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

Audio Recording

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,