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 #22, I break down the four things that successful copywriters do on a weekly and even daily basis.

 

 

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Read The Transcript: Four Things Successful Copywriters Do Every Single Week

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. 

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about what a copywriter actually does. We’ll go through four things that tend to take up the vast majority of a copywriter’s time on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. 

Before we dive in, I just want to clarify that three out of these four things are going to be specific to freelance copywriters. If you are an in-house copywriter—if you are aspiring to write for another employer and not be in the freelance game—you can essentially knock off three of these four things; you’re going to be spending the vast majority of your time writing. You’re going to get a lot of writing practice. 

If you’re looking to get into this field and would prefer to start with an in-house position, I totally endorse that. There are not a lot of downsides to getting paid to be trained. So if you’re not necessarily looking for the benefits and the freedom of freelancing—you just want to get rolling on this career in the quickest way possible—grabbing an entry-level position is a very viable option.

The one thing I would add is that you are going to discover, fairly quickly—and by that, I mean probably within your first year—that you are getting drastically underpaid. 

As an in-house writer who is writing full-time, once you get to the point where you’re feeling pretty confident in your work—which if you’re writing full-time is probably going to be around the six to nine month mark—you’re going to immediately look over at people doing half the work, half the actual volume of writing that you’re doing, and see that they’re making more than you. 

Those people are freelancers, and so you’re probably very quickly going to be tempted to get out and go the freelance route, assuming you actually want to take on the additional challenges of bringing in your own clientele. So, just something to keep in mind.

Now, getting past that, going into what freelance copywriters do, there are four main things that are going to occupy your time on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. These are:

1. Writing copy: first and foremost, you’re going to spend a good amount of time writing. 

2. Pitching new clients: if you are a successful freelance copywriter, you will be spending a significant portion of your time pitching every single week. The mantra that I hammer into my students over and over and over is: 20 pictures per week, 20 pitches per week, 20 pitches per week. It doesn’t matter if you have no clients; it doesn’t matter if you have more clients than you want. Increased demand is always a good thing; it’s going to allow you to be even more selective and raise your rates.  Ultimately, that’s when you want to raise your rates—when you are getting more demand than you can handle. So even if you have as much demand as you want, continue pitching. Continue generating that demand. 

3. Managing your existing clients: this can go anywhere from ‘barely a thought’ to ‘an absolute time-draining pain.’ 

4. Marketing your brand: you don’t necessarily need to spend as much time on marketing in your first year to maybe three years.  Pitching is your short-term growth mechanism, but over time, you’re going to want to start adding in some m...