Get far enough along on your journey and you’ll realize that there are TONS of things you’d do differently if you got a second chance.

That’s true for life, and it’s true for freelancing too.

I can’t complain – things have worked out pretty well for me.

But if you’re at the beginning of your freelance career, you’ve got time to implement these lessons for yourself.

In this episode, follow along as we cosplay as young, ignorant Jacob and figure out what he could have done better.

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What are the things that I wish I knew at the beginning of my freelance journey that I know today?

In this episode, I’m going to be covering six different things that I wish I knew way back when, when I first started freelancing.

Whether they’re mistakes, misconceptions, or just lessons I’ve learned along the way, these are the things that I wish I could go back and teach my younger self.

So if you want to cosplay as young, ignorant Jacob today, don’t go anywhere.

Today’s episode is sponsored by CopyAI, a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers skip writer’s block and quickly create first draft copy for themselves and their clients.

If you’d like to get a full 30-day free trial, head on over to http://copy.ai/jacob and sign up there.

So let’s talk about the six things that I wish I knew when I first started freelancing.

#1: Nobody Cares About Your Credentials

This is one of those things that I spend a massive amount of my time teaching new writers.

One of the things that most people are used to in an employment context is that you have to go through a series of gates and gatekeepers in order to be considered qualified for any given position or role.

Your journey through your career is essentially a journey of checking off boxes and meeting certain, somewhat arbitrary criteria that allows you to then progress to the next level.

In freelancing and entrepreneurship on the other hand, those check boxes don’t really exist.

As a general rule, there are no gates and no gatekeepers.

It all comes down to what can you do for someone? And what are they willing to pay you? And that’s it.

This is something that takes many people a long time to wrap their head around. And I would even say a lot of people never manage to do so.

I see so many freelancers who spend years and years and years trying to figure out what credentials they need to hit their goals…

When the only thing that’s been between them and their goals since the beginning is just their willingness to get out there and sell.

And this carries us over to…

#2: Nobody Cares About You At All

This is something that kind of sounds harsh, but when you really understand it, it’s quite liberating.

There are people out there who are going to dislike you or take particular issues with you- bias, this, that, or the other – but at the end of the day, your audience is the entire marketplace.

There are no individual gatekeepers who can prevent you from hitting your goals.

Nobody cares about you in a positive way, but nobody really cares about you in a negative way either.

The only thing people care about is themselves. And what they’re doing. Their goals, their aspirations.

Your job coming into this market isn’t to be preoccupied with yourself and what you want.

It’s to go in and find what everyone else wants and how you can provide that for them.

So this leads us into lesson three…

#3: Find Ways To Help Successful People

The single best way you can get ahead in your career is to find already successful people a...

This last week, I sat down and asked myself a question: “What are the most powerful copywriting tips that don’t get discussed very frequently?”

The five tips we’ll cover in this video are what came to mind.

These are the types of tips that can singlehandedly change how you write and shift the entire trajectory of your copywriting career… and yet, even if you’ve read all 200,000+ words on my blog, you would only have come across these tips once or twice.

Time to bring out the spotlight and make sure these get the attention they deserve.

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Share Your Thoughts

I hope this was helpful, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Do you agree? Do you disagree with the fierce heat of a thousand suns?

Let me know in the comments below.

Plus, if you have a question you want answered on a future Write Bites episode, ask in the comments or shoot me an email, and I’ll add it to the schedule.

There are three super important questions that every copywriter should be asking their clients, but most don’t.

If you have already found my copywriting questionnaire, then you’re already using two of these, but I’ve actually since added a third to the lineup…

And I’m a little embarrassed it’s taken me this long.

In today’s episode of Write Bites, we’re going to cover exactly what these three critical questions are.

This episode of Write Bites is sponsored by Copy.AI – a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers harness the power of GPT-3 to quickly create first draft copy for their businesses and clients. Click here to try Copy.AI free.

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Let’s talk about three super important questions that every copywriter should be asking their clients, but most don’t.

If you have already found my copywriting questionnaire, then you’re already using two of these, but I’ve actually since added a third to the lineup and I’m a little embarrassed it’s taken me this long.

This is a super important question that I personally added after publishing that questionnaire and just completely forgot to add to the lineup.

I’m adding it in now, and this video is my way of highlighting to you that it’s there, that it’s super critical and that you need to be asking every single client you work with this question.

So with that said, let’s dive in.

This episode is sponsored byCopy.AI, a toolkit that helps writers, marketers and freelancers skip writer’s block completely and quickly create first draft copy for themselves and their clients.

If you’d like to get a 30-day free trial, head on over to http://copy.ai/jacob and sign up there.

Question #1: What Businesses Do You Like And Want To Emulate In Some Way?

Now, this is a super important question because what people tell you they like and what they actually like are often completely different things.

so you can ask clients all day long, what they want to see in their copy, and they’ll give you all sorts of feedback, but when you actually look at the real examples that they actually like – when they point to a website or a brand or messaging and say “Hey, we like this” – that’s when you know they actually like it.

I can tell you: I’ve had so many clients who will sit there and talk all day about how they want their copy to be bold and aggressive, or interesting, or artistic, or something, something, something that’s outside of the norm…

And then when I asked them “Show me the brands you want to emulate”, they send me to cookie-cutter brands that have very straightforward, industry -average types of messaging.

And I know from experience that the clients who say they want bold, they say they want artistic, but then point to examples that are none of those things?

At the end of the day, when I send them the copy, they’re going to want the example that they pointed to, not the actual adjectives they use to describe their requests.

So:

Always, always, always – regardless of what the client tells you, no matter how effusive they are on the call, no matter how passionate they are about their desire for this, that, or the other in their copy – ask them for the examples.

Make them show you the brands they like.

Make them show you the businesses they want to emulate.

Take that as the baseline.

And then try to incorporate small little bits of what they’ve requested.

But as a general rule you want to use the examples they point to as the core foundation of the copy…

I spend most of my time talking about freelancing because I feel that – for most people – freelancing is the best first step to take when transitioning from an employment context.

If you’ve been an employee your whole life, jumping into freelancing is a much smoother transition into entrepreneurship than most of the other business models available.

That said most people don’t want to stay freelancers for forever.

Fortunately, if you’re a writer who’s been following me to how to freelance, you are a great candidate to build an audience.

In today’s episode of Write Bites, we’re going to cover a simple four step process you can use to start building your audience the right way.

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Today’s episode is sponsored by Copy.AI, a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers skip writer’s block forever and use the power of GPT-3 to quickly create first draft copy for themselves and their clients.

If you’d like to get a 30-day free trial head on over to http://copy.ai/jacob and sign up.

I spend most of my time talking about freelancing because I feel that – for most people – freelancing is the definitive best, first step when transitioning from an employment context.

if you’ve been an employee your whole life, jumping into freelancing is a much smoother transition into entrepreneurship than most of the other business models available.

That said most people don’t want to stay freelancers for forever.

Fortunately, if you’re a writer who’s been following my channel to learn how to freelance, you are a great candidate to build an audience.

Most audiences today are built using writing.

Some people do it through videos.

Some people do it through audio.

Some people do it through visual social media channels.

But I would say the vast majority of people who have profitable audiences today have built their audiences using writing.

And I’m going to teach you every step that you need to go through in order to build your own audience in this episode.

So let’s dive in.

#1: Identify a Topic That Satisfies Market Demand

So when we talk about building an audience, unfortunately, you can’t just write about what you want to write about.

There are people who’ve just started talking about whatever the hell they wanted to talk about  and built an audience of raving fans who love their work.

But as a general rule, that’s not how you’re going to build a profitable audience because people don’t really care about what you care about.

They care about what they themselves care about.

So in order to build an audience, so you need to be talking about what a large group of people care about.

Now, obviously there are going to be overlaps between what you care about and what other people care about. And that’s the sweet spot. That’s what we’re looking for.

We’re looking for something that you have an interest in.

Maybe some firsthand experience, or maybe just a passion to dig in and research about this topic…

but ultimately we’re trying to find some sort of a overlap.

Obviously, for my own brand, freelance writing, copywriting, building businesses online is the overlap that I’ve found.

It’s something that I’ve done a lot of work to gain experience in, and by extension, there are a lot of other people who are actively looking to do some of the same things that I’ve done.

So it makes it really easy for me to just talk about what I know, and build an audience that way.

If you’re early on in your online career, maybe it’s more something that you’re just ...

Improving your prose has always been in that “write better” category of skills development.

Sure, we’d all like to write better prose… but how?

In today’s episode of Write Bites, I’m going to break down four practical ways you can improve your prose over time.

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In today’s episode, I’m going to give you four different strategies that you can use to improve your prose over time.

And the keyword there is time. These are not overnight processes.

In general, improving prose has kind of always been in that “write better” category of skills development, where I can tell you “Hey, your prose is weak” or “You need to work on your prose”, but what do you actually do about that?

In a lot of ways, how we write prose is not about a conscious strategy that we’re following.

It’s more of a subconscious way in which our brain is processing thoughts into words.

And so improving the way that that happens is not easy.

That said, I’ve noticed some correlations between people who tend to write better, more engaging prose and people who really struggle with it.

And so I’m going to be focusing on those things in today’s strategies and trying to make something that is not typically actionable a bit more actionable.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Copy.AI,  a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers, skip writer’s block completely and quickly create first draft copy for themselves and their clients. Head on over to copy.ai/jacob, and you can get a full 30-day free trial.

Tip #1: Read More Fiction

Number one – the most enjoyable, in my opinion – read a lot more fiction.

Now, I have noticed a very strong correlation between people who are heavy readers and people who have great prose when they’re writing. And this shouldn’t be a surprise.

Like I said before, prose is more about how your brain processes ideas into words. That is how your brain is going to understand words and ideas: through the prose that you’re engaging with.

This is obviously easy for me to say. I came into the space as an avid fiction reader. I’ve been reading my entire life. I currently read one to two fiction books per week.

it may not be that way for you, but I’d say if you’re not someone who’s read a lot of fiction, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Particularly if you are wanting to improve your prose.

I notice a lot of people who come into this space – not really from the writing side, but more coming in from the marketing/money side – the thing that appeals to them about freelance writing is more of the career potential.

And while there’s nothing wrong with that, one of the defining factors I see with a lot of these individuals is they haven’t done a lot of reading.

When they come into this space, most of what they are reading is business books, and business blogs and things like that.

And there’s obviously nothing wrong with that. Obviously I write a lot of business blogs, myself.

But the style of writing that people tend to use in business books particularly is… frankly, shit.

It’s terrible prose.

It’s mediocre writing.

A lot of times it’s mediocre content and you are not going to become good at prose by reading business books.

If your brain learns to process words in terms of a business book, your prose is going to be weak.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t succeed with weak prose.

I actually have some students who I would consider to have somewhat weak prose, but they are very good at focusing on substance.

Expectations are important.

Your expectations will determine both your goals and how you evaluate your own performance along the way toward those goals.

In today’s episode, I want to help you set expectations for yourself in terms of writing productivity.

We’re going to cover how many hours per day most professional writers spend writing, how many hours you should spend writing if you are new to the field, and how many hours of writing per day are sustainable on a long-term basis.

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Share Your Thoughts

I hope this was helpful, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Do you agree? Do you disagree with the fierce heat of a thousand suns?

Let me know in the comments below.

Plus, if you have a question you want answered on a future Write Bites episode, ask in the comments or shoot me an email, and I’ll add it to the schedule.

In my opinion, the dream freelance writing scenario is built on retention.

You have 4-5 clients paying you a lucrative retainer, and you work with those same clients for years and years and years.

In this scenario, you get all the benefits of freelancing:

* Flexible hours and schedule

* Not dependent on any one boss/client

* High income

AND all the benefits of being employed:

* Stable, predictable work and income

* Familiar work atmosphere with ongoing relationships

* Growing expertise within a given company/niche/subject matter

Unfortunately, most freelancers never experience these benefits, because they don’t know how to retain clients.

In today’s episode, I cover four highly practical ways you can increase client retention as a freelance copywriter, so that you can have a better chance of building this dream scenario for your own business.

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Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites: a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing. 

In today’s episode, I’m going to be covering four different ways you can increase your retention as a freelance writer. 

We’re talking about getting contracts with clients that last longer, pay more, and are ultimately something that you can build your business around instead of having to scramble for new gigs month after month after month.

If that sounds interesting to you, stay tuned!

This episode of Write Bites is sponsored by Copy.AI, a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers skip writer’s block completely and quickly generate first draft copy for themselves and their businesses by harnessing the power of GPT-3 artificial intelligence. 

If you’d like to try out Copy.AI for yourself, head on over to https://copy.ai/jacob and you can get a 30 day free trial.

Okay guys, let’s dive in. 

We’re going to be covering four different ways that you can increase retention for your business as a freelance writer. And the first is relatively simple: focus on types of copywriting that facilitate retainers. 

Strategy #1: Focus On Writing Services With Built-In Retention 

A lot of new copywriters tend to gravitate towards types of copywriting that are a little bit more one-off in nature. Website copy, landing pages, sales page copy – even stuff like email sequences. 

And there’s nothing wrong with this. We’re going to be covering a way you can leverage these types of gigs for more retention. But the simplest way to increase retention is simply to focus on the types of gigs that result in ongoing work. 

So in particular, we’re talking about blog writing. We’re talking about email broadcasts. Emails that are ongoing: sales for eCommerce that need to be run every few weeks, broadcast emails that are designed to just nurture audiences, and stuff that needs to be generated each week.

Blogs are obviously the most common example here because you cannot get value from any given blog posts without having a lot more blog posts.

Any client that knows what they’re doing and is paying for blog content? They’re going to be paying for blog content pretty much forever.

So if you want more retention, going in and finding gigs built around these services that kind of have retention baked into them is a great strategy. Because then you do the work to land a new client and you didn’t just land a client that you’re going to have to replace next month.

If you land a blogging client this month – if you can do a good job for them and they know what they’re doing from a content marketing perspective – you could be working with them for the next five years. 

There are a LOT of different copywriting tips floating around on the internet.

But there’s only a few that are really going to move the needle.

In fact, 80-90% of all copywriting success can be explained in just four quick tips…

And in today’s episode of Write Bites, I’ll share them with you.

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Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites: a series of 10-minute videos on writing, marketing and freelancing.

There’s an endless number of tips, tactics, and techniques that you can use to improve your copy. But the reality is that most of them are fairly inconsequential.

They might improve things a little bit, but they aren’t going to have it a massive impact on your copy’s performance.

So in today’s episode, what I want to do is I want to cover the only four tips that you need to know in order to write great copy. If you can master these four tips, you’re going to write great copy every single time.

If you fail to do any one of these four tips, your copy is going to struggle.

So if you’ve been looking for some ways that you can meaningfully improve your copywriting performance, stay tuned. This is the episode for you.

Tip #1: Figure Out Who You’re Speaking To

First and foremost, you need to understand who you’re speaking to.

If you don’t know who you’re speaking to, you can’t really communicate with them effectively.

Let’s say I were to have you prepare a speech, and I told you “Hey – next week, I’m going to have you come in and give a presentation on building a business”.

So in your mind, you’re thinking: okay, this is for business owners. Maybe small business owners.

So you spend the next week preparing your presentation.

You think about the challenges that small businesses are facing, the potential hurdles that new small business owners might need to overcome as they’re looking to achieve profitability.

You put your whole presentation together. You’re ready to go. You walk in…

And it’s a class of fifth graders.

Suddenly everything that you’ve just prepared sort of goes out the window because this is a completely different audience.

If you’re going to speak to fifth graders about what it means to build a business, maybe you’re talking a bit more generally about entrepreneurship and helping them understand the concept of what owning a business is all about, or the place of small businesses in the economy, how small businesses impact their daily lives, things that they like that connect to people who have started these businesses.

What matters to fifth graders and what is it going to keep them interested – what is going to get them excited about the idea of growing a business – it’s going to be completely different than a group of adult active small business owners.

And that’s an extreme example, but I just want to illustrate the point that who you’re speaking to has a massive impact on what you’re saying, even when the topic is the same.

And continuing in line with this idea, it takes us into our second tip, which is the only thing that matters is what our target audience cares about.

Tip #2: Figure Out What Your Audience Cares About

One of the biggest problems that entrepreneurs, marketers, even new copywriters make when they’re coming in and writing copy is that they get very focused on the brand itself, the offer itself, or who they are working with to write this copy.

This is because when you’re speaking with a business owner about their company, they’re describing it to you the way they see it, the things that matter to them.

And what matters about the business to a business owner i...

Most freelancers approach sales calls the wrong way.

And it’s really unfortunate, because when you approach a sales call the right way, closing sales becomes… easy.

That’s not an exaggeration.

I close around 75% of the sales calls I get on, and the ones I don’t close are usually because I decide the prospect isn’t the right fit to work with me.

That’s not supposed to be a boast.

Sales calls will work this way for you too — as soon as you stop making these three mistakes.

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Share Your Thoughts

I hope this was helpful, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Do you agree? Do you disagree with the fierce heat of a thousand suns?

Let me know in the comments below.

Plus, if you have a question you want answered on a future Write Bites episode, ask in the comments or shoot me an email, and I’ll add it to the schedule.

A few months back, we talked about how GPT-3 could impact writers in the future.

Well kiddo, the future is now.

In today’s episode, I highlight four different ways that writers should be using GPT-3 RIGHT NOW.

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Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites: a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing.

In today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing four ways that copywriters should be using GPT-3 right now.

Not in the future, not when the technology gets better. This is four ways that you can be using this tech right now.

I’m going to tell you what those things are and I’m actually gonna show you exactly how to use them. It’s super simple. And I think you’re going to be really excited.

Important Announcements

Before we dive in, I have two pretty exciting announcements.

First of all, you can see in the background here that I’m in the process of moving down to San Diego this week. I’m really excited to have a little bit of a change of scenery.

If you’re in the area and you want to connect, definitely hit me up!

Second of all (and this is something that I’ve actually never done before. This is a first for me and I’m really excited about it!), my podcast and the Write Bites Youtube channel is now officially sponsored by CopyAI.

If you haven’t heard of CopyAI, they’re a company that helps marketers, business owners and writers leverage the GPT-3 technology with really simple, straightforward, easy-to-use tools.

Now, I absolutely love this tool.

I reached out to CopyAI when I first found out what they were doing.

I took one look at their tool and I thought “Wow, this is basically leveraging the GPT-3 technology in all the ways that I wanted to utilize the tech when it first came out”. But you couldn’t really do it just using their base “playground”.

If you were to just try to pull GPT-3 tech and use it for writing, it’d be like sitting down to a commercial espresso machine and trying to make a cup of coffee without knowing anything about espresso brewing.

What CopyAI does is they have written human-made instructions that go over GPT-3 and allow it to immediately understand what you’re looking for.

So if you want to write an email subject line, CopyAI has a tool built for email subject lines. All you have to do is enter a little bit of info about the topic and it’ll pop out seven different email subject lines generated using GPT-3.

It’s really cool. They’re helping ordinary people leverage this tool in a really smart way.

I reached out to them when I first came across this tool since I was really excited about it. I wanted to see how I could partner and work with them to help them make this tool most effective for writers.

As I talked about before when I was first covering GPT-3, I don’t see this technology as a threat for good writers.

I think there is a section of the writing market that’s very low-quality, where writers aren’t really looking to be good writers. They’re just looking to churn out a huge quantity of low-quality writing.

That corner of the market was always destined to be replaced. And so this tech will probably be part of replacing that market.

But for the most part, what really makes a writer effective and high-paid as a result is knowing the substance of what they’re writing – understanding the core substance of a piece.

GPT-3 – while it can generate ideas and language – can’t generate core substance for lengthier pieces of content.

Bottom line: it’s not a threat, it can actually be a really effective tool for your own personal productivity.

In this video, I’m going to be covering four different ways tha...