I get a lot of questions about pricing.

In this episode, I’m going to break down the two most common misconceptions writers have about pricing, and I’m going to give you a framework for pricing your freelance writing services that will maximize your income now AND through the rest of your career.

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Read The Transcript: How To Price Your Freelance Writing Services

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 pricing. I’m going to be touching on two very common misconceptions that writers—new and old—have about how pricing works and what they should be pricing.

And then I’m also going to be giving you a framework for how to price your services over the course of your career. 

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is I got a few questions from some of my course students over the last month about pricing, and I realized that even though I addressed it in the course, I hadn’t quite gone as in depth as I had originally been intending. 

So, over the last two weeks, I’ve been putting together a brand new, super in-depth, step-by-step lesson on how to price—which just got added to the course earlier this week. 

And while I was doing that, I was thinking, “Hm, you know, I should definitely touch on this in a Write Bites episode as well,” because this isn’t something I typically spend a whole lot of time talking about. Anyway, this is going to be my 10-minute spiel on everything pricing. 

Let’s dive in. 

For starters we need to address two common misconceptions about pricing:

First Misconception

Number one. A lot of new—especially new writers—get super preoccupied with what they charge on their first few projects, or even what they’re charging on their stuff through the first year of their career. 

The thing you need to understand is that it really doesn’t matter what you charge initially.

Really unimportant. 

In fact, if you are not on the clock because of a lost job and a bunch of bills you got to pay, I actually recommend that you undercharge through your first year to try to maximize the workload that you go through. 

The more time you can spend working on real projects and increasing your mastery as fast as possible through that first year—that’s going to pay multiples in the following years in terms of your earning potential, because you’re going to have increased your mastery much quicker than if you’re just chasing higher rates through that first year. I see a lot of writers who are three years in, and they’ve only worked on like 20 projects.

And sure. Maybe they charged a rate on those 20 that the average three-year copywriter would be a little jealous of, but at the end of the day, they made less over the course of three years than other writers who are charging less because they just worked on a massively smaller volume of work. As a result, their mastery curve is way behind than if they had worked on a hundred projects over those three years. 

All that to say: don’t get hung up on what you charge early. What matters is what you charge over the course of years. And the framework I’m going to provide in this episode will help you maximize your earning on that, in that scope of years.

Second Misconception

The second misconception people have is that pricing is directly connected to value. People think that they need to identify the true value of their work and price it around that. But frankly, in a free market system, that’s not true at all. Pricing is not about what it’s worth,

It’s important to celebrate your wins as a freelancer.

That’s why we have something called “Ring The Bell” in our Write Minds community, where any time someone experiences a win, they share it with the group, and we all get excited.

A few weeks back, course student and Write Minds member CJ Haughey posted the following message on our community Slack:

CJ is one of two community members who crossed the $10k milestone for the first time in the last month, and I knew I had to get him on the podcast to talk about his journey and what made the difference in getting him to five figures per month.

In this episode, CJ walks us through his journey over the last 3 years and tells us the specific changes he made to go from casual dabbler to committed freelancer, from sporadic income to a stable $3k per month, and then from $3k per month to more than $10k per month.

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Share Your Thoughts

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

I’d also love to get your thoughts on the new interview edition. Do you want more 10-15 minute interviews? Or would you prefer if I keep it to just shooting the shit while walking around the neighborhood?

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.

A lot of freelancers seem to think that November and December aren’t great months to land new clients.

In my career, December & January were always my two biggest months of the year, and the work to make that happened started in November.

If you want to leverage the holiday season to make this quarter your best yet, listen to today’s Write Bites episode or read the transcript below.

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Read The Transcript: Why The Holidays Can Mean BIG Money For Freelance Writers

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

In this episode, I want to talk with you about the upcoming holiday season and what you should expect as a freelance writer. We’re going to talk about how you should approach this next two months, what your expectations should be, and how the next two months could potentially set you up for the best year yet in your career in 2021. So let’s dive in. 

Now, when a lot of people think about the holiday season, they envision people being out of the office, gone for holidays, phoning it in–a work version of senioritis. I get a lot of people emailing me and asking me, “are people even going to respond to me when I’m pitching over the next few months?”

In my experience, the holiday season is actually the best time of year to close new business. When I look back over my eight year career, historically December and January have been the two most lucrative months year in and year out. Both in terms of closing, raw numbers, but also in terms of contracts closed that extend through a good chunk of the year.

The reason for this and the mentality that I want to shift you into as you view the holiday season as a freelancer, solopreneur, or service provider, this is the time of year that people who did not have a great 2020 are reevaluating their strategies heading into the new year.

So, people where things may be stagnated or started declining, which is a huge chunk of businesses, they’re looking at this time of year. They’re really coming face to face with the idea that, “hey, what I did this last year is not going to work, and I need to take a new approach heading into 2021.”

Now, assuming the answer to that is not, “hey, we’re changing our product line” or “I’m scrapping this business and starting a new business,” which regardless of whether or not that should be what they’re doing, most business owners are going to hold onto their babies. They see what they’re currently doing as their child and aren’t going to want to change it.

So what that means for the vast majority of business owners is they need to change their marketing. Either they need to invest in new marketing channels or they need to switch up their marketing providers–the people who they’re currently working with. Maybe they have full-time hires that just aren’t working out and they are like, “okay, I’m going to scrap this and put the money into an agency or a freelancer.” Maybe they’re already working with freelancers or agencies that haven’t been working out, so they switched them. 

But that’s what happens. This is the time of year between November and January where that happens. A lot of the deals that you’ll close, especially the larger deals that you’ll close in January…the seeds for that will be planted in November and December.

Now this doesn’t just apply to failing businesses. This is just as true for successful businesses, businesses that have been kicking ass this last year, heading into the new year. they’re looking to double down on what they’ve done. They’re looking at the next year and going “we did a really great job this last year and we want to keep the momentum going. We want to continue scaling.

One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is purchase an online business bringing in at least $1,000 per month and then try to optimize and grow it.

I figured my three main skill sets of copywriting, SEO, and content marketing would be a great fit for this type of endeavor, and then I could look to either resell it at a higher price or simply retain the monthly cashflow as income.

This is not that story.

Instead, this is the story of how I spent $60,000 to buy a 7-year-old recipe blog instead of making a similarly priced real estate investment… and then did absolutely nothing to it… much the same as I would have treated a real estate investment.

Here’s what happened.

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Read The Blog Post

This started as a blog post writeup, so if you’d prefer to check that out, you can read the full blog post here.

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.

I would be completely within my rights as both a tasteless writer and purveyor of dad jokes to open this post with a Shakespeare quote.

You know the one.

…

And just like that, I don’t even need to say it.

You did it for me.

Lol loser!

In this episode, I’m going to give you my take on what you should name your freelancing writing brand.

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Read The Transcript: What To Name Your Freelance Writing Brand

Hi guys. Welcome to Write Bites, a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing and freelancing. 

In this episode, I’m going to answer the question, “What should you name your freelance business?” .

There are two typical options that most writers are considering when they are going about naming their business. 

The first option is to name it after their own personal name, like I have. If you look me up anywhere online, I’m under the Jacob McMillan brand. 

Alternatively, you can come up with your own brand name from scratch. Some examples of this include Business Casual Copywriting, Men with Pens, Copycat, Very Good Copy—anything that you can come up with. 

It doesn’t even need to have something about writing or copy in it, but if you come up with a brand from scratch, that is the other option available to you. When you’re thinking about which one of these to choose, there are some pros and cons to each one. 

That’s what we’re going to cover in this video, and I’m also going to give you my personal opinion on what I think is objectively the better choice for most copywriters.

Reasons “for” using your own name

Typically, the simplest option when you’re first launching a copywriting business is to name your brand after your own personal name. There are some significant advantages to going this route. 

The first one is that you are building your own personal brand. And the significance here is that any amount of time you spend building your own brand—building a brand attached to your name—is never truly going to be lost.

For example, if you choose to completely pivot down the road and go in an entirely different direction, you don’t lose all that work that you’ve put into branding yourself and building your own personal brand, because it’s your own personal brand. It’s built around you; you didn’t disappear.

You may have taken a different direction. You may be working on a different business. But the people who are connected to you are connected to you personally, regardless of the specific task or career or business that you are running. 

It isn’t quite the same if you spend five years building a dedicated separate brand. For example, say you came up with Copy Team—something super generic—hopefully no one else’s name out there, so whatever I say in this example doesn’t connect to anything.

Let’s say you name yourself Copy Team and you spend five years building the Copy Team brand, and then you decide that you want to go develop an e-commerce fashion line. 

All of a sudden, all this work that you’ve put into building the Copy Team—if you aren’t actively selling anything through the Copy Team anymore—most of that branding is now for nothing. 

Most of the followers to that brand, most of the work you’ve put getting that brand name around the web—once you stop operating that specific brand, or alternatively once, even if you kept the same business but re-branded—you end up losing a lot on the way. 

Ultimately, that’s the advantage of the personal brand: Any work you put into investing in a personal brand never disappears as long as you don’t disappear—as long as it’s still you, as long as you don’t change your name or whatever.

Welcome to Write Bites: Interview Edition, where I bring on a guest to discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing.

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In this episode, I interview freelance writer Declan Davey on how he used my SEO techniques to rank #1 for his copywriting niche via a brand new website.

 

 

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Read The Transcript: How Declan Davey Became The #1 Search Result For His Copywriting Niche

Okay, awesome, so we have Declan Davey here, and Declan is the first person in the last three years to take me up on the challenge of ranking for a niche copywriting term. He was able to recently hit the number-one spot for the term he targeted. 

I’m going let him tell you guys about that and dig into a little bit of how he did it, how long it took, and then also some other thoughts on how he’s been growing his business. Declan, thanks for hopping on. Can you tell us what is the term that you are now ranking for? 

Declan: Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me, Jacob. The term is health and wellness copywriter which, in the last couple of weeks, has hit result one on page one. 

Jacob: Awesome. 

Declan: I managed to rank, I think number two as well for health copywriter, a separate page, and then alternative health copywriter on another page after that.

I really have you to thank for the inspiration and the guidelines. I read your guide back in March—April—this year, and I was like: Challenge accepted. Let’s get to work. 

And yeah, obviously, it took some time to do my research and get a sense of what my competitors were doing: the kind of word counts there were on the top-ranking pages; how their pages were structured; and come up with a strategy:

“How can I make a better page that is going to outrank them?” 

I used a variety of writing techniques, SEO strategy—trying to make the pages:

Long enough… so, I think the health and wellness copywriter example came in around 3000 words… and I think the top-ranking one before that was maybe 1800, something like that.

Jacob: Okay, so basically, you close to doubled it just to make extra sure that you’d have the edge.

Declan: Yeah. I thought I’d guarantee that. 

Jacob: That’s awesome. And a few quick questions…. How long had your site been live prior to doing this?

Declan: Not long at all. Not long at all. I think I bought the domain around April and then was building the site quite comprehensively throughout April and May…

Jacob: That’s April of 2020!

Declan: Yup. 

Jacob: Okay, so this is a brand new site that you were able to get this ranking on, and you started the actual process of targeting this keyword—when? 

Declan: I would say early May, right at the start of May. 

Jacob: Okay, so we’re talking really only about four full months to rank for this term, which is kind of right in the vein of what I was talking about in my challenge about how wide open this opportunity is. 

Man, that is the perfect case study because it’s a brand new domain, and you literally right off the bat are targeting this and got it in only four months. Pretty incredible. 

I’m curious to hear… obviously, you mentioned the length. I noticed as well that rather than doing a service page, you opted to do, kind of like, a guide to hiring that type of copywriter. What led to that decision? Was length a part of it, like, “Hey, I don’t know if I could do 3K-words on a service page?” 

Declan: Not so much, really. I was more thinking about trying to be a voice of authority in that particular niche, and not trying to go too much with the hard sell—stay off of that.

Jacob: Okay

Declan: More demonstrating value upfront, but also peppering relevant calls to action throughout the page… subtly saying, “Hey, my services are available if you click this button or fill o...

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

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In Episode #24, I break down how to get started as a copywriter when you have no portfolio.

 

 

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Read The Transcript: How To Get Started As A Copywriter With NO PORTFOLIO

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

One of the biggest hurdles that really trips up aspiring writers who are wanting to get into the space, but struggling to take action, is the idea of landing those first few gigs. 

There’s sort of this belief that if you don’t have a portfolio, if you don’t have any previous experience, no one’s going to hire you. When I tell these people, “hey, you just need to get out and pitch,” It’s kind of like telling someone, “hey, just go get a job.”

[“How to get a job” clip from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia].

So in this episode, I want to do three things. I want to explain to you what clients are actually looking for in a portfolio so that you’re aiming for something that’s actually going to help you, and not just your own misguided, preconceived notion of what a portfolio should be. 

Two, I want to explain how to quickly create your own portfolio without needing to jump through a bunch of hoops, or even work on a bunch of real projects. 

Three, I want to explain to you why you don’t really need a portfolio to get started, and why the feeling that you do need a portfolio is really more based on a misunderstanding of how pitching works. 

Alright, let’s start with number one. So when most people think about a portfolio, they’re imagining some fairly extensive collection of work with impressive brands, testimonials, all of this, that and the other. They have this idea that the client’s going to get into this portfolio and spend some time going around and looking at all the examples, maybe even comparing those examples against other copywriters. 

But in reality, this is pretty much never what happens. When we talk about how a client actually engages with the portfolio, they’re probably only looking at one, maximum two pieces. And what they’re mostly looking for is just to verify that you’ve done a similar type of work to what you’re offering…what they’re looking to hire you for…that you’ve done before with the client that is reasonably similar to them. 

So if you have a really relevant example, that’s going to be more impactful to them than this huge body of work. 

Now, that’s not to say that having a big body of work won’t impress some clients and won’t potentially help you land some gigs. It could. But for the vast majority of clients that you’re reaching out to, they really just care about having that one or two really relevant examples. 

Even in my own work, and what I recommend to writers I work with who have even more experience than I do, I actually never advised to send a client to your full portfolio. Instead I have people send them the one or two very specific examples that look most like the gig that they’re proposing. That’s worked very well for me, that’s worked very well for my students, and it just makes sense when you think about it.

As a busy business owner, do you really have time to go through and analyze all these different blog posts? Are you probably even reading fully through those two examples? Probably not. A blog post is a very low investment in terms of content marketing, and when you’re hiring a writer for like a blog post, or an email, or…a little less so with website copywriting,

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

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In Episode #23, I break down four common misconceptions that a lot of writers bring into freelancing.

 

 

Read The Transcript: Four Common Misconceptions Writers Bring Into Freelancing

Hey guys, and welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

So in this episode, I want to talk about common misconceptions that writers bring into freelancing. And these are not exclusive to beginners. I’ve actually found that a lot of times the mistakes that people bring in initially… oftentimes they don’t actually figure out the reality on their own, even after years in the field. You do tend to learn and overcome some of these misconceptions over time. But that said, whether you’re a beginner, aspiring, or have been freelancing for several years, you might still have one of these misconceptions. So let’s dive in.

The first one, and probably the biggest one, is that people care about your background. There’s this common belief that people care about your past work experience, or your credentials, or where you went to school, or even what country you live in, or this, that, and the other. There’s all these things that people come in assuming that clients are going to care about.  And the reality is they almost never do.

In the eight years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never once had someone ask me where I went to college or what my degree was in. And it has never once come up in the process of closing a client. No one ever has asked me if I have copywriting credentials or this, that, and the other. It just doesn’t happen because the reality is, people really only care about, “can you solve my problem? Can you do the writing that I need?” And so if you can do that, if you can either demonstrate that you’ve done it with one other person, or if you can create an “in” for yourself in terms of doing an initial low investment test project for a client before they commit to the bigger gig, that’s your ticket in. it’s not your background, it’s not your experience. It’s not even really your portfolio. Your ticket in is good work. So that’s number one. 

Number two is that business owners are comparing you and your credentials against a bunch of other copywriters. There’s this idea that any time a business owner goes out and hires a freelance writer, they’re going through this lengthy due diligence process of comparing them against a bunch of other similar copywriters and picking the one they like best. That’s not to say that that never happens. But the reality is if, against what I teach, you’re spending most of your time on job boards and third party platforms like Upwork / Fiverr, you are going to be actively competing against a lot of other copywriters, and they probably are comparing you. But if you’re going out and pitching businesses directly, that’s not what’s happening. And a lot of times people who even go and seek out copywriters on their own, [for them] it’s not a matter of finding ten different ones. It’s more like one, maybe two going, “hey, who do we know that does copywriting? Let’s get them in and see if they’ll work.” It’s pretty much that simple. 

Just a few weeks ago, I had in the back of my mind been wanting to do some guest podcasting. For several months I was thinking, man, I really don’t want to do the outreach for guest podcasting. it’d be really nice to have like a booking agency. Then one day I get a pitch from someone pitching me on their podcast booking agency. It showed up in my inbox, and I was like,

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

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In Episode #22, I break down the four things that successful copywriters do on a weekly and even daily basis.

 

 

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Read The Transcript: Four Things Successful Copywriters Do Every Single Week

Hey guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood. 

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about what a copywriter actually does. We’ll go through four things that tend to take up the vast majority of a copywriter’s time on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. 

Before we dive in, I just want to clarify that three out of these four things are going to be specific to freelance copywriters. If you are an in-house copywriter—if you are aspiring to write for another employer and not be in the freelance game—you can essentially knock off three of these four things; you’re going to be spending the vast majority of your time writing. You’re going to get a lot of writing practice. 

If you’re looking to get into this field and would prefer to start with an in-house position, I totally endorse that. There are not a lot of downsides to getting paid to be trained. So if you’re not necessarily looking for the benefits and the freedom of freelancing—you just want to get rolling on this career in the quickest way possible—grabbing an entry-level position is a very viable option.

The one thing I would add is that you are going to discover, fairly quickly—and by that, I mean probably within your first year—that you are getting drastically underpaid. 

As an in-house writer who is writing full-time, once you get to the point where you’re feeling pretty confident in your work—which if you’re writing full-time is probably going to be around the six to nine month mark—you’re going to immediately look over at people doing half the work, half the actual volume of writing that you’re doing, and see that they’re making more than you. 

Those people are freelancers, and so you’re probably very quickly going to be tempted to get out and go the freelance route, assuming you actually want to take on the additional challenges of bringing in your own clientele. So, just something to keep in mind.

Now, getting past that, going into what freelance copywriters do, there are four main things that are going to occupy your time on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. These are:

1. Writing copy: first and foremost, you’re going to spend a good amount of time writing. 

2. Pitching new clients: if you are a successful freelance copywriter, you will be spending a significant portion of your time pitching every single week. The mantra that I hammer into my students over and over and over is: 20 pictures per week, 20 pitches per week, 20 pitches per week. It doesn’t matter if you have no clients; it doesn’t matter if you have more clients than you want. Increased demand is always a good thing; it’s going to allow you to be even more selective and raise your rates.  Ultimately, that’s when you want to raise your rates—when you are getting more demand than you can handle. So even if you have as much demand as you want, continue pitching. Continue generating that demand. 

3. Managing your existing clients: this can go anywhere from ‘barely a thought’ to ‘an absolute time-draining pain.’ 

4. Marketing your brand: you don’t necessarily need to spend as much time on marketing in your first year to maybe three years.  Pitching is your short-term growth mechanism, but over time, you’re going to want to start adding in some m...

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

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In Episode #20, we dive into why the freelance business model has taken over the world. I think understanding how it works will help you better understand how to work it (ba dumb shhhh).

 

 

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Read The Transcript: Why Freelancing Has Taken Over The World

Hey guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood. 

As you can see, I am not walking around the neighborhood because it is still a bit smokey, and I’m not quite ready to resume my walks. Waiting for the air quality to get just a bit better.

So, I am recording this in the office, and the topic I want to discuss today is the freelance business model:

Why is it so lucrative? Why is it such a superior option that has completely changed the landscape of clients and business owners alike over the last 10 years relative to the previous model?

I wanted to dive into this because I noticed that a lot of questions that come up on freelancing, and more specifically freelance writing, really stemmed from people not understanding how businesses work in the first place and the advantages that freelancing provides, if you are approaching it correctly.

So, to go back to the beginning, let’s talk about how businesses worked before the internet changed things and made people more accessible. Let’s continue with the writing business model and talk about what the previous version of a writing business looked like. It’s going to apply to many other business models as well, but the direct comparison will make it a bit easier to wrap your head around it. 

Previously, if you wanted to offer writing as a service, what did you do? You went and got hired by a writing firm or some sort of firm that heavily utilized writers.

Picture the traditional idea of the mad men style advertising where most of the people are either falling in the category of the visual creative or the copywriter. The same was true for pretty much any other form of direct sales writing, freelance-style writing, or copywriting that was going to be used in the business sense.

If you wanted to work on projects like that, you went and got hired by a firm. That’s what you did. Why did the firms have the writing jobs to offer? Why were they the only game in town? Because they were the ones who were out selling this service to other businesses.

In a firm, there was a full-time sales team at work. Depending on how the firm was arranged, you might have the upper-level copywriting partners who worked their way through the firm. They then become the leads on going out and securing business by connecting with other people who are at the top of their firms and saying, “Hey, you know, we’re going to  have a $500 meal together. And then, at the end, you give your firm’s business to my firm and we do the work for you.”

That’s basically how it worked. And there were different scales of that. You had smaller firms, you had bigger firms, you had firms in-between. But that’s how it worked. You had a sales department that secured the business or upper-level partners, the upper-level executives, who are the ones networking with executives from other companies to secure some of those bigger contracts.

Now let’s look at how that worked from the side of someone who needs copywriting for their business. 

Let’s say I am the business owner of Ogilvy. I’m selling a cleaning product that helps people to clean their carpets, clean their clothes, whatever. It helps get stains out—a stain remover. I want to get this product out and in front of people.