TUNE IN: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher

Looking for closed captioning or a transcript? Watch the episode on YouTube!

A Sneak Peek at the Episode

[2:38] Nicki and Kate remind us to put the word “copywriter” in the title section of your LinkedIn profile. This is not an area to get too catchy or clever—you can show off your expertise in other places.

[5:03] Our hosts also recommend putting the URL for your portfolio site in the title section. (Yes, even if you have the world’s best LinkedIn profile, you *still* need a portfolio site!)

[6:38] If you have your full-time job and don’t feel comfortable switching your LinkedIn profile over entirely to copywriting, then it’s perfectly fine not to. There are other ways to land clients.

[8:00] The big mistake that people make in the bio area of their LinkedIn profile is making it about themselves too much. You want to get into your USP and talk about what you bring to the table that nobody else does. Why would a client benefit from working with you?

[12:23] Do not feel limited by what LinkedIn tells you to put—especially when it comes to the “experience” section. Instead, think about what your target audience needs to know. You can put in a selected credits resume to show the work you’ve done (use spec work if necessary).

[14:26] Your profile should reflect the most up-to-date work that you’ve done. Schedule time on your calendar to update the “experience” section of your profile—just like you would with your main portfolio.

[15:22] Value-based pitching is still your direct line to client acquisition. If you are posting on LinkedIn instead of pitching clients directly, it may be a resistance tactic because it feels safer.

[19:05] If you’re using this platform with the aim of landing clients, you want to be connecting with potential business owners rather than other copywriters.

[21:22] The purpose of your posts should be to attract potential clients, so make sure the topics are geared toward what your potential clients would find useful versus what other copywriters would enjoy.

[22:30] If you’re sending requests to people that you want to follow, make sure you give some context about who you are and why you want to connect. What’s the benefit to them of connecting with you?

[24:28] Avoid the “easy apply” button at all costs! It is much more effective to reach out to the hiring manager directly and focus your pitch around delivering value.

[25:47] Don’t talk about your clients negatively on LinkedIn—even if you don’t share their details. Social media is not the place to vent—it’s best to keep it positive!

[28:59] You don’t necessarily have to post yourself and start conversations if you don’t want to. You can still insert yourself into conversations and find ways to add value to other people’s threads.

Must-Hear Takeaways

“It’s very easy to default to just talking about ourselves because it’s easy for us to talk about ourselves, but that’s not how we operate as copywriters, as marketers. We put our clients first and we think about what our clients need to hear in order to make the decision to get in touch with us because that’s what the whole point of the LinkedIn bio. It’s a piece of copy and the desired action we want someone to take is to get in touch with us.” – Nicki

“Pitching will directly get you clients. So again, post on LinkedIn, absolutely. But first of all, just make sure it’s not taking up all your time away from your pitching. And number two, make sure that it is not taking up a ton of time and that resistance isn’t kicking up and you’re not doing it instead of pitching because it feels safer.” – Nicki

“You can also look at other people’s comments and threads and what other people are posting and weigh in on those conversations. So you don’t necessarily have to post yourself and start conversations. You absolutely can if you want to but insert yourself into conversations and again, look for ways to add value to the conversation. Look for ways to demonstrate your knowledge as a copywriter, your strategic thinking, your looking for ideas and looking for ways to help business owners. Weighing in on conversations like that can be great if people keep seeing you show up in various places and adding value. People can see that and think ‘oh wow I like the way this person thinks, I might want to connect with them.’” – Kate

Mentioned on this Episode

• What to Do Before Your Copywriting Interview 

Related Links

• How to Optimize Your Copywriting LinkedIn Page
• Your Ideal Clients Want You to Pitch Them
• Business Builder or Time Waster?

Tell us what you love about the podcast and what you hope to hear next! When you do, you can get access to an exclusive bonus recording featuring five wildly successful entrepreneurs who share what they do (and don’t!) look for when hiring copywriters. You do not want to miss it! 

Get all the details on how to get your recording here »

About the Build Your Business Podcast

Ready to turn your love of writing into a successful copywriting career?

Join professional copywriters Nicki Krawczyk and Kate Sitarz to get the tips, tools, and training to help you become a copywriter and build a thriving business of your own. Nicki and Kate have 20+ and 10+ years of experience, respectively, writing copy for multi-billion-dollar companies, solopreneurs, and every size business in between.

Whether you want to land an on-staff job, freelance full-time and work from wherever you want, or make extra money with a side hustle, the best place to start learning is right here.

See Previous Episode

Ep. 172: Taking Action in the Face of Imposter Syndrome – Shelby’s Story

The post Episode 173: How to Elevate Your Profile & Land Copywriting Clients on LinkedIn appeared first on Filthy Rich Writer.

TUNE IN: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher

Looking for closed captioning or a transcript? Watch the episode on YouTube!

A Sneak Peek at the Episode

[1:51] Regularly asking yourself if something is a business builder or time waster helps you to make the best of the time that you’re spending on your business.

[3:00] Posting on social media can often become a time waster if it is not targeted at your audience and the content is not serving its intended purpose.

[7:42] It’s not just about evaluating the task, it’s also evaluating how much time you spend on the task, and how much effort it takes you to spend on the task.

[9:24] There comes a point when trying to choose the perfect URL, logo, and email domain becomes a time waster instead of a business builder.

[14:09] Our hosts discuss when posting and networking in Facebook groups goes from business building to time wasting.

[20:10] It is very easy to fill your schedule with consuming content from books, podcasts etc. but you need to actually use the information that you’re consuming for it to be a business builder.

[24:42] There are some tasks that are almost always business builders, like pitching, following up, updating your portfolio, and listing potential clients to pitch.

[33:14] Take time to evaluate your tasks by putting your CEO hat on and seeing what’s getting results.

Read More: Using Social Media

Posting on social media can often become a time waster if it is not targeted at your audience, the content is not serving its intended purpose, and you’re not following industry influencers. Read more about who you need to be following on social media here >>

Must-Hear Takeaways

As with every episode, we highly encourage you to listen to the entire conversation! But here are a few of the highlights:

“If you’re spending five hours posting on social media and you’re not getting anything out of it, you could be spending at least four of those sending pitches and then absolutely getting something out of it. So it’s not just evaluating the task, it’s also evaluating how much time you spend on the task, and how much effort it takes you to spend on the task.” – Nicki

“If you are truly evaluating one of your “business builder” techniques or tasks and it’s not actually building your business, then you have to to scale it back because you don’t have time to waste.” – Nicki

“Resistance is so insidious. All it’s doing is keeping you from taking action by telling you that the only way to be successful is to have the perfect URL.” – Nicki

“The more pitches you have out in the world, the more potential opportunities you have coming back to you.” – Kate

“You don’t have time to waste. We all have limited time in our day. And on top of that, any time that you’re not spending building your business, is time that you are not making money. You are not landing new clients, you are not doing things to move yourself toward your goals. You’re keeping yourself stuck in the same place.” – Nicki

Related Links

• 5 Easy Tips for Maximizing Your Time
• Amp Up Your Copywriting Productivity with Ultra Scheduling

Tell us what you love about the podcast and what you hope to hear next! When you do, you can get access to an exclusive bonus recording featuring five wildly successful entrepreneurs who share what they do (and don’t!) look for when hiring copywriters. You do not want to miss it! 

Get all the details on how to get your recording here »

About the Build Your Business Podcast

Ready to turn your love of writing into a successful copywriting career?

Join professional copywriters Nicki Krawczyk and Kate Sitarz to get the tips, tools, and training to help you become a copywriter and build a thriving business of your own. Nicki and Kate have 20+ and 10+ years of experience, respectively, writing copy for multi-billion-dollar companies, solopreneurs, and every size business in between.

Whether you want to land an on-staff job, freelance full-time and work from wherever you want, or make extra money with a side hustle, the best place to start learning is right here.

See Previous Episode

Ep. 142: On-Staff vs. Freelance Copywriting: Which is Better?

The post Episode 143: Business Builder or Time Waster? appeared first on Filthy Rich Writer.

As a copywriter, there’s lots of information we need to stay on top of. Some of that we can get by asking clients or fellow copywriters. But a lot of that information? We can find it ourselves.

Just like your time is valuable, so is your clients’ time. You certainly want to reach out when you can’t find information that you need to move forward on a project.

But you also want to do your due diligence in finding as much information as possible before asking your clients for it, particularly if the question isn’t related to internal company knowledge.

There is so much information in the public domain and there are several sites you’ll want to bookmark so you have them handy if you need them. Create a folder for “Copywriting Resources” or, if you start to have too many copywriting resources, subfolders that get specific: taxes, Facebook/Meta ad specs (not to be confused with spec ads!), Google ad specs, etc.

Getting organized now will set you up for success later! Here are a few sites worth bookmarking.

Facebook/Meta Ads Library

Search any company name in the Facebook/Meta Ads Library to find out what ads they’re currently running. This can help you get inspiration by seeing what other brands across an array of industries are doing and see what your client’s competitors are doing.

View details on a specific ad to see amount the company spent, the number of impressions, and who was shown the ad, and where viewers were located.

Bookmark this site:

• Facebook – Ads Library

Character Counts

When you’re writing ads, you’ll sometimes need to adhere to specific character counts. This is especially true on social media and search ads where not adhering to character counts means your ad either won’t run or text may be cut off, making for a message that doesn’t read as you intended.

Bookmark these sites:

• Google – Search ad specs (note: some clients may refer to these as “text ads”)
• Google – Responsive search ads
• Facebook – Ads Guide (note: make sure you choose the right type of ad—image, video, carousel, or collection, as well as the “ad placement” to see the given specs)
• LinkedIn – Best practices (as with Facebook, make sure you’re choosing the right type of ad).
• Twitter – Campaign types
• Snapchat – Ad formats

Ad Rules

With copywriting, you don’t necessarily have to play by the rules when it comes to things like punctuation and grammar (especially in places like a headline), but you do need to play by the rules when it comes to advertising policies.

While you don’t need to memorize the rules, it’s handy to review policies if you’re working on a project for a client that involves one of these platforms.

Bookmark these sites:

• Google – Ad Policies
• Facebook – Ad Policies
• LinkedIn – Ad Policies
• Twitter/X – Ad Policies
• Snapchat – Ad Policies

Grammar

You do not need to be a grammar expert to be a successful copywriter. That said, the best copywriters always strive to deliver clean copy. If you have a grammar question, Grammar Girl is the go-to. Use the search function to find answers to your specific question.

Taxes

If you’re planning on freelancing (a.k.a. being self-employed), you’ll want to bookmark the IRS self-employment tax page, so come tax season you don’t have that deer-in-headlights look of, “what do I do again?”

Publication 505 is another handy resource for figuring out how to pay estimated taxes. Rules can change slightly year to year, so you’ll want to make sure you brush up (or, better yet, get your professional tax accountant to stay on top of it for you).

And, when you’re self-employed, you have the bonus of being able to contribute to a retirement plan as the employer and the employee, which can come with some major tax benefits. You’ll want to read up on the rules and, again, talk with your accountant if you’re unsure. We can’t say it enough: We are not tax preparation experts, accountants, or lawyers, so be sure to always consult the pros with any questions.

Bookmark these sites:

• IRS – Self-employment tax
• IRS – Publication 505 – Tax Withholding and Estimated Tax
• IRS – Calculating retirement plan contribution and deduction (self employed)
• IRS – Tax Withholding Estimator (Note: When you use the calculator, step 4 will ask you about jobs where federal taxes are regularly withheld. Those who are 100% freelance will want to select “no,” or “0” for yourself if your spouse has a W-2 job. Step 5 allows you to check “Earn net income from self-employment.”)

And, of course, it’s worth bookmarking the Filthy Rich Writer site in case you have a copy-related question you need to search.

Your Turn

Do you have any go-to websites that we missed? Share them in the comments!

The post Websites Copywriters Need to Bookmark appeared first on Filthy Rich Writer.

If you ever look at Meta, Instagram, Google, TikTok, or any number of platforms, you encounter a ton of ads for lots of products and services. After a while, it’s hard not to wonder, “If it’s working for them, wouldn’t it work for me?” Does paid advertising work for a copywriting business?

Paid advertising can be a great place to way to get a lot of traffic to your portfolio site. But it can also be a great way to lose a lot of money.

Remember that paid advertising constitutes some people’s entire careers. It’s their full-time job and they’re very good at it. I’m not saying that it’s something that you can’t master, but I am saying that you’ll waste a lot of money if you don’t at least become proficient in it before you start running ads.

Here’s what you need to consider before spending money advertising your copywriting services.

Who Are You Advertising To?

The first question you want to ask yourself is who your audience is. If you haven’t carefully defined your audience first, you’ll waste a lot of money reaching people you don’t want to reach.

As part of this, why do you want to advertise to this audience? What is your goal? What is the action you want them to take? Before you even write ads, you need to think through the entire ad strategy and hone in on who you are targeting. Otherwise, you’ll have a generic message that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.

As always, write yourself a creative brief.

How Are You Going to Capture Leads?

You also need to decide how you’re going to capture the leads that get to your site. Just spending money to send people to your site and hoping they’ll decide to get in contact with you is foolish. The vast majority of people will get to your site and quickly leave, likely forgetting that they ever visited.

As much as possible, you want to collect the contact information of the people who visit your site. A great way to do this is to offer some kind of freebie—an e-book, infographic, or video—that your audience will want and will be willing to give you their email address to get. (Yes, you’ll want to write a creative brief for this, too!)

Once you’ve gotten their email addresses, you can email them with follow-up information and offers.

You have to work hard, though, to make sure that this freebie is both valuable to your target audience (prospective clients) and that it doesn’t devalue what you offer.

For example, an e-book about how copywriters can track their invoices and billing would be useful for your fellow copywriters but wouldn’t be useful for your target audience.

Also, a “How to Write Emails That Get 50% Conversion Rates” is certainly valuable to your target audience, but if they think they can do that by themselves, why would they hire you?

How Will You Collect Emails and Deliver Your Freebie?

Once you decide what you’re going to give away, you need a method for email collection and freebie delivery. I won’t go too deeply into your software options, but suffice it to say that this email collection and freebie delivery needs to be automatic and instantaneous, so you’ll need an email service provider like MailChimp or Drip to help you do it.

Write Your Own Email Series

You should also have a plan for a few emails to automatically go out after someone downloads your freebie. These emails may talk about your background, successes you’ve helped clients achieve, the benefits of working with you as a copywriter, or other relevant topics.

You should also consider an email in this series that directly asks the prospect to set up a free consultation call with you. This email series helps nurture your prospect and keeps them engaged with and interested in you.

Determine Where You Want to Run Your Ads

Next, you’ll need to decide where you want to run your ads. Personally, I’ve found that LinkedIn ads are exceptionally expensive and Google ads is complicated for the newer advertiser to quickly master. Facebook offers a lot of different targeting options and you can start running your ads for just a few dollars a day.

There are lots of great resources online for how to set up and run Meta/Facebook ads (from people much more knowledgeable than I am), so I won’t bother getting into it here. Just be sure to do your research and learn as much as you can about how to create ads before you start paying money to run them.

Remember that running ads is an entire career. You may want to take a course on it to ensure you’re going about it in the best possible way for your goals. (To read more about marketing trends, check out our blog here >>)

Implement a System for Monitoring Ads

Paid advertising is never a “set-it-and-forget-it” solution. Once you start running ads, you need to be constantly monitoring the ad click-through rate and the number of people who are signing up for your freebie.

If you have a low click-through rate (below 2%), your ad isn’t performing very well. If you have a high click-through rate but very few people are signing up for your freebie, your campaign still isn’t succeeding. You’re looking for as high of a click-through rate as possible (from your target audience) and as high of a freebie sign-up rate as possible and you need to tweak your ad and your freebie until you hit that sweet spot.

It’s very easy to set up an ad, start it running, and then forget about it. Then when you remember to look a few weeks later, it’s very possible to have spent hundreds of dollars with nothing to show for it! Make sure you’re tracking your ad results and that the money you spend is yielding client leads.

Start Small Before Scaling

I would also strongly advise you to start with a small daily spend—even as little as $5—and then increase it when you start seeing positive results. It can be very tempting to get excited about the possibilities of paid advertising and want to start by spending $30 or $40 a day.

That amount may be reasonable eventually if you’re getting a great return for your ads. If you’re not, though, that’s a great way to lose $1K a month without making any of it back in new clients.

You may find your target audience is not clicking on your ads and you may need to adjust. Or you may find it’s not worth your time and other client acquisition tactics are far more lucrative.

The verdict? Paid advertising can be a great way to get copywriting client leads. However, if you’re not willing to take the time to learn how to run them properly, set up a lead capture system, and check your metrics on a daily basis, it’s far more likely you’ll lose money than make it.

For more creative ideas of how to advertise your copywriting business, check out our blog post here >>

Your Turn

Have you tried paid advertising for your copywriting business? What were your results? Let us know in the comments below!

Note: This page contains affiliate links.

The post Should I Pay to Advertise My Copywriting Business? appeared first on Filthy Rich Writer.

Undoubtedly, you’ve got at least a couple of social media profiles—Meta/Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and so on. Hopefully, you’ve already optimized them to feature your copywriting (and aren’t just wasting time looking at what everyone else is doing!). You may even be following or connected to some of the leaders in the industry. But chances are that there are some very important people that you’re not following.

First, you want to make sure you’re following some of the top creatives in the industry and the companies they work for. If there are conversations going on about industry topics and new trends, you want to be at least listening to them, if not contributing to them.

But the second group of people that you’re very probably not following are much more important—directly important—to your career. In fact, they’re posting jobs that might be perfect for you multiple times per day.

Who am I talking about? Recruiters. And not just recruiting firms, but the individuals that work for recruitment firms.

Remember, they make their money when they place people in jobs. So, they want to get notices about those jobs out to as many people as possible. And what’s one of the ways they do it? Via social media.

Many recruiters, both those who work on their own and those who work for firms, regularly post new openings on their LinkedIn profiles. And these are the people you need to be following.

So, how do you find them? Do a search on LinkedIn for “creative recruiter” and start taking note of the people you find. You can connect with them.

If you opt to connect via LinkedIn, personalize your request. It helps you stand out from those who are moving so fast they didn’t even take the time to personalize their greeting. That may make the difference between the recruiter accepting your request and ignoring it.

You should also do a search for your city and “creative recruiter” on X/Twitter and take a look at what comes up. You may find recruiters, or you may find other creatives who follow recruiters. You’ll probably go down a several different rabbit holes, but you’re bound to find several useful people to follow.

Your social media contacts are never fully complete, either. Recruiters move companies and leave their jobs while new recruiters come in to take their places. It’s important to refresh your search for new contacts at least every couple of months. You don’t want to miss the perfect job just because you’re not following the right people!

Watch More: How Copywriters Can Work With Recruiters

In this episode of the Build Your Copywriting Business podcast, Nicki and Kate discuss how copywriters can work with recruiters to get more clients. Listen as they share exactly what you should and should not do when it comes to working through a recruiter.

Your Turn

Who else do you follow on social media? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Who You’re Not Following on Social Media (But Should Be) appeared first on Filthy Rich Writer.