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,