Do You Have a Copywriter on Your Team?

Our guest for the 269th episode of The Copywriter Club podcast is Lindsey Walker. Lindsey is a public relations expert who owns Walker + Associates Media Group – a boutique public relations agency. Lindsey helps her clients position themselves for visibility and growth. If you want to increase your visibility and authority in the online space, tune into the episode to find actionable steps you can take to increase your impact and grow your brand. Lindsey’s journey into the public relations world and starting a freelance business. The roles that characterize a publicity firm and finding a team that will help you scale your business. How to shift from solopreneur to leader and CEO. – What do you need to have in place? Defining the type of CEO you want to become and how you can begin to look strategically at your business. The process of working with someone in public relations. – What happens first? How long it takes to expect results from PR. How copywriters need to think about their business from a PR standpoint. Are you the bottleneck in your business? The 3 elements to DIY public relations in your business. How to break through when you don’t have connections or people on the inside. How to successfully pitch yourself and the biggest mistakes you need to avoid. The different opportunities to pitch yourself depending on the season and time of year. How to break into the PR space as a writer. The difference between in-house and freelance PR writers. The impact that mindset plays in public relations and how to put yourself out there. When it’s a good idea to think about PR in your business. What is the future of public relations? What Lindsey learned from a life-threatening experience and how it applies to her business today. Advice for business owners who are going through difficult situations. How to handle rejection when sending pitches. Will Kira and Rob become influencers?! PR is an essential tool to grow your business and create a lasting impact. Be sure to grab your earbuds or check out the transcript below. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground The Copywriter Club Accelerator waitlist  Lindsey’s website Mai-kee’s website Episode 229 with Selena Soo Episode 151 with Patsy Kenney Episode 150 with Brigitte Lyons Episode 152 with Mai-kee    Full Transcript: Rob:  One of the most important activities that you do as a copywriting business owner is marketing, and that can take a lot of forms, everything from cold pitching to social media, and almost literally 100 other activities. Continually marketing yourself and your business is the thing that attracts clients to your door. If you want to succeed long term as a copywriter, you can't ignore this activity. Today's guest on The Copywriter Club Podcast is publicist and PR expert, Lindsey Walker. She knows a thing or two about attracting attention to your business. We met Lindsey when she reached out to pitch a guest for our podcast, and while that particular person wasn't a fit, when we heard Lindsey's story, we knew that she would be. Stick around to hear what she shared about getting people to pay attention to what you are doing in your business. But before we get to all of that, let me introduce my guest host for this episode, Mai-kee Tsang. Hey, Mai-kee. Mai-kee:  Hey, Rob. Lovely to be here. I'm not Kira, but she's here with us in spirit. Rob:  Nope. Kira was with us on the initial interview. Yeah, it's just you and me to talk about all of that. Mai-kee:  Exciting stuff. Rob:  Yeah. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you'll remember that Mai-kee shared how she pitched 101 podcast in 30 days way back on episode 152. It's a really good episode. I'll remind you again at the end to listen to it, but make a mental note because you're definitely going to want to check that out. Then one more thing before we jump into our interview, this podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Accelerator. That's our program for copywriters who want to lay a solid foundation under their business and get all of the pieces lined up for success in the coming new year. It runs for 16 weeks, covers everything from business mindset and figuring out your X factor and your unique mechanism to creating products and pricing and services and working with clients and all of those things, as well as marketing yourself and attracting the right clients into your business. Do yourself a favor and visit Thecopywriteraccelerator.com and get yourself on the wait list right now. We'll be opening the doors again in just a few weeks. Okay. Let's hear from Lindsey and how she got her start as a publicist and a PR expert. Lindsey:  I have always loved all things communications. I grew up with my grandmother. She would always have the news turned on on someone's news station. I fell in love with journalism. I've always written in my journal poetry, just things like that. Initially, I thought that I was going to be a writer. But in my senior year of high school, I got the opportunity to participate in this program called the Minority Journalism Workshop, and I will never forget it because it was so instrumental in just where I am today. We had the opportunity to pick between careers and I had just finished reading this fiction book and the lady was an account executive in the book. She was a publicist, and so I was like, "You know what? It sounds interesting. Let me see what this is about." Oh my gosh. So awesome. I got a chance to learn so many things about publicity and how to work with journalism, put together releases and press conferences and all of those things. I majored in it in college. I did a ton of internships and I just started my own business as a freelancer once I graduated because I wasn't able to find a position back at home. But that's pretty much how I got started in the industry. Rob:  Tell us a little bit more about that, what you were doing as a freelancer and basically just what it was that you were doing to find places to publish, to do your work, all that kind of stuff. Lindsey:  Yeah. What's so interesting is that I landed my first three clients. I landed two of them from Twitter, I landed another one from LinkedIn. I just put it out there that, "Hey, I'm a freelancer." I used my portfolio from the internships that I've done and people, they gave me an opportunity, they gave me a chance, and so I was able to get them placements. I used those first freelance clients to buy my LLC and to have my company name, which at the time we were PR Mentality. Then it just grew from there with getting more retainer clients the more that I got results. I was also connecting with other people in the industry so that they could mentor me, and I really, really just went all in with making sure that I serviced the clients that I had very well so that we could grow. Rob:  I know this is journalism, and we usually talk about copy, ad copy, marketing copy, that kind of thing. But tell us the kinds of things that you were writing and where you were publishing. Lindsey:  Yeah. For me, I'm on the opposite side of the journalism table. I write the media pitches and then the editors will decide if they want to write and do the story. I target outlets like the New York Times, CBS This Morning, Fox, Refinery29, Essence, Black Enterprise, those types of publications based upon what my client's overall message is and what their overall goals are, and I'm able to put together and package a pitch that I know that the editors will be interested in. That's how I begin to identify those targets, the editors, the writers, and then based upon what they've been covering, what they've been publishing, I'll reach out to them to garner their interest. Kira:  Lindsey, let's talk about what your business looks like today, structurally. How many clients do you typically work with? Are they mostly retainers and how many team members do you have? Lindsey:  Yes. Our clients mostly are on a retainer basis. Right now we're taking between eight to 10 clients on roster. On the team, we just hired someone. I think now we're up to a team of four, four or five. No, it's four, including me. Okay. We have two account executives which help me to work with the accounts and help me to manage who we're pitching to and what the status of things are. We have a virtual assistant that really helps handle the backend of getting our email sequences and our marketing together. Then I'm now testing out the role of actually bringing on a copywriter to have someone to help us build out those email sequences as well. Those are the roles that we have. Rob:  Lindsey, as you've grown your business, how did you step through who was the first hire, who was the next hire? How did you identify what the need was and then find the people to bring them into your business? Lindsey:  Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's important to note I've been in business for nine years, and eight out of those nine years, really about seven and a half out of those nine years, I was a solopreneur. I did all the things myself and I got to a point where I figured out I just cannot do and be all things and do and be them well. Right? One of the first positions I created a role for was virtual assistant because I'm like, "If I could just get someone to handle my copy, my content for social media, handling the backends of email marketing, then that would help me to focus a little bit more on client structures." Then as we started to get more clients, it was just like, "Okay, we need to hire out for the actual account executive positions so that we can take on more clients." That was pretty much the thought process, but definitely a virtual assistant was the first hire that I made because I knew, number one,