was like, I don’t really want to work for anybody else—I’d been hiring a lot of freelancers when I worked in-house, so I was like,