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 #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.

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