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 #7, I talk about something that is somehow every new freelance writer’s favorite topic – niche – and why it’s both wildly overhyped and a bit underrated. If that’s not the most effective curiosity hook of your week, I don’t know what is.

 

 

Transcript: Why Choosing A Freelance Writing Niche Is Wildly Overrated

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.

So today, I wanted to talk about NICHE. Niche seems to be a favorite topic among freelance writers. I get asked about it all the time. And I see somewhat conflicting advice on it.

And because of that, I would say that choosing a niche as a freelancer is both wildly over-hyped and a bit underrated.

So to explain that, what it really comes down to is the stage of your career. When you are early in your career, niche is moderately helpful, and that’s about it.

I would say it is moderately helpful if you can choose it relatively quickly and then stop worrying about it. If it’s something that you worry about, if it’s something you’re constantly re-evaluating, if it’s something that feels confusing to you, then it is going to be a net negative for you, and I would recommend that you ignore it altogether.

On the other end of the equation, when we’re talking about a more advanced freelance writer, and by that, I mean you have freelanced a minimum of five years and really invested a lot of time in mastery. Five years. Completely full-time. For most people, we’re talking closer to 10+ years of being a freelance writer to kind of be in that more advanced category.

When you’re there, or close to there, that’s where having a niche that you’ve been focused on for a period of years can really start to pay off for you.

To dig into both of those things, let’s talk about what niche does for you and what it doesn’t do for you.

What niche does for you is it adds a level of specificity to your pitch, to your value proposition.

If you work specifically within a certain niche, that makes you more appealing to people in that niche because they know, “Hey, you don’t work with everyone else, you work with me.” If you say, “Hey, I’m a medical copywriter,” then when you’re talking with some sort of medical business, they know that you’ve spent a lot of your time working on medical projects and that you’re specifically focused on that niche. By virtue of you saying, “I’m a medical copywriter” on your website and your branding, you are excluding many other brands.

Clients know that, so they understand that there’s a greater value to them by virtue of your specificity of focus. And in reality, that’s also where we get the other benefit of your spending a lot of time working in the same area, and you develop significant expertise in that area.

If you’re working with medical businesses for five years, you’re going to have a lot more niche-specific expertise in that area than other copywriters. What that translates to is—in conjunction with 5+ years building a business, in conjunction with all this time you’ve spent getting your brand out there, building your lead generation system, connecting with people in the niche, building your referral network—you’re going to have a lot of specific lead flow in this area. You can then charge a very attractive rate, because you’ve also been building the expertise. So it’s kind of the “both/and” there. And when you’re just getting started, you don’t have any of that.

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 #6, I talk about why freelance writing isn’t a good fit for everyone and how to figure out if it’s right for you.

 

 

Transcript: Why Freelance Writing Isn’t For Everyone

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

Today, I want to talk about why freelance writing isn’t for everyone, and how to tell if it’s right for you.

In most of these episodes, I’m focusing on the benefits of freelancing, the benefits of writing, and how accessible the career is. It really is a very accessible career. But at the end of the day, it’s not for everyone. So I wanted to touch on three (of what I would consider) deal-breakers for freelance copywriting—freelance writing, specifically. The first one will apply to writing as a career in general, the second two are more specifically related to freelancing.

If you feel like you qualify on any of these, I’m not the one to say, “Don’t go for it anyway.” If you want to do it, absolutely go for it. This is just my personal opinion, and you’ll see why as we dig into it.

The first reason freelance copywriting might not be for you is if you struggle to communicate via written words… if you struggle to write. And I’m not talking about a specific writing struggle here. I’m saying if you were just to have a thought that you wanted to share to a friend, but you couldn’t talk—for whatever reason, you needed to write a note to pass it to them—would you struggle to translate your thoughts into words?

That’s one of those things that I don’t know how to teach. That doesn’t mean it can’t be taught; there could be people out there who really understand how to teach just the discipline of writing in general, or the practice of translating your thoughts into words. But, from my own experience and talking with other people who have attempted to help students with this, I’ve just come to the point where I don’t necessarily know that it can be taught.

The only advice I would give, if you do struggle to translate your thoughts into words—I’m just talking about at a really basic level here—then the only thing I can suggest is to read a lot.

Most of the people I know who have always considered themselves good writers are also big readers. They tend to do a lot of reading—not any specific type of reading—just a lot of reading. To be honest, I have no clue how the brain works with this. I feel like you tend to emulate the people you talk with—you might find yourself using phrases they use or kind of communicating with a certain cadence that’s similar to the people you’re around. I think in the same way, we tend to mimic what we’re reading. The ways that certain authors express themselves tends to come out when we’re doing our own writing.

I might be completely off base; this is a pretty arbitrary take, but that’s just my thought on how it works; that’s how it seems to work for me.

But again, if just at the basic level, you struggle to write, then freelance writing—writing in general—is probably not the best career choice. That would be a weakness for you. But again, if you feel you have that weakness and you still want to go for it, by all means, more power to you.

The second one is this: If you struggle outside of having explicit instructions given to you, it’s going to be a bit more difficult to be a freelancer. Freelancing is different than any other career in the sense that there’s no one telling you what to do. You have no boss. The funny thing is, when we look at most careers,

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 #5, I answer the question, “Why won’t you just shut the f**k up about pitching already?”

 

 

Transcript: Why I’ll Never STFU About Pitching

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

Today, I wanted to answer the question that you’re never going to ask me, but you’re all thinking, which is, “Why won’t this dude just shut the fuck up about pitching already?”

It’s a fair question, because if you’ve talked to me, read any of my stuff, or are on my email list, you’re probably tired of hearing about pitching.

Since you’re tired of hearing about it, I want to talk to you more about it.

Because once you understand what pitching really can do for your life, you’re going to be just as much of an evangelist as I am.

You might think it’s funny because, to be honest, I don’t do a whole lot of pitching anymore. So why am I always thinking about it? Why am I always telling you about it?

That’s what I want to explain.

When most people think about pitching, and they hear me talk about the numbers game of sales and all that, what they hear is, “If you grind hard enough, you can eek out some money.” That’s what people hear when they hear, “Hey, sales is a numbers game. pitching as a numbers game; you’re looking at getting volume out and you’re going to get some wins.” What people hear when I say that is, “Grind it out and you’ll make a little money.”

But that could not be further from the reality of what I’m trying to teach you here.

What pitching actually does, what the numbers game actually means, and when you really do it and you really understand how to do it, when you really see the results for yourself time and time again, what it actually means is that for the rest of your life, any time you need money, you can fuckin’ snap your fingers and have an extra grand. You can snap your fingers and have an extra five grand.

And I do not mean that metaphorically.

If you were following on my list literally just last month, I had someone do a challenge on Twitter where they said, “You need to make $5k over the next 48 hours. What do you do? You can’t use an email, you can’t use any existing audience,” and here’s what I said:

“That’s the same thing I teach you guys. I’d go pitch 10 marketing blogs and offer them a package of four blog posts for $5k.”

That second part is more specific to me and my niche; that’s not actually the price points I’m teaching you, but I am teaching you to “Go send 20 pitches.” For me, I thought I could do it in 10.

So guess what I did?

I went out and actually did the goddamn challenge. I pitched 10 marketing blogs and 47 hours and 30 minutes later, I had $5k deposited in my inbox for four writing gigs, which I then obviously still had to fulfill after the fact. I didn’t write them all in 48 hours, but that should illustrate to you how powerful this concept is. You can literally snap your fingers and create $5k out of thin air.

Obviously that’s a little bit of exaggeration because you’re taking advantage of previous things you’ve done and that’s why the further you go into your career, the more effective pitching will be, the more assurance you’ll have that when you tap your network or even go out and pitch random people that you’ll have more results to show.

It’s going to get better and better as you go. But even right now, you want to make $2k per month right now?

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 #4, I answer the question, “What are the best resources for learning copywriting?”

 

 

Written Transcript: The Best Resources For Learning Copywriting

Hi guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood. The question I want to answer today is, “What are the best resources for learning copywriting?” That’s a reasonably common question.

I think the version of this question that might be even more common is simply, “How do I get started?” That’s probably the one that I get the most, and it’s often accompanied by someone who has just read my guide to getting started as a copywriter, so I think the real question being asked there is, “Okay, I kind of understand the theory of this, but how do I actually go from “I know nothing about copywriting” to “I feel confident doing a copy writing assignment or gig”.

The place we need to start is in understanding that everyone’s different. What is going to be most effective in helping you learn is going to be different than what helps me learn, or what helps anyone else. The most effective strategy for one person might not work for someone else.

As an example of that, if you look at my blog post that’s about the top copywriting books, you’ll see some of these titles that get constantly recommended—The Boron Letters—or Ogilvy On Advertising—blanking on some of the other ones—there’s a whole slew of these old-school ones, and then there’s a lot of newer titles as well. But these get thrown around a lot because people like reading books when they’re approaching a new subject—a subject they don’t feel they know a whole lot about—a lot of people really like to read a book.

A book helps them. Some of these books are the things that gave them an initial window into what copywriting is all about, and that’s why, to them, they’ll always associate their knowledge of copywriting with these copywriting books that they read. For me, I’m pretty much the exact opposite.

I hate books. Not all books. I hate business books.

Can. Not. Stand them. Will. Not. Read them.

I spent a brief window of my life trying to read them…. Never again. So I didn’t learn anything from copywriting books, because that’s not how I learn.

So, if you’re someone like me, don’t go fucking read 20 copywriting books. Don’t even read one if you don’t want to. There are plenty of ways to get the exact same information from other mediums. The first thing I’d tell you is, “Go to the type of resource that most helps you learn and don’t feel like you need to follow the exact path that someone else followed on their learning journey.”

That’s the “Everyone’s different” spiel.

Now, I’m going to go in the exact opposite direction and say, “Everyone’s the same.” And here’s what I mean by that. 90% of what you’re going to learn about copywriting is going to come from actually writing copy. So, that initial learning period where you go from, I know nothing to I have a baseline, that’s really only the first 10%.

You can go do that in whatever way floats your boat, but at the end of the day, if you want to really learn copywriting, you’re going to have to actually write copy—do copywriting—and there’s no way around that.

I joke in that blog post that rumor has it, if you read The Boron Letters 10,000 times in a row,

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 #3, I answer the question, “How lucrative is copywriting… really?”

 

 

Written Transcript: Is Copywriting A High Income Skill?

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. It is a light 97 degrees here at 4 o’clock in the afternoon in Redding, California. So that’s fun.

And the question I want to answer today is, “How lucrative is copywriting…really?” And the way I’m going to phrase this for SEO purposes is probably, “Is copywriting a high-income skill?” 

But the series of questions related to it: 

Is it high income? 

Is it lucrative? How lucrative? 

Is it reliable? 

What’s the floor? 

What’s the ceiling?

And I want to preface this by saying, nothing that’s going to be said here is based on hard data; this is just based on my experience over eight years working with hundreds to thousands of other freelance writers. 

Depending on how you want to gauge that metric, I have probably had about 10,000 subscribers come through my list, most of those in the last year. Every three months, we get about 100 applications to Write Minds and I get to see from a 100 different freelancers what they’re experiencing, how much money they’re making, how long they’ve been doing it—so I have a lot of first-hand experience in gauging what’s happening in the market across a broad spectrum of freelancers. That said, this is still my arbitrary take based on my own limited experience.

The first thing I want to address is, when we talk about copywriting, let’s start at the floor of copywriting, because a lot of people come into it and they question whether they can replace their current full-time income with freelance copywriting income. 

Understandably, that’s usually the first thing they’re thinking about. And a lot of them think that just to accomplish that goal, they need to be some sort of unique special talent, or they think they need to stand out in the sea of thousands of copywriters. In their mind, it’s a very uphill battle. They’re contextualizing it against their own frame of reference, their own background, where you’re in a small environment within a limited pool and you can experience fairly fierce competition against a very small group of people. 

So you come into the freelancing world, and you look out and you see thousands and thousands of other freelancers and you think, “Well, shit. If I was struggling to compete against a handful of people, how am I ever gonna get noticed in all this?”

What I want to explain to you here is that the freelance landscape is nothing like anything you’ve ever experienced before. If you have not been in freelancing in the past, there is virtually zero comparison between this world—this career path—and what you’ve known in the past. And in almost every case, that’s to your advantage.

To get to the specifics of that, in freelance copywriting, what makes it such a reliable career choice is that every single business on the planet needs copywriting. Every. Single. One. You want to make money online, you need copywriting; there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You may produce the copywriting yourself, someone on your team may do it—it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have to choose a freelancer—but you need it.

Every business needs a website. There was a brief moment in time where some misguided souls were saying, “Oh hey. Just do it all through social.” But even that trend crashed and burned pretty quickly as a lot of these social cha...

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 #2, I answer the question, “What is the difference between copywriting and content writing?”

 

 

Written Transcript: Copywriting vs. Content Writing

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.

So today, I want to talk about the difference between content writing and copywriting, and the reason I actually want to discuss it isn’t really to talk about the philosophical differences between them. I wanna talk about the practical stuff, because I see very commonly in new freelancers work – especially freelancers who are doing both copywriting and content writing – they’ll make some pretty critical mistakes in writing stuff like blog post, where they include stuff that is really more suited for copywriting, or they’ll do something within a piece of website or email copy that is really more suited for content writing.

So I just wanted to cover some of the differences through a more practical lens as opposed to just talking about the conceptual differences between the two.

So to kind of just do a quick overview of the two, copywriting is writing that we do when we want to drive immediate action. We want to get the reader to take some sort of real action. I don’t need to go through a whole lot of examples for you guys ’cause you kind of already get the context, but if I write an email where I want a click, that’s copywriting. If I write a landing page where I want someone to fill out a contact form, that’s copywriting. With copywriting, I need to be provoking action. I need to be priming the reader to for that action at all times.

When we’re talking about content, we don’t have that same goal. With content, we’re pretty much always looking to educate, entertain or answer a question. We’re really just looking to provide value. Granted, there is going to be some sort of supplemental goal related to how that piece of content fits within the content marketing campaign it’s part of.

For example, any time you’re reading a blog post on my website, I want you to subscribe. If you’re not subscribed already, my number one goal for my content is to get you to subscribe, but unlike with copywriting, I’m not designing my blog content around priming you to subscribe. My content is designed to give you the maximum amount of value, which I then hope will motivate you to subscribe, and there is a key difference there, because if you were to read one of my blog posts or any blog post for that matter, and the author is just constantly advertising to you how great it would be if you were on their email list, it’s gonna feel very forced. You’re not gonna want to take that action, because that’s not why you’re there.

You’re not reading the blog post to sign up for a new email list. You’re reading the blog posts to have a question answered or to learn something.

And so when you’re on a landing page, when you’re reading a sales email, it’s a bit different. You are engaging with that page for the purpose of the action. If at any point you decide the action is not for you, you simply click away, there’s not some sort of misleading promise keeping you there. You’re not being tricked into being on that page. If you’re continuing to read it, you clearly understand why you’re reading it, and to some extent what it’s leading you towards. Sure, maybe they’re using some sort of storytelling or something to kind of pull you in, but if you’re reading a sales page,

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 #1, I answer the question, “How do I know if my copywriting is good?”

 

 

Transcript: How Do I Know If My Copywriting Is Good?

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood. I want to thank Kevin Helmy for sending in the question that’ll be the catalyst for the discussion today. He asked, “How do you gauge the quality of your copywriting?”

And that’s obviously a super important question. Anyone who’s serious about improving as a copywriter and building a career around the skillset should be asking that. But the answer is a bit more complex than you might think initially, so I wanted to cover it today.

So when we ask the question, “How good is my copy?” the ultimate answer, the truest answer really just comes down to, “How does the audience respond to it?”

If I’m writing an email for an audience of software users—say we’re in the finance niche, and we have an audience built around people who are into FinTech and using software for their financial purposes—if I’m set to write an email to them, and I want to get them to click over to a page, the data for that is quite simple: Do they open the email? Do they click through the email to the landing page? For the email, that’s super straightforward. At the end of the day, the data on “How did this piece of copy perform?” is the only thing that matters.

I’ve been doing this for eight—nine years. I can look at a piece of copy that you write—say you were to write that email, were to send it to me and say, “Hey, can I get some feedback on this before sending it out?” I could look at it and evaluate it based on best practices, based on my experience—based on this, that and the other, and say, “Hey, I think you should do this,” or “I think you should change this,” or, “Hey, I think this is good to go,” but at the end of the day, that’s just the best guess. Until you actually put it in front of the end user and test it, there’s really no way to say how good it is.

And depending on the copywriting niche you’re in, whether or not that end user testing is taking place can vary wildly. So for example, if you’re focused on email copywriting, analytics for email copywriting are much more straightforward: open rates, click-through rates, maybe sales rates on the landing page behind that, but even that’s going to have more to do with the audience you’re sending it out to versus the email itself…all that to say straightforward stuff.

But what if you do a home page for a website?

How do you gauge that?

You’ll find that probably 90% of the clients that you work with don’t even track traffic info. They couldn’t even tell you how many people are visiting their home page or clicking through to what. Maybe with some digging, they might be able to find it, but they’re not actively evaluating that information. So with a lot of these projects, you don’t actually know.

Even when we talked about a landing page, unless someone is running thousands of visitors to that page and paying you for multiple versions to split test—and again, only a very small percentage of clients are engaging in that level of tracking and analytics—if you happen to have those clients come to you, or find those clients, or ideally you focus on pitching those types of clients where you can really evaluate the quality of your work, if you’re not doing that, you could be doing projects for hundreds of clients a year for years and years and never actually have a piece of copy tested with the end user.