Come on in, the water’s fine
So you want to become a freelance copywriter? Good for you for taking the first step. I took the very same step two years ago and transitioned out of my corporate marketing career to start my own digital communications and copywriting agency with my husband.
As businesses moved online and to remote work, it was a great time to start something new. We wanted to capitalize on the digital economy.
Two years on, with a roster of clients, it feels like we made the right call. As entrepreneurs, we’ve had our fingers in every piece of the business pie and upskilled across the board.
When I was starting out, I read every article, and book, and listened to every podcast about entrepreneurship that I could get my hands on. There’s a comfort in research that allows you to put off doing the actual work of building.
After a point, the advice became repetitive. Be consistent, build a portfolio, become a creator or thought leader, and so on. The advice we’ve all read time and time again.
But there are some things that can only be learned once you dip your toes in the water and stick your hands in the mud.
These are things that are easy to forget when the going gets tough. And the going will get tough.
Here are four truths I’ve learned about becoming a freelance copywriter and building a business in the digital economy that holds true, no matter what type of business you’re building.
You need a bit of self-delusion and a lot of self-awareness
You’ve got to believe that you’ll make it. This doesn’t work without it. But you also need to be self-aware and realistic about your skills, how you’ll reach your goal, and if you have the stomach to weather storms.
We had cut our chops for almost a decade in corporate marketing. We love skillful writing; understand business writing and can make bad writing awesome.
We measure everything so we know what wins, what works, and what we can throw away.
So, we delude ourselves a tiny bit.
Start before you’re ready
I wish I had known this sooner. You learn certain habits working in large organizations. One of them is over-perfecting. I’ve spent years of my life making millions of tweaks to things that were great in the first place.
At our agency, we constantly refine our products and services. We deliver work, observe the market, iterate, refine, and come back with something better.
But we put ourselves out there.
Newsflash: You’ll never feel 100% “ready.” The only way to know if your idea, product, or services work, is to get them out into the market and in front of real-world clients.
The market gives you real-time feedback. It’s your best teacher. Becoming a freelance copywriter, content writer or anything else in 2022 is a competitive challenge. The only way to know how you stack up is to test the market, iterate and refine.
Embrace a beginner’s mindset
Do you remember the first time you rode a bike, played an instrument, or tried something new?
There was a sense of excitement and new possibility.
The beginner’s mindset is translated from Shoshin, a word with roots in Zen Buddhism.
It means, looking at something as if it’s the first time you’re seeing it. It’s looking at something with no preconceived notions, expectations, or past experience limitations.
It opens up a world of possibility.
In our world of everyone being an “expert,” it’s difficult to approach things with a fresh outlook. An expert mind is clouded with things it knows or thinks it knows. It doesn’t allow room for curiosity, experimentation, and even happy accidents.
We had a client who was dead set on landing in a major publication. He created content and sent it to every journalist who worked at this publication.
The response was crickets.
This guy was set on his strategy because the tactic had worked in the past. As a marketing guy himself, he knew that pitching the publication you’re targeting is an excellent way to get published.
We advised him to pitch competitor publications. Places where the journalists we were targeting, hang out. One of the fastest ways to get someone’s attention is to get their competition’s attention.
Shortly after he landed in the competitor publication he was a guest on his target publication’s podcast.
Embrace the beginner’s mindset, and find new ways to solve old problems.
Your reputation is more significant than your brand
Repeat after me.
Your brand follows your reputation.
Your reputation is how you show up every single time, across every channel with your clients. It’s your micro-interactions, promptness, and delivery. It’s showing your client that no one works harder for them or does what you do.
People aren’t hiring you for a LinkedIn profile stuffed with buzzwords. They’re hiring you because you have a pristine reputation. To become a freelance copywriter you need to have your reputation work for you.
Hard work, consistency, and a great product are table stakes. It’s the unknown, unknowns where we falter.
Starting something new is hard. You have no way of knowing where you stand and how you stack up against the millions of people doing the same thing as you.
The only way to know is to begin, experiment, iterate, and build an excellent reputation. And have a sense of wonderment as you do it.
The world has a weird way of bouncing your dreams back at you if you have the courage to reach for them.
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