In my opinion, the dream freelance writing scenario is built on retention.

You have 4-5 clients paying you a lucrative retainer, and you work with those same clients for years and years and years.

In this scenario, you get all the benefits of freelancing:

* Flexible hours and schedule

* Not dependent on any one boss/client

* High income

AND all the benefits of being employed:

* Stable, predictable work and income

* Familiar work atmosphere with ongoing relationships

* Growing expertise within a given company/niche/subject matter

Unfortunately, most freelancers never experience these benefits, because they don’t know how to retain clients.

In today’s episode, I cover four highly practical ways you can increase client retention as a freelance copywriter, so that you can have a better chance of building this dream scenario for your own business.

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Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites: a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing. 

In today’s episode, I’m going to be covering four different ways you can increase your retention as a freelance writer. 

We’re talking about getting contracts with clients that last longer, pay more, and are ultimately something that you can build your business around instead of having to scramble for new gigs month after month after month.

If that sounds interesting to you, stay tuned!

This episode of Write Bites is sponsored by Copy.AI, a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers skip writer’s block completely and quickly generate first draft copy for themselves and their businesses by harnessing the power of GPT-3 artificial intelligence. 

If you’d like to try out Copy.AI for yourself, head on over to https://copy.ai/jacob and you can get a 30 day free trial.

Okay guys, let’s dive in. 

We’re going to be covering four different ways that you can increase retention for your business as a freelance writer. And the first is relatively simple: focus on types of copywriting that facilitate retainers. 

Strategy #1: Focus On Writing Services With Built-In Retention 

A lot of new copywriters tend to gravitate towards types of copywriting that are a little bit more one-off in nature. Website copy, landing pages, sales page copy – even stuff like email sequences. 

And there’s nothing wrong with this. We’re going to be covering a way you can leverage these types of gigs for more retention. But the simplest way to increase retention is simply to focus on the types of gigs that result in ongoing work. 

So in particular, we’re talking about blog writing. We’re talking about email broadcasts. Emails that are ongoing: sales for eCommerce that need to be run every few weeks, broadcast emails that are designed to just nurture audiences, and stuff that needs to be generated each week.

Blogs are obviously the most common example here because you cannot get value from any given blog posts without having a lot more blog posts.

Any client that knows what they’re doing and is paying for blog content? They’re going to be paying for blog content pretty much forever.

So if you want more retention, going in and finding gigs built around these services that kind of have retention baked into them is a great strategy. Because then you do the work to land a new client and you didn’t just land a client that you’re going to have to replace next month.

If you land a blogging client this month – if you can do a good job for them and they know what they’re doing from a content marketing perspective – you could be working with them for the next five years.