In today’s episode I answer a listener question I get pretty frequently.

“Do I need to understand an industry in order to write copy for it?”

This is a question that a lot of freelance copywriters ask themselves. And I totally get it – it makes sense that you should stick with what you know best, right?

Maybe not.

In fact, sometimes deep knowledge of an industry can even be counter-productive if you want to write great copy.

In today’s episode, I explain why.

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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 want to answer a question from Mike.

Mike asked: “Do I need to understand a particular industry in order to write copy for that industry?” – and I think this is a pretty great question.

I’ve gotten it several times in the past, and so I wanted to take a moment and dive into that on this episode.

It’s All About The “Why”

Now, when you think about copywriting, you know that you need to really understand the customer. And so what can happen is a lot of times people think that also means they need to really understand the company and by extension the technology or the particular solution that the company is selling.

And so the idea becomes that if you don’t understand this industry very well, or this technology very well, or this particular niche very well, them you’re probably gonna struggle to write copy for a specific business in this industry. And the reality is that’s just not the case.

Or at least, in most cases, it’s not true.

The first thing we have to understand is that the most important aspect of copywriting is not what or how. It’s why.

It’s the core reason that your customer base is going to want to purchase the product or solution that you are offering.

And you’ll find as you work across various industries and niches that the why is kind of always essentially the same.

Make it easier, make it faster, make it more profitable, make it more reliable, make it more secure and make it more enjoyable, make it more effective, make it doable in the first place, et cetera, et cetera.

And the application is obviously gonna vary across every product, every company, every industry, every niche, but it all boils down to the same thing. People make purchasing decisions based on the benefit more than the specific feature or how to.

Now, obviously this isn’t always the case, particularly when you get into really saturated industries and products. Or places where a product is competing against a lot of very established products.

In that case, maybe there’s a particular feature or a particular aspect of how the product or service is delivered that provides its unique value proposition.

So this isn’t necessarily a universal idea, but you’ll find – by and large – most purchasing decisions all boil down to the same core rationale – the same core reasons that people have to make purchases.

Whether I’m purchasing email software, or whether I’m purchasing a new desk for my office, the core reasons I might choose to go with any given company are often the same.

If It’s Too Complex For You, It’s Too Complex For The Reader

The second reason you don’t necessarily have to really understand an industry to write copy for it is that most of a given company’s customers aren’t really gonna understand the technology.

If the explanation of how it works is too complex for you to understand, it’s also probably too complex for a lot of the customer base to understand.

Now, again, obviously this is relative.

I got my bachelors degree in accounting, and up to this point, I don’t think I’ve fully appreciated how scary finances and taxes can be for new freelancers.

I was talking with several writers the other day and realized that many of them had never even heard of an IRA, let alone an individual 401k (the account I use to reduce my tax payments by $7,000+ every year).

In this episode, I give you three simple tax tips that will make your life easier AND put a lot more money in your pocket… or at least your retirement savings.

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

In this episode, we’re going to be covering three tax tips that are relatively simple, pretty easy to implement but could be incredibly effective, especially if you’re doing your own taxes. And even if you’re working with a tax professional, these could be pretty helpful for you as well.

So with that said, let’s dive straight into it.

Tip #1: Keep Your Business & Personal Expenses Separate

The first and simplest tax tip is to set up a separate business account and card that you use to cover your expenses.

Probably the biggest hassle that many freelancers have coming to the end of the year is sitting down and going through their expenses and categorizing them by which of them are business expenses and which of them are personal expenses. And if you’re running all of it through the same card, it’s just going to be a huge chunk of time.

There’s just a lot of ways that things can slip through the cracks. And it’s just a whole lot of hassle that you really don’t need to have.

Setting up a business account is super easy. And then having a dedicated card, you can just run all your tools, any expense that you entail, – regardless of what you’re doing – can run through that card and it just makes it really easy to calculate at the end of the year. I’m really glad. I took way too long to do this, and I’m really glad that it is now in place because it makes things a lot easier for me. One less thing to think about. It’s one less thing to track.

Revenue usually pretty simple because you’ll funnel most of your revenue through the same places and it’s just the actual revenue payments tend to not be such a high number that its a pain in the ass to sort at the end of the year.

Expenses, on the other hand… it just can be, you know, hundreds and hundreds of line items. Even little small stuff. So something I recommend: set up that business account. It’ll make things a lot easier, especially if you’re doing your own taxes.

But even if you’re working with a tax accountant – like I do – I still have to send him the full list. Like I still have to send them the itemized list. So regardless, I highly recommend that.

And in a similar vein, track your revenue and expenses monthly, – at the end of every month, instead of at the end of the year.

Tip #2: Tracks Your Income & Expenses Monthly, Not Yearly

Just from a highly practical standpoint, you’re going to end up catching expenses that you didn’t realize were still rolling.

I once found out at the end of the year that a SAAS tool I wasn’t even using – that I hadn’t even signed up for their paid account – had been charging me for the entire year. And it was a substantial amount of money.

If I had caught that earlier, would’ve saved me a bunch of money. Finding stuff like that is something that tracking monthly is going to help you with.

And in a similar vein it also just gives you a better handle on how your business is actually doing.

In this episode, copywriter Cole Schafer explains how to make your writing brand stand out.

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If you’d like to learn more from Cole, click here to check out his website, newsletters, and courses.

Share Your Thoughts

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

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

Ghostwriting is something that pretty much every freelancer is going to do at some point in their career.

And make no mistake – there’s major money to be made doing so if you play your cards right.

Since I’m all about helping you guys hit your freelance goals, this is the perfect topic for our next episode.

Today, we’re going to talk about ghostwriting: what it is, and what you should know before offering it as a service.

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Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites, a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing. In this episode, I’m going to be answering the question: what is ghostwriting? And should you be doing ghostwriting as part of your freelance work?

So if you’ve never heard the term before, ghostwriting is essentially just writing that is done by someone other than the credited author.

For example, within my own work, I’ll often have pieces that are very data-heavy or require a bunch of examples that I don’t really want to spend the time to go and do.

In this scenario, I will hire a ghost writer to send me an initial first draft where they go through and find these examples and write up some initial ideas and insights.

In this context – and this is how ghostwriting should be done – they are fully aware that they are being hired for a ghostwriting project that they will not be credited on. And in my case, I will often end up rewriting almost all of the content – or at minimum about half of it.

Now some people will just hire people to come in and do fully ghostwritten pieces that they barely touch. And this is very common in the industry as well. Even when we talk about full-length books, most of the business books that you see are not written by the credited author.

And in any case where the subject matter expert is not a writer, but they want to create a thought leadership piece – which books tend to work very well as – they will hire a ghost writer to come in and take either their core ideas or come up with ideas of their own to create this book.

So it’s very common, all throughout writing. I would say probably 50% of the writing that you have read to this point in your life has been ghostwritten.

It’s a common part of writing.

It’s a very large segment of the freelancing world, so I just want to dive into it and talk about it.

It’s one of those things that when a lot of new writers first discover it, it throws them for a loop.

They’re not really sure how to engage with it because on the one hand you want to get credited. You want to put your name out there. But on the other hand, a lot of the paid work out there is looking for ghostwriters, not credited authors.

So how do you approach this?

You’re Probably Going To Do Both

First of all, I want you to understand that if you have a successful writing career, you will very likely do both.

You’ll do credited work. And you’ll do ghostwritten work. In fact, a lot of probably your biggest paychecks might even come from the ghostwritten work.

Just understand right up front that this is – and should be – a part of your portfolio.

Now where we can get into some, some weird areas are, a lot of times, people won’t really be up front about it. They’ll hire you for pieces and won’t say clearly “Hey, this is going to be ghostwritten. You will not be credited for this.”

That’s really where you run into issues: when either you or the client isn’t being upfront about expectations.

And so it’s important that, from the get go, you’re being clear with this.

Set Separate Rates For Credited & Uncredited Work

Writing and marketing are both fun, because you can be kicking ass for YEARS and then wake up one morning feeling like a complete fraud.

It’s so prevalent, it’s become something of a running joke among writers and marketers alike.

And that’s why today, I’m putting on my buzzkill pants and swooping in to kill the joke.

In this episode, I’m going to teach you three strategies to absolutely crush imposter syndrome… permanently.

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

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about Imposter Syndrome and I’m going to be giving you three strategies to beat Imposter Syndrome now and throughout the rest of your career.

This is not an issue that is specific to beginners. I know people who have been in the game for 10 or 15 years and still struggle with this. You’ll find that simply having experience – simply knowing how to do something – isn’t usually enough to fully beat that Imposter Syndrome. You need a clear strategy and that’s what we’re going to cover here.

#1: Do Things That Make You Feel Legit

So a lot of people, their biggest challenge with Imposter Syndrome is that it’s usually vague. You don’t necessarily know why you feel like it. You just think “Hey, this person is legit. I’m not”, or “I’m not really sure if I’m legit”.

How do you beat that?

You get specific.

When you start to have those feelings, think about someone who’s a non-imposter. Someone who you’re like, “Oh, they’re legit. They know what they’re doing. They got their shit together.”

And ask yourself… what can they do – or what about them, what qualities about them, what masteries, what specific achievements do they have that I don’t feel like I could match? What is that gap? What’s the thing that’s keeping me from being a non-imposter? And then go try it.

So, for example, if you’re like “Hey, legit people get published on Forbes”, or on HubSpot, or whatever the big blog is in your niche – or the big publication – wherever the thing is that you think “Hey, that’s where the legit people get published.” Go try to get published there!

Go look through what’s getting published on that site and pitch something that you think could get on.

Strategize: what are the types of posts that these publications want? And then send it to them.

You’ll find that it really doesn’t have anything to do with quality and expertise, or any of these things that you think are like a dividing line.

It has more to do with understanding their own system, their own ecosystem the specific way things work in a given niche or a given platform or a given circle.

If you’re just intentional, a lot of times you can infiltrate these things and you can accomplish something that you previously may have thought was outside of your depth.

#2: Find Ways You Can Have an Impact

In a similar example, if you think, “Hey – real pros, they’re publishing case studies about how they got 100% ROI for a client.”

Have you ever tried to get 100% ROI for a client?

A lot of times if you’re just a blog writer and you’re just writing blogs, you don’t even have a chance to get 100% ROI for a client. Companies that you’re working with probably aren’t even telling you about their stats, you know?

So put yourself in a position where you could actually find out the impact that you’re having.

In this episode, I’m going to be answering the question, how much money do you need to start a writing business?

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Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites, a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing. In this episode, I’m going to be answering the question, how much money do you need to start a writing business?

And this is a pretty common question I get, whether it’s related to, how much startup capital do I need to launch or more commonly, – it gets asked associated with my paid comprehensive course. It’s the idea that after the investment of getting this course, how much additional money am I going to need to actually make this business work?

The Most Important Answer

And the thing I want you to know first and foremost is that the answer is $0.

You don’t need any upfront capital to start a writing or in most cases, any sort of a service business outside of something that requires some sort of unique software.

That is the beauty of launching a service-based business. You’re not dealing with any cost of goods. You’re not dealing with any manufacturing costs.

You’re selling your time.

And in most cases that doesn’t come with any sort of overhead. It doesn’t come with any sort of, upfront costs that you have to invest.

And this applies to courses as well. As I tell all my readers and watchers and listeners, you don’t need to purchase a course even to succeed in this business.

At the end of the day, succeeding in any service business comes down to just two things:

* Can you perform the service at an acceptable level?

* Can you get that service in front of enough people that a small percentage of them will say, yes, and pay you for it.

That’s all it comes down to.

And you don’t need any money, especially if we’re talking specifically about writing, you don’t need a dollar to start doing that right now. You can go out and start pitching your writing services with no expenses.

The Answer You’re Actually Looking For

So that said, the core answer is zero.

But the secondary answer, a lot of times what people are looking for, is there any way that I can invest money to achieve a better result?

Whether it’s to grow faster, whether it’s to secure tools that will help me succeed, whether it’s to increase my ceiling. And the answer there it, to some extent is, yes, you can find things to invest in.

Which of those you want to invest in: it comes down to your unique situation, and it also comes down to whether or not you found your flywheel – your kind of core process for growing your business.

So we’re going to dig into that a little bit, and I’m going to walk through that over the rest of this episode. But just to reiterate, when we’re talking about launching a service business, particularly writing, you do not need any money to start right now and go get actual results, start landing, actual paying clients.

They may not be super high paying clients. They probably won’t be, unless you’re coming in with, professional writing experience from a full-time job or some other background, you’re probably going to start with low paying gigs and that’s okay.

That’s how virtually all of us start.

And honestly, if you’re in a situation where you have more time on your hands and not a lot of extra money on your hands, that’s the way you want to do it.

Don’t sink money that you can’t afford to lose even in training, even in my training. Because at the end of the day, there’s no reason to when you can just immediately go out and start pitching.

It happens every year.

Millions of people begin the New Year with a metric ton of motivation to hit their goals and the determination that THIS YEAR, it’s going to be different.

And by the time February rolls around, it’s back to business as usual.

When this happens, the typical response is to blame a lack of motivation, and that’s why a TON of people think they have a motivation problem.

They’re wrong.

The problem isn’t actually motivation.

The problem is how people set their goals and expectations.

And that’s why in today’s episode, I’m going to teach you three things that will help you make THIS year the year that you hit your goals in every area of life.

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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.

Yesterday, I taught a 2-hour session on creating longform content with around 40 writers, and I’m sharing the most valuable 10-minute segment with you in today’s Write Bites episode.

While the big key that I focus on here is conceptual, once it sinks in, it will have a much bigger impact on your writing than any tip or technique I could teach you.

This clip also includes three specific applications out of around 10 we covered on the call.

I think you’ll get a lot out of it!

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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 this episode, consulting coach Michael Zipursky explains how to position yourself as a consultant.

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Learn More From Michael Zipursky

If you’d like to learn more from Michael about being a consultant, head on over to his site Consulting Success for some great consulting resources.

Share Your Thoughts

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

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

In this episode, freelance writer and writing coach Carol Tice explains how freelancers can thrive during a recession.

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Learn More From Carol Tice

If you’d like to learn more from Carol, click the link below to get her 12-point plan for thriving in hard times.

Click here to download The Recession-Proof Freelancer (free).

If you are in the beginning stages of your writing journey and would like to join a community of writers, there’s no better place for you than the Freelance Writer’s Den.

Click here to join for just $9 (community closes in a week).