Category Archives for Business
A Simple Way To Get Hired As A Copywriter
Here’s a couple of ideas to help you get hired as a copywriter.
The first is the rule of Simple. Simple ideas. Simple words. The title of Ernest Hemingway’s best known book “The Old Man And The Sea” consists entirely of three letter words. Was that accidental? No. He agonised over every word of everything he wrote. Use simple words.
The second has everything to do with getting work, and it also happens to be a simple idea and a three letter word: Ask.
People love to do favours. Especially when they believe the idea came from themselves.
So here’s the bit that matters. Instead of asking directly for work, reframe it as a question. Eg. “if I were to write a blog piece for you, and it got you some attention – or even work, would you consider hiring me for further work?”
Starting a Copywriting Business from Scratch [7 Step Guide]
Here’s the 7 steps I would do if I were to start a copywriting business from scratch:
1. Decide who my audience was in terms of business size (the larger the business, the more they will understand – and budget for – the cost).
2. Decide on the industry I wanted to write about – in other words, become a specialist in a specific industry or a niche within an industry.
3. Make sure all my online positioning (in other words everything I put out there) focused on that industry – starting with a blog.
4. Make a list of all the businesses I can find that fit my criteria (business size and industry).
5. Focus on one of these businesses at a time. Find the right person most likely to be interested in what I do (if they have a marketing department, it will be head of marketing).
6. Send them a letter in the first instance explaining who I was and that I’d like to work for them on a freelance basis.
7. Follow up multiple times, but I’d never ever push them. I’d simply remind them who I was, what I did, and that I was for available for hire.
If you do this right, you will never need to dilute yourself across different industries, and you will become the expert in your field with the possibility of becoming a keynote speaker at some point (should you wish that).
The 80/20 Rule Flaw
The 80/20 principle just came up in ProCopyClub and I think it might help anyone who’s not heard of it before to understand the principle and whether it’s useful in a business context.
Here’s the concept: 80% of everything we do is inefficient. Therefore we should look for the 20% that’s worthwhile and act on that (eg. 20 out of every 100 customers spend more than the remaining 80 – so only focus on the 20).
The problem is, it’s flawed from a marketing perspective (systems thinking shows why – more on that later).
Vilfredo Pareto came up with the principle by looking at distributions such as 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population (Wikipedia). It was and is an observation of nature.
But humans are fidgety animals and like to play around with things. What if we could implement the 80/20 observation as a rule? What if we could improve on nature? What if we could make nature great again (we invented the word arrogant because we’re so good at it).
But here’s why using the 80/20 principle as a tool is flawed thinking. If we ignore the 80 customers who spend less, we’re sending out a message that we no longer care. We’re putting all our eggs in one basket. We fail to ask questions such as: Does market share matter? Do these people help spread influence? Would the 20% have bought if we’d not attracted those other 80 customers in the first place?
So can we use the 80/20 rule in marketing and business? Yes. By understanding that the 80% of everything we do may not seem as effective as the 20% but it STILL has a purpose. That is Systems Thinking (it doesn’t mean we can’t improve the 80%, just that we must never ignore it).
For example, sleep seems highly inefficient, yet nature has spent half a billion years working on it. Some animals sleep for months, others, like us, for 8 hours. It’s necessary. It’s part of the system.
If we apply the 80/20 rule to a sales funnel and only concentrate on improving 20% of the funnel (or worse, remove the other 80%, or even worse, make the other 80% the same as the 20%) we ruin the funnel.
A 10x conversion increase on the front end does not necessarily increase the whole funnel (it can make it worse by reducing the quality, increasing refunds, and tarnishing our reputation).
It’s the same with copy. If you decide that only 20% of your copy is working, be absolutely certain that it can work on its own before ditching the other 80%.
Things work in steps. Each step has an effect on the following step. Make a change to one step without working out what the consequences are for the rest of the steps and you get failure.
Everything in the universe is connected and affects everything else. Climate change is real for the most obvious of reasons: killing trees and burning fossil fuels affects the carbon sink, and that in turn affects the atmosphere. 100% of our thinking matters, not 20%.