Posts tagged: freelancing

I Gloat, I Preen, I Strut About (I Land a Dream Client, And Not How You Think)

November 12, 2010, by 5 comments

We ink the contracts next week, after which I embark on the latest chapter of my career; I become wholly responsible for the online presence of a medium-sized membership organization.

Clearly, I wanted this client; I pursued them for more than two years. And the project fits me so well it’s as if it was custom-tailored on Savile Row.

And yes, it’s a contract/retainer gig (freelancers love the sound of “retainer” – it rolls off the tongue like honey).

I am a very happy freelancer. Truly.

Passive Marketing vs Active Pursuit

I’ve long said copywriters shouldn’t meekly accept whatever work falls from the sky.

Instead, they should pursue the clients and projects that appeal to them – the projects and people they want to write for.

It’s not always easy. Chasing clients who aren’t convinced they need your help leads to a fair amount of rejection.

Which isn’t any fun.

Yet the rewards can be significant (just ask me next week).

For example, I recently spoke to an old friend and a copywriter from the Silicon Valley.

While he has a website (just barely) and sends out the odd enewsletter to a list he hand-compiled over the years, he’s never touched a blog or messed with social media (well, he’s on LinkedIn).

And he stays incredibly busy (six figures, easy).

What Does He Know That You Don’t?

He calls people. Cold calls them if needed. Asks for referrals. Works his network.

Basically, he exercises the simple, personal tactics that have always worked, but fell into disfavor when online media erupted.

Which is precisely why they work so well.

Despite the difficulties of a troubled economy, too few freelancers seem willing to take any risks (outside of a moment’s rejection, there isn’t much real risk to blowing a cold call).

And believe me, the old stuff still works. Cold calls, lumpy mailers, postcards – all will deliver high-quality clients.

Provided you’re willing to take a few small personal risks.

For example, I’m facing a year-end work overload. Five websites/online presences need building (along with the goodies that fill them, and the streams they connect to); several enewsletters have to be sent; a software product is launching; a local nonprofit needs a website and a favor… and there’s more. Much more. Way too much.

Exactly one of those jobs came to me via online channels.

Keep writing (and searching for the work that makes you happy), Tom Chandler.

Have You Hugged Your Online Marketing Map Today?

August 24, 2009, by 2 comments

Lately, there’s been precious little writing going on here – an odd reality given that you’ll find the word “writer” in this blog’s title.

It’s not sloth.

It’s a slew of new Web projects. A little teaching. A rare fly fishing vacation/road trip. And the happy byproduct of taking my own advice (I know, it amuses me too).

That advice?

The Value-Added Copywriter, Meet the Online Marketing Map

Becoming an indispensable resource for your clients – the “value-added copywriter” concept I’ve plugged ad nauseum on the Underground – is a concept becoming more relevant to marketers, not less.

It’s where you apply knowledge and experience to your client’s problems, thereby transcending simple “word jockey” status.

My reality? Clients are happily paying me to craft their online presence instead of simply writing their copy.

In a purely economic sense, that’s a good thing.

The copywriting industry is not the rose garden it used to be – especially at the middle and low end – and after you’ve done something for a while (hint to social media gurus – a “while” is longer than two months), you might as well get paid for what you’ve learned along the way.

Tapping into a couple decades of marketing experience is how my recent teaching gig – which I expected to be a temporary, short-lived thing – became an ongoing concern. In fact, I just signed to do what amounts to a monthlong, fulltime classroom stint later this year.

I still write – and I’m not here to mourn the passing of my copywriting career. It’s alive and kicking. But it’s changing.

Have you overhauled your online marketing presence lately?

Is my online marketing presence changing along with it?

And more importantly to my gentle readers, is yours changing as your business does?

Now, The Inevitable Online Overhaul

I tell my online marketing students the basics of marketing remain in place, but that all the details are subject to change by the end of our class session.

They laugh, but only because they recognize the grain of truth buried there.

I’m simply recognizing the dynamic nature of our online world, and I mean it when I say marketing has changed more in the last ten years than in the prior 100.

Those that sit still too long risk becoming embarrassing dinosaurs.

That’s not to say you must embrace every new social media fad. Or abandon your current online presence after five minute’s thought. And in fact, if your current system involves sales letters and phone calls – and it’s working – then keep it.

Success trumps faddishness every time.

For example, this Copywriter Underground blog was first launched as an experiment; I didn’t feel right advising clients about blogs without really knowing how they worked.

The response was gratifying, and I quickly ended up on Google’s first page for “Copywriter” – a move which saved me a big chunk of change in Google ad fees.

Still, after 24 months, I realized the leads generated weren’t all that relevant to my changing business. So the Underground simply became a writer’s platform.

Regular readers will know I stopped relying on random leads, and began courting the clients I wanted to work for – often using personalized methods like my lumpy mailer.

The results haven’t been swift, but they have been gratifying.

Is this whole post a long-winded gloat? No (though yes, I’m perfectly capable of gloating).

How long has it been since you sat down and evaluated your online marketing presence? How long has it been since you’ve taken stock of your own marketing – and the media channels you’re using?

Are you working for the clients you want? Are you doing the kind of work you want do do?

The Online Marketing Map

When my small business students emerge from my Online Marketing Boot Camp, they do so with an online marketing map – a guide which directs their online marketing efforts.

It’s both aspirational and realistic; it’s used to define what marketing the business wants to happen (and how, and when), but also provides the kind of reality check needed in an era where already-stretched small business owner is told they need to foolishly commit to five blog posts a week.

Marketing is driven by business goals (not the latest technology), and yet an increasing number of small businesses are letting technology drive their marketing decisions, not their brains.

When the technology tail starts wagging the dog, trouble often follows.

In this case, my own online marketing map has fallen on hard times.

My bare-bones copywriting site hasn’t changed significantly for years. And it doesn’t reflect my new reality.

Time to follow my own advice. Time to craft a new Online Marketing Map.

What time is it for you?

The Numbers Aren't Pretty – But Is There An Emotional Toll to Freelancing in a Recession?

June 7, 2009, by 9 comments

Freelancers are suffering a recession-linked double-whammy – not only are clients and customers cutting budgets, but the newly unemployed are swelling the ranks of the self-employed, and driving fees downward.

This New York Time article (found via the Copywriter Maven) looks at the recession’s effect on the self-employed (and under-employed), and touches on an often-overlooked emotional side-effect (we’ll get to that later). First, the numbers:

Recession Takes a Toll on Freelance Livelihoods – NYTimes.com

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the number of self-employed workers who say they are working “part time for economic reasons,” which means that they work fewer than 35 hours a week because they can’t line up more employment. In March 2008, 622,000 self-employed workers across the country put themselves in this category. A year later, the number had almost doubled, to nearly 1.1 million. “What you can see in this data spells real trouble for these people,” says Susan Houseman, a senior economist for the Upjohn Institute, a nonprofit research center.

OK, the numbers are terrible, but they only tell a piece of the story. There’s an emotional toll that doesn’t get a column in the unemployment statistics:

That trouble is about not paying bills. It’s also about the vertigo of falling out of the middle class. “We talk about it as middle-class poverty,” said Sara Horowitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, which has 70,000 members in New York City. “Your frame of reference, when you think of yourself as middle class, doesn’t include being scared about making ends meet, realizing that welfare and food stamps are your only option. Psychologically, that shift is devastating.”

Interestingly, the researcher also noted the different responses between those who lost jobs and freelancers who lost clients – an observation which will resonate with many freelancers:

Venkatesh sees a difference in how freelancers talk about the recession compared with workers who have been laid off. “They’re more alone, and they can’t help but feel like they did something wrong because they’re losing relationships with individual clients,” he says. “They think of themselves as ministering to their clients, so they also feel guilty about no longer helping them.”

It’s natural to develop relationships with regular clients – especially if you’re working hard, getting good feedback, and functioning as part of the team.

It’s easy to forget it’s a business relationship.

And when the client stops calling, it’s just as easy to blame yourself.

Don’t do it.

Sure – take a hard look at your business with an eye to making yourself more relevant. Are you offering the right services in a fast-changing marketing landscape?

But never forget this is business – and even the best agencies lose accounts, often for reasons far outside their control.

Add free-falling, recessionary marketing budgets into the mix, and suddenly, a certain amount of client loss can only be expected.

Do what you can to contain the damage. Beef up your service offerings. But don’t personalize the loss. Things happen, and getting depressed about it simply limits your ability to dust yourself off and find a new client – or develop a new offering.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

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Where the Time Goes When There Isn't Any

July 31, 2008, by 4 comments

Because I foolishly took a vacation, I’m now overwhelmed with Stuff to Write, and my workload is treating me the same way trains treat automobiles:

Because she’s a game sort who’s willing to share the pain, Roberta Rosenberg posts pretty much the same story of getaway-related overwork.

I won’t turn this post into a pine for the old days, when we actually had time to think about the words we wrote, or projects didn’t change course a half-dozen times in three days.

But I have to ask: how many of today’s freelancers (writers, designers, Web folks, etc) are feeling – acutely at times – the pressure of what we used to call Internet Time?

It’s the pressure that accompanies the expectation of too many words (and calls, and emails, and research) in too little time. And the realization that compiling an actual to-do list – complete with deadlines – would reduce you to a whimpering, drooling fool.

It’s likely we have only ourselves to blame.

But still, you think you absolutely can’t take an afternoon off? Afraid to book a vacation? Forget what the sun looks like?

The floor is yours, Undergrounders.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

Getting Ready For the Client Pitch: How to Turn Prospects Into Clients

May 7, 2008, by 5 comments

I’ve repeatedly said you should pick the clients and projects that interest you, get your foot in the door (via lumpy mailers), and get the business.

But how do you pitch prospects — and make them buy what you’re proposing?

The Big Pitch: How do you succeed? I’m working on a pitch right now. (And yes, I  generated the meeting via a lumpy mailer sent to a high-value prospect.)

So OK, I got my foot in the door.

Now what?

It’s time to show up on the prospect’s doorstep, and convince them they can’t live without you.

It’s time for a pitch.

Gushing is Bad

Pitch hint #1: Don’t show up empty handed, sit down at the conference table, and gush about yourself.

Don’t gush about your accomplishments. Don’t gush about your capabilities. Don’t gush about your ability to meet deadlines.

Don’t gush.

In a former life, I worked at a high-tech ad agency, and sat through a pitch from a freelance writer. He advertised himself as the area’s “foremost copywriter,” but over the course of the pitch, revealed himself as something less lofty.

He talked endlessly about himself. And never once asked how he might help us.

When you write copy, you do so with this question in mind: “What’s in this for the reader?”

The same is true of a pitch. What’s in it for the harried, sleep-deprived marketing director sitting across the table?

People are busy. And even those who aren’t busy have better things to do than sit in conference rooms while you convince them you’re the second coming.

The area’s “foremost” copywriter ignored that rule, and walked out without a prayer of getting an assignment.

When Gushing Might Be Good

If you absolutely must gush, gush about the benefits to the pitchee.

You know. The growth in revenue. The truckloads of leads. The increase in loyalty. Regrowth of their hair. Whatever you’ve got.

Don’t be afraid to be specific, and then back those specifics with real data (if you’ve got it).

For example, this prospect is a non-profit, so I researched non-profits running similar membership programs. I emailed two of them asking for help, and now I’ve got a handful of warm, fuzzy statistics plugged into my pitch.

With a solid foundation of benefits in place, I move on to the next step.

The Pitch Outline

Ok, so you’ve opened with a few strong benefits (like “I can help Conglomco triple its membership retention rates”). The next step is to connect the benefits to your proposal.

Paint the broad strokes of your proposed project, but don’t delve into unnecessary details.

People get hung up on details, and the last thing you want is for your carefully built pitch to sink beneath the waves because the prospect hates the purple in your sample layout, or thinks the blog you’re pitching should run on TypePad instead of WordPress.

Make it deft, keep it light, and (once again), connect the benefits to the project itself.

In other words, don’t just toss out a few benefits, outline a project, and call it a day. The prospect needs to see how the project produces the benefits. It’s your job to weave the two together.

I do this mainly via spoken word, though I’m not above putting together an outline to keep me on track.

Do I prepare visuals for the prospect? Yes. Sometimes a flow chart, outline, org chart or informational graphic are necessary.

I don’t like prospects reading proposals while I’m pitching them, so I tend to keep it simple. And I haven’t yet fired up an animated presentation with a soundtrack.

That makes me a passive part of the process, and computer-run presentations don’t respond to your prospect’s questions or body language.

And while you’re prepping, don’t forget to formulate answers to potential objections (time, money, impact on an overworked staff, etc). You can’t predict what might get thrown at you, but it’s worth five minutes of your time trying.

What’s Your Leave Behind?

The pitch is finished. The prospect’s eyes are bright and shiny. They’re licking their lips over the program. They want it. Bad.

Yet they can’t make the final decision. But their boss can. Can you really rely on them to repeat your pitch from memory?

My preference is to leave behind a single sheet of paper summarizing your pitch. What should it contain?

  • The benefits (duh)
  • A very brief outline of the project
  • A compelling argument why you’re the perfect person for the gig
  • The call to action (everyone forgets this)

This isn’t rocket science; keep it clean, simple, and smart. Bullet it where needed, and don’t forget a call to action — the prospect needs to know what you want from them.

When you leave, don’t forget to push for a resolution — or at the very least, let them know you’ll call them in a few days.

Full disclosure: lots of people do this differently (more visuals, animated presentations, etc). It works for them, this works for me, and I’m not suggesting there’s One Way to do this.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Keep pitching, Tom Chandler.

The Best Reason EVER to Begin Your Freelance Copywriting Career (or, Why We Freelance)

November 15, 2007, by 11 comments

AT&T is now offering realtime monitoring services to small and medium sized businesses. Big Brother’s watching, and it turns out he’s your boss…

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