If you decide to flee 9 to 5 world and to live by your wits as well your laptop as a independent copywriter, the largest challenge you will face is finding clients. It can take months, if not a number of years, to build up a secure customer base to keep your profits at a stable level. So you need to make sure you have sufficient funds to last half a year before you get started and that you never stop advertising and marketing yourself and looking for clients.
Here are four ways of locating corporations able to pay for your copywriting expertise:
Social networking sites
LinkedIn is the alternative to Facebook for business professionals. Rather than party photos, Farmville and posting witty jokes, people use LinkedIn as a professional networking tool to link with people they’ve worked with and people they’d like to. So it's a wise decision to get involved by setting up a user profile and interacting with colleagues you've worked with before and people you want to work with in the foreseeable future.
To give your network a jump start, send link invitations to all the people you've worked with in the past. You may be surprised what businesses they may have transferred to that might make use of a copywriter. You may also use LinkedIn to find enterprises in your local area that might call for your services and whom you can contact for freelance assignments.
Marketing and webdesign agencies always need freelancers
Local marketing and website design agencies can be a goldmine of freelance copywriting work paid at a good rate of pay.. They will also give you access to bigger higher paying clients and brands than you would be in the position to connect with as an individual freelancer. The big agencies probably already have copywriters internally, so it will be sensible to concentrate on the medium sized to smaller agencies who use freelancers to add extra expertise whenever they require them.
Attending face to face business networking functions
With competition for clients on the web leading to rates of pay to drop fast, the best method is to seek out customers in your local region. Folks naturally prefer to work work those they've met in person. With this in mind, you need to be out there shaking hands and speaking to local business owners, face to face, at each chance you get.
If you check with your local council or business support organisations you will likely discover a vibrant business networking scene in your town. Often held in local hotel function rooms or over an early morning breakfast in a local restaurant, networking events are typically fairly relaxed and enable people who run businesses and freelancers to meet each other.
While many business networking events have to be paid for, it’s often feasible to locate free events in your neighborhood. But if you can not locate any professional networking events in your town or city, then why not start an event of your own? You could create the event on a social networking website, like Meetup, Facebook or LinkedIn. Simply start a networking get together and next invite people in your neighborhood business community to attend also to invite their business contacts.
Pick up the phone
Many copywriters are naturally fearful of picking up the phone, and would rather clean the house than pick-up the phone. It can be time-consuming, but contacting local firms which may require a freelance copywriter is far more effective than just email bombing them. Sending unsolicited email messages is unlikely going to get the result you need, unless you want to irritate people and be labelled a spammer. Making the effort to pick up the phone, on the other hand, gives you the chance to speak about your copywriting expertise in a more ethical way that can build a relationship and give you the opportunity of acquiring some freelance work.
As a freelancer you can not afford to sit back and wait for enquries to roll in. So you need to be constantly marketing and offering your copywriting skills so you can build up a consistent salary and make the freelance dream a reality.
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