For the 60th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob opted not to invite a guest on the show and instead take your questions and give our off-the-cuff, no-preparation answers. We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we did our best with what we have. We talked about:
• where we got our first clients (and where we get some of our clients today)
• why relationships are so critical especially for freelancers who never leave the house
• how copywriting has changed since we both got started and what that means to you
• what we expected The Copywriter Club to become when we first started out
• how we keep all the plates spinning (Rob has dropped a couple)
• what comes first the club or clients (don’t let our clients see this)
Plus we also talked about where we find the most satisfaction in our work and our thoughts on LinkedIn and Medium and which one is best for sharing your work. We don’t have a guest to carry us on this one, but to hear everything we shared, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Sponsor: AirStory
Hillary Weiss
Laura Belgray
The 50th episode
Ry Schwartz
The Copywriter Accelerator
Joanna Wiebe
Michal Eisikowitz
Luke Traser
Momo Price
Serial
CrimeTown
Tim Ferriss
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club.
Kira: What if you can hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits. Then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work. That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 60 as we answer your questions about copywriting, fitting it all in, choosing a niche, our processes and what we find most rewarding in our businesses.
Hey, Kira.
Kira: Hey, Rob. How’s it going?
Rob: It is going awesome. Mostly awesome, how about yourself?
Kira: Is it really awesome, Rob? Is it really? You just told me you woke up at 5 a.m. to workout and so…
Rob: That’s correct.
Kira: You’re feeling good?
Rob: I am feeling good. I was up a little late doing client work where I think we’re going to talk about that here in a second when we ask, answer a couple of questions and you were doing the same.
Kira: Yeah, we were both emailing each other at midnight while working in client work so that’s how I spin, but yeah.
Rob: Exactly.
Kira: I’m excited to answer some questions. For this special 60th episode, we asked the club members in the Facebook Group, what questions you have for us and we have a nice range of questions we can tackle here, but I feel like we should say that normally, we like to prep. We are preppers and think through our responses and even type them out. Today, we are not doing that. We are going to wing it.
Rob: That’s right.
Kira: I don’t wing things well so this will be interesting.
Rob: It’s all of the cuffs so it’s not sugarcoated. We’re going to tell you the truth, but it may not be quite as well thought out as it might have been otherwise so.
Kira: Right, this will not be poetic today. Okay, so why don’t we jump into the first question. Rob, you can choose.
Rob: Yeah, so I’m actually going to choose Heath asked a couple questions and I think these area good questions that a lot of people in the club are thinking about. This is the first one. How did you get your first clients when you’re starting out?
Kira: Okay, well, first I want to say shout out to Heath. I love Heath. He always makes me smile in the group. My first few clients, I was at Ace working at a startup, actionablebooks.com as the marketing director and I’ve been there for a couple of years. While I was working there, you know you did everything in a startup. I was writing a lot of copy and so at that point, some of the consultants I was working with asked me to work with them and they offered to pay me to write copy for their websites as they were growing their businesses and that’s kind of when I clued into this and a couple of them said, “Why don’t you start your own copywriting business? You know you clearly have this entrepreneurial drive. This could be something that make sense for you” and so that was the light bulb moment for me.
Rob: My very first copy assignment was from a friend that I had met, I don’t remember how I met her but she was doing freelance copyrighting. She had an assignment and asked me to help out on and I did that. I thought this is interesting. I can make money writing. It hadn’t really occurred to me before. It should have, but for whatever reason, I just hadn’t considered that as an option. I was planning on going to law school at the time, and then I got a job in house writing copy and spent about four years doing that. I moved to an ad agency and spent about four years there and then I moved to another company in house, for again another four years, so by the time I was ready to branch out on my own. I built a network of people who I had worked with in the past, and so when I went out on my own, I basically approached several of the people that I had worked with and said, “Hey, I know you need help with content, with copywriting. Let me help you out.”
I landed a few assignments and it just grew from there. The other big place though, and I think we’ve talked about this a lot of times, the other big place where today, where we get assignments is from other writers and referrals from other writers. Get in groups, network with other writers because oftentimes you will be around writers who have too much work and they’re more than willing to pass on an assignment or a project to somebody who’s capable and can get things done.
Kira: That’s a really important point. Beyond so, you’re talking about your network, that’s really where I started too, with a network of people where I was at the time, who was asking me for help at the time. I don’t necessarily work with any of those clients now, but beyond that, when I realize this is something I want to do, how do I grow, that’s when I really started to follow the copywriters I respected and found online, the names that you already know, like Hillary Weiss, Laura Belgray, and some others and I reached out to them. I remember I pitched Laura on why I should be her apprentice, and Hillary as well, and so I reached out and just put myself out there with people I never met before to ask them how I can just get in the door and help them in some way, and that turned into building relationships with them and also I got a couple of leads from both of them early on that just helped me gain some traction, build my portfolio and the niche I was focused on at the time.
Rob: In our 50th episode, Ry Schwartz asked us both what we would do if we had to start over, so I don’t think we will answer that question but if we were starting over with no network, we talked about what we would do differently, so go back to the 50th episode if you’re interested in how we would start over from scratch.
Kira: I think that the key for both of us, what we’re saying is it’s about relationships and I think that’s what we based everything with The Copywriter Club on, our relationships and strengthening those, building those and then also with our copywriting businesses, starting with the relationships, building the trust and credibility. I mean we both have been writing for years and years and years but that wasn’t really enough if you don’t have those relationships and the people who trust you who are sending you work and that never ends. I’m constantly focused on building relationships.
Rob: I think that’s great advice, really good. He also asked how copywriting has changed over the years and I started writing in 1994, so for me the biggest change is that we have the internet. When I started writing, we had email. The internet was just barely starting to be a thing. It wasn’t really a commercial enterprise yet and so there’s a ton of writing that happens online that just wasn’t around 25 years ago. That really has been the biggest change, but as I think about the kinds of assignments that I was doing back then versus what I’m doing now, the other changes that I’ve seen is the measurement tools online are far better than what we had offline before. When it comes to things like conversion copy or direct response copy, the tools in order to measure effectiveness and to get better are just a ton better than they were in the past.
Having said that though, human nature and the reasons the wise people respond, that hasn’t really changed at all, so a lot of what was applicable back in the 90s when I started is every bit applicable to the kinds of copy that I write today.
Kira: Yeah, so I’m not going to go as far back but I will say when I was at school, I’m from Virginia Tech, I was on the newspaper staff and writing copy for ads and designing ads and so again to me, it’s all the same stuff. When I connect the dots and I’m sure all of us can connect the dots when we look back and we’ve been writing copy and advertising and positioning for years when you can really see that when you stop and connect those dots, but to me, it’s the same. I’m doing the same thing. I’m just doing it in a different medium now, but what really stands out to me today that’s changed even over the last few years is how crowded the marketplace is now, which we all know, with lots of copywriters, with lots of people who are kind of jumping into the space, for good reason.
There are many reasons we all get into it, so now how do we really stand out in a crowded marketplace,
