Despite your love of copywriting, you feel like you’ve hit a wall with clients, services, and income. Fortunately, you can overcome any obstacle and grow your freelance copywriting business with the right mindset, strategies, and the best copywriting resources.
You deserve a promotion
You are more in control of your career as a freelance copywriter than the average professional. Your career trajectory, future opportunities, and paychecks are entirely within your control, unlike a traditional employee whose managers and bosses determine their advancement and development.
The conventional yearly raise, performance reviews, and promotions only happen when you self-manage your professional development. If you want to land a high-quality client, make more money, or hone a skill, you must seek out the best copywriting resources and create those opportunities yourself.
Goals = Growth
Growth is the product of your focused attention, developmental process, and drive. Invest in the growth of your business by examining your mindset, creating a strategy, and tapping into the best copywriting resources.
A SMARTer approach
Tap into your business mindset—the way of thinking that empowers you to embrace challenges, reframe mistakes, and celebrate every success as a freelance business owner and copywriter. Use the SMART goal-setting technique to set your intentions, create a plan, and manage your progress.
Your goal is:
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Provide a detailed description of what you are trying to accomplish. Be sure it answers the 5 “W” questions—Who? What? When? Where? Why? & which? |
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Maintain a clear set of criteria that allows you to track progress and determine whether your goals have been met |
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Affirm the reality of your goal based on available resources and influences from external factors |
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Assess the value of the goal and whether it is worth the time and effort it will take to achieve it |
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Establish a timeline and stick to it! Keep track of your progress and prevent the goal from being advanced or delayed |
Strategize SMART
Your strategy will emerge when you plug your goal into your SMART template. Think about the steps you need to take to satisfy all of the stages of your SMART goal. Build a timeline around your target completion date and set benchmarks to measure your progress. These benchmark goals might include:
- updating your portfolio or website
- collecting customer reviews
- taking a course to improve your technical skill
- improving your cold-emailing skills
- automating processes and delegating tasks to a contractor
- exploring new organizational, financial, or project management software
- researching the best copywriting resources
Essential elements of freelance copywriting
Three key elements determine your business’s growth potential:
- Clients
- Services
- Profit
Don’t try to grow these areas all at once. Instead, focus on one element at a time. It is important to remember that progress in one area will always positively affect others.
Using the best copywriting resources that freelance copywriters rely on will help you develop a business mindset and generate meaningful results.
Client Growth
Mindset
It takes hard work and dedication to build a client list. Now that you have one, you can enhance and refine it. Review your client list and ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are your most valuable clients?
- Who is giving you the most stable work?
- Which clients take most of your time?
Never stop pitching to your current clients.
Talk to your contact, research their business, and come to them with a great idea of your own. Maybe they didn’t know you could create their email campaigns. They might be thrilled that you have great blog ideas to boost their SEO!
Use social proof in your favor.
Collect referrals and reviews. Your clients know a lot of people, many of whom might benefit from your copywriting services. Ask them to write a review of your work and request they recommend you to people within their network.
Protect your time.
Increasing your business without taking more time is a must. It is not wise to accept every job that comes your way or try to retain every client you have booked—especially if the workload or their expectations are mentally draining. Let them down easily and make for your ideal client.
Resources
It doesn’t matter if you have an all-star client list or only book your favorite styles of copywriting if you’re not organized. Your lead tracking, scheduling, and project management systems must be on point. There are a lot of great options available. Here are some copywriter favorites:
Services
Mindset
You already know that professional copywriters deliver a wide range of writing services and specialize in various niches. Become a lifelong student. Invest in continuing education and raise the standard of your services.
Broaden your service offerings.
You can effectively identify a target audience, persuade the most skeptical consumer, communicate with people on an emotional level, and sell practically anything. These are highly transferrable skills. With the right kind of training, they open the door to many different options:
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- Marketing consulting
- Content strategy
- Project management
- SEO specialization
- Copyediting
Deepen your copywriting skills.
Choosing a niche industry or specialized type of copywriting could help you expand your freelance business. Research your niche industry or the specific services you wish to offer and narrow your focus. You might excel at writing blogs and never want to write another social media post again. Take advantage of tools such as books, copywriter-oriented communities, and online courses to advance your knowledge and writing skills.
Resources
With so many options available, expanding your knowledge base has never been more accessible. Books, writing courses, certifications, and copywriting communities that offer networking opportunities and helpful advice are available at your fingertips.
- EDU by Content Workshop
- Kingmakers: A Content Marketing Story
- Copywriting online community
- HubSpot Academy
Profit
Mindset
Your clients value your work and will pay what you’re worth for the high quality you provide. It’s your responsibility to put an appropriate price tag on that service—and remember that time is money. Budget your time accordingly.
Determine the value of your time.
By the end of this year, how much money would you like your freelance business to have generated? If the amount you’re thinking about doesn’t leave room for an annual raise, add more.
Take that your yearly income goal and divide it by 12.
Divide that by 20 to account for roughly the number of workdays in a month.
Divide this time by the hours you want to work each day.
This is what one hour of your time is worth. Don’t forget it!
Raise your prices.
Now that you know the value of a single hour of your time, raise your prices accordingly. You’ll have clients who accept this as part of the price of doing business with you and clients who choose a less expensive option. In the latter case—don’t worry. Without them, you’re either making the same amount or adding more hours to your day to pursue more high-dollar clients.
Automate and delegate.
Investigate options to expedite manual tasks, like automated workflows, templates, and software. As your business grows, you may need to hire a team member to help protect your time. Based on your hourly rate, hiring someone else might be less costly than doing it yourself.
Resources
As a freelance copywriter, keeping track of your projects, proposals, contracts, and invoices is a crucial step. You can find many easy-to-use online tools to do this, and you can ask your new employee, contractor, or virtual assistant to do it for you.
Freelance writers’ best copywriting resources
Goals give you direction, keep you focused, and align your behavior with what matters most to you. Your freelance copywriting business will scale successfully as long as you know your worth, protect your time, make SMART goals, create solid strategies, and stay motivated.
Author Bio
Jo Gore-Wright is a copywriter and marketing strategy consultant based in Atlanta. She spent years working in business development, operations management, and marketing strategy in the corporate sector but was ready to make a splash on her own. Jo launched Copysplatter and hasn’t looked back since.
At Copywriter Exchange, we’re a group of master content marketing pros who bring their diverse talents and backgrounds to bear on the art and science of creating high-performance content, tailored to your needs. We exist to help copywriters thrive in today’s economy by connecting them with the resources they need to step up their game. Join now to access our templates, guides, and courses to help you grow your career, skills, and network.
