Copywriter and founder of The Content Bistro, Prerna Malik joins Kira and Rob for the 74th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. And we cover quite a bit of ground as we talk about...

•  how she became a freelance content writer (thanks to a family illness)

•  how she has grown her business despite living thousands of miles from her best clients

•  why she’s only invests in training that delivers a real ROI

•  the activities she spent time on to get her first several clients

•  how she went from $21,000 in 2011 to $200,000+ this year

•  how she thinks about the packages she offers (and how she prices them)

•  how she splits duties with her business partner (and husband)

•  what copywriters should be doing differently with social media

•  how she schedules her week to get things done (the hacks and systems she uses)

•  what she’ll be doing differently in 2018

•  the advice she would offer to a “just-starting-out” copywriter, and

•  where she thinks copywriting will go in the future

Note: Because Prerna lives in India, we weren’t able to use our usual recording software, so the sound has a few hiccups… we’re really sorry about that.

Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Content Bistro

Art of Simple

Launch Grow Joy

Fearless Launching

Mogul Mom

AWAIhttp://www.awaionline.com/copywriting/p/

Mass Persuasion Method

Copyhackers books

4-Hour Work Week

Fully Loaded Launch

Miers Briggs

7 Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned in Our 7th Year of Business

Biz Bistro

Kira’s website

Rob’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

Intro: Content (for now)

Outro: Gravity

 

Full Transcript:

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

Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 74 as we talk with content specialist and copywriter Prerna Malik about creating high-performing content for clients like Amy Porterfield and Katrina Springer; what we need to know about social media copy; what she did to earn $200,000 in a single year; and what’s it like to work with your spouse every single day.

Kira: Welcome, Prerna.

Rob: Welcome, Prerna!

Prerna: Hi! Thanks so much for having me here!

Kira: It’s great to have you on the show, and a great place to start is with your story, and how did you end up running Content Bistro with your husband?

Prerna: So, I blog; like a regular “mom” blog, it’s called The Mom Writes. And I started it in November of 2008 because I was a new mom. My daughter was nine months old, and while I love being with her, I also wanted something that was creatively stimulating and, you know, I used to read a lot of blogs when—you know—between feeding her and, you know, being with her and all that. So it just kind of started to so make sense to my sleep-deprived brain to, you know, start one! That blog...it started growing, and it led to me getting noticed by small businesses who then started reaching out and saying, you know, “Would you write for us?” That then led to things like social media gigs because, at that time I was super-active on Twitter. Now, I’m not so active, but yeah. I was super-active on Twitter, and then clients starting asking, “Okay, would you manage our social media for us”, you know? Especially Twitter.

So I took a couple of courses to be sure that I knew what I was doing, and I started doing very part-time social media management and blogging for small businesses. And things were going okay, and I was you know, having a lot of fun; I was being able to stay at home with my daughter, and I had some creative work. And this was very part-time thing for me because my husband, Mayank, his full-time job was what was supporting us financially.