Securing Clients: Strategies for Freelance Success

Looking for clients? In this episode I’m sharing 21 different ideas for ways to connect with clients for your copywriting business. I guarantee you’ll find at least one idea—and probably more like four or five ideas—that will work for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

The Copywriter Club Youtube Channel
The Finding Clients Ignition Kit
The P7 Client Acquisition System
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: How do you find new or better clients? Here are 21 different ideas you might want to try. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

This episode of the podcast is going to be different from any episode I’ve done recently… in fact, in more than 450 different episodes, I can’t remember ever having an episode where not only did I not have a guest, but also didn’t have a co-host or someone else to chat with and bounce ideas around with. So in a sense, we’re making Copywriter Club history right now.

But we’re not covering a new topic. In fact, we’ve talked about finding clients on almost every interview we’ve conducted with copywriters over the last eight years. And my guests have shared a ton of great ideas for finding clients. At some point in the future, I’d love to create a supercut of all the ideas we’ve shared over the years… but that would be dozens of hours long and it’s not at the top of my to-do list at the moment.

However, on this episode, I’m going to share 21 different ideas, actually it will probably be more, 21 different ideas for ways to find clients. Not all of them will work for you. But I promise, if you stick around to the end of this episode, you’ll find at least one and probably five or six ideas that WILL work for you and that you can start using right now.

I’m also going to share some advice… the dos and don’ts of reaching out to clients—some of the things you need to do first and what you absolutely can’t afford to do.

If this topic appeals to you, I’ve got a couple of resources for you. The first is The Copywriter Club Youtube channel. I’ve posted several videos there about finding clients, pitching clients, the questions to ask to attract clients and more. Those videos are relatively short and will help you improve your outreach process so be sure to check them out.

And I’ve put together a mini offer I’m calling the Client Finding Ignition Kit. It includes a 36 page report that covers what I’m talking about in this episode at more depth, and also includes three different workshops on finding clients. One focuses on Upwork and other online marketplaces, another is all about what’s working on LinkedIn, and the third is all about what to do if you need to find clients right now. And it also includes a one-time coaching call to talk about your approach and your pitch to make sure it will work. If you want that, go to thecopywriterclub.com/ignition

Finally, I won’t go through all the stuff it includes, but there are a ton of resources in The Copywriter Underground to help you find, pitch, and land clients. If you want to find a full-time job, there’s a workshop all about that. If you want to improve your discovery calls, there’s a workshop and playbook all about that. If you want to go deep on what’s working on LinkedIn, Upwork, and several other places to find clients, there are resources for all of those too. And that’s on top of all the other workshops, coaching, community, lead sharing and more… that’s all available at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

Before I jump into that first idea, though, I want to just talk about a couple of things that are really important to keep in mind before you start finding clients. The first idea is that you do not have a business without clients. This is the thing that we do. We write copy. But if we’re not writing copy for a client who’s paying us to do it, we don’t actually have a business. We’re just doing this thing. So whether you have one client you spend all of your time on, or you have 19 or 20 clients, you’re writing small things for over the course of the month, someone has to pay the bill. Someone has to pay you for this skill that you have, and if you don’t have clients, that’s the very first thing that you need to do. So don’t spend any time getting ready in your business.

And by that, I mean don’t spend any time building a website. Don’t think about even building a portfolio. You don’t have to worry about having a social media presence. You don’t even need a LinkedIn page or anything like that. What you need is a client. And so I want you to go out there and land that first client. Now there’s some things that you’re going to have to do in order to do that. We’ll talk about these in a minute, but I want you to land that first client, and then once you’ve had that client, you’ve done. The assignment. You’ve created a piece of copy, you’ve solved a problem for them. You’re going to do it again. You’re going to find a second client, and you’re going to do the same exact thing before you do your website, before you have a LinkedIn page, before you have social media presence, you can go out and find the second client. You’re going to solve a problem for them, and then the third time, you’re going to find a third client, and you’re going to solve a problem for them, probably writing copy or the thing that you want to do. And once you’ve done that three times, once you’ve acquired and proven that you can find clients, that’s when you’re going to back up and say, Okay, I’m going to get my business assets ready. So it’s going to make it easier for me to find the next client.

In order to do that, you need to do a couple of things. First, you need to identify who you serve. There are so many ways to look at this, and mostly we think about this as choosing a niche. I help people in the health and wellness niche, or I write copy for finance companies, or I help Coaches find clients, right? We talk about this generally by industry, the industry that we work on, but there are so many different other ways to think about niching as well. You can niche by the type of client that you work with. Let’s say that you like working with enterprise level clients or mom and pops or startups that have gone through their second round of funding. Lots of different ways to cut this so that you’re working with a certain kind of client, but if you you know, help mom and pops solve their marketing problems, or help them solve their email sequence problems, or whatever. The thing is, you can do that for mom and pops across many industries, or you can do that for a variety of different clients across all kinds of other ways that we think about niching.

Another way that you can be thinking about this is the problem that you solve. So if you are a copywriter who helps businesses or memberships reduce churn, or helps a SaaS company reduce the churn on their monthly signups. You could you’re basically identifying that problem reducing churn, right? Or maybe you’re the problem you solve is onboarding customers into different kinds of programs or software. Maybe the problem that you are solving for people is acquisition, customer acquisition, Facebook ads, those kinds of things. So there are lots of different ways to look at marketing problems. In fact, there are so many marketing problems always copywriters can solve.

We put together a list of more than 30 different marketing problems and included it with our P7 Client Acquisition Program. I didn’t talk about that at the beginning of the show, but if you want more information about that, you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/p7 there’s this massive list of problems that you as a copywriter or a content writer as a marketer can solve for your clients. Oftentimes it will involve writing copy or writing content, but sometimes these problems are attached to the things that we do, and we can think a little bit bigger about the problems that we’re helping our clients solve.

Another way to think about who you serve is the voice of the style that you write in. There are certain clients who want a particular voice or style, and if you can capture that and talk about that in a way that attracts them again. It’s another way to niche your business. You could also help businesses at different stages. So you know, whether they are a startup, whether they are in a later stage of development. You know small to medium size or medium to large size businesses, the different stages that a business goes through, comes with additional problems that they need to solve, and additional opportunities where you can step in and help.

Another way to think about this is the deliverable you create. Maybe you are the only person who writes welcome sequences for your clients, or you help them solve a problem with creating weekly regular content that drives traffic to a variety of products, whether that’s on their blog or elsewhere online. Maybe you help with social media and the deliverables there are related to the platform where you’re posting. So there’s lots of different ways to think about who it is that you serve, but after you have found those first three clients, what are the things that those clients have in common, and is there something that can indicate who it is that you are able to help right now that doesn’t have to stay static. You can change this over time, but when you’re just getting started, or when you’re looking for clients, you want to be looking at some of the clients that you’ve already worked with. What do they have in common? Because you know, you can help them, and you should be able to find more people like them.

You also want to be able to identify the problem that you’re solving. So we’ve talked a little bit about that as we’re talking about niching, but the more you know about the problem you solve, the better. You can talk about it, the better that you can bring it forward so that people can identify, oh yeah, this is the person to talk to if you need help with that. That will help you as you reach out to potential clients, and later on, as they reach back to you to help identify the thing that you do for them, you also have to be able to talk about the value that you deliver. So oftentimes, as copywriters, we talk about the thing we do. Yes, I write blog posts for small businesses, or I write sales pages for health and wellness companies, or I write welcome sequences for coaches and course sellers. But that’s not really the value. That’s oftentimes what clients come to us, asking us for hey, I need blog posts, or I need a sales page, or I need a welcome sequence. But the real value is the thing that those assets get for our clients, and so it might be authority, it might be attention, it might be additional traffic. It’s almost always also going to include revenue and sales and the ability to continue to do this, because your client is actually making money, but identifying the value of the thing really matters for talking about it. And as we go through all the ideas I’m about to share here, you need to be able to talk about that value that you bring. It’s not just a blog post, but it is authority building content that’s going to help you connect with your clients. It’s going to help bring additional sales. It’s going to get you out into the world in front of new audiences, all of the kinds of things, the what you do has value, and we’ve got to be able to talk about it a couple more things to think about when you’re reaching out to clients is we want to remove as much risk as possible for clients. So a lot of clients have worked with copywriters in the past who disappeared on them, who didn’t deliver what they promised, who missed deadlines, who allowed scope creep to happen, and so what they got was not exactly what they wanted or what they needed. And because of that, a lot of clients look at working with copywriters and other freelancers as risky.

They don’t know that if they cut you that first check before you start working, that you’re actually going to deliver on what you promise. And so if you can remove the risk for those clients in order for them to see that it’s not just low risk, but they’re not going to lose you need to do that. And of course, there are different ways to do this. One the best way is probably to offer a guarantee. We usually say we don’t guarantee copy, because you can’t guarantee the performance of the copy that you write, because it’s based on so many different variables, whether they’re going to show it to the right audience, whether they’re going to be running traffic to it, whether the ad is actually going to be talking to the right people, bringing the right people to your copy. But guarantees are a really easy way for us to say, hey, yeah, we will remove the risk, or I will continue working with you until we get this thing working for you, so that we are delivering on our promise.

Other ways to remove the risk is to show testimonials, to show case studies, to show that you know how to do this, that you’ve done it before, to show examples of the work that you can do, so that your client can envision, that they can see you actually do the thing that you promise to do, having a framework or a process that you work through that is consistent and delivers a proven result, and being able to talk about that with your client another way to remove the risk. Again, there’s so many ways to do this, but you’ve got to make it easy, ultimately, for your client to say yes, and part of that is removing the risk. Other parts are make that buying process easy. Sign up for stripe or wave app or something that allows them to easily charge a credit card or to click the button, say yes. If you make that process of working with you, signing a bunch of forms, getting all of the materials that you need in order to get started, if you make that difficult, if you make that, you know, increase the friction there, and make it really hard for clients to say yes, then they will say no. We need to make it easy for them say yes. And so all of those things that we can do on the front end matter. But back to my original point here, don’t wait to start reaching out to clients until you have those things in place. You need to find clients first. The you don’t have a business unless you’ve got paying clients, and until you’ve got two or three paying clients, you really haven’t proven you can do this over and over.

Okay, having said all of that, let’s talk about some of the ways that you can actually get out there and find clients. And the number one is something we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, but that is networking. Everyone has a network. Your network includes. It’s everyone from your parents and your siblings, your friends, the people you went to high school with or college with, teachers, professors, the person who works at the coffee shop that you see you know, the different professionals that you might work with, if you’ve got a masseuse or you work with an attorney or a bookkeeper, work acquaintances, neighbors, even people in line at the grocery store, the folks at the dog park, anybody that you run into during your daily life, people at the gym, people at church, people at your coworking space, former coworkers or bosses or supervisors, anyone that you meet and interact with. These people are in your network, and many of them want to help you succeed. And so your first step, as you are thinking about who is in your network and who you can reach out to, is make a list of these people there.

My guess is that as you start this out, you can find at least 25 but it might be more like 150 or 200 people who are in your network, loose affiliations or connections, relationships that you have with these people that you might be able to reach out to and let them know what you do, the problem you solve, and who you solve it for. There are all kinds of different ways. So again, we’ve talked about this on the podcast, but I’ve talked with copywriters who landed clients you know, talking to people at the laundromat, people who you bump into at the store, people who have a conversation with at a cocktail party. All of these people are potential clients, and as long as you can direct the conversation to their problems, the problems that you help them solve, and how you do that anybody in your network could help you. It’s not just about asking the people in your network if they have work for you, but also asking them if they know somebody. So if you have 100 people in your network, and each of them has another 100 people in their network, well now we’re talking to as many as 10,000 people, and that’s more than enough connections to start a very successful business, if you get all of your ducks in a row, and if you’re able to talk about that problem you solve, who you solve it for, and are able to deliver on those promises. So get out there. Tell everyone that you meet, what you do, the problem you solve, and who you solve it for, because your network is the number one way for you to find and connect with clients.

Number two is to find clients on Facebook or in Instagram or in other groups. There are groups on LinkedIn. There are dozens of groups now popping up in places like telegram and slack, and you know, all these other tools that we have for connecting with each other. But what you want to do is you’re not just going to show up in a Facebook group and start spamming all of the members. You’re not going to be DMing everybody. You want to show up and demonstrate your expertise, your focus, by commenting when people ask for help in a Facebook post or in a LinkedIn post, or even content that they’re posting elsewhere.

We can do this in a couple of different ways. So not only is there the content that you’re going to comment on and show that you can think deeply about the problems or the questions that they’re asking. But there are also groups where people collect and so if you happen to work with, say, software developers and help them create website copy in order to sell their products, well, join a few groups for software developers. Open up Facebook and search for software developer, and you’re going to see the groups that cater to those people join the group and then start commenting on the content that’s in there. Like I said, Don’t be DMing and pitching outright, but demonstrate your ability to solve problems, your ability to think strategically about the questions that are being asked. Propose ideas for free, share the different things that you would do, and people will start to notice and even recommend you as the expert. Idea number three, you’re going to be looking for clients in online job marketplaces. So usually when we talk about this, we’re thinking about things like Upwork or Craigslist or any of the other marketplaces that are out there.

Now there are some trade offs in this, and that is that there are 1000s of other writers on these forums fighting tooth and nail for the exact same projects that you want, and many of them are going to be charging less than what you can afford to charge. That’s okay, that that they’re there, because what the marketplace helps you do is what we’ve been talking about already. Focus on the client you serve, the problem you solve, and how you do it. And if you get the Upwork workshop that I mentioned in the ignition kit at the top of the show, we’ll show you how to create the. Type of profile that will stand out, and how to use the search features in those marketplaces in order to connect with the people that you could work with.

There are a couple of rules of you know to follow as your their rules of thumb number one, ignore the beginner projects. Even if you are a beginning copywriter, you want to be looking at intermediate and expert projects, just because you don’t want to be competing for those $5 type projects, but you need to have a profile that helps you stand out. And so there’s work to be done there. We’ve talked about this on the podcast in the past, so you can go way, way back to Episode 19, where we talked about Upwork with Danny Margulis. We talked about it on episode 315 with Rob Perry, if you want to check that one out as well. And of course, I mentioned that there’s the workshop in the Ignition Kit and The Copywriter Underground, if you want to see exactly how to attract clients on job boards like or job marketplaces like Upwork.

Idea number four is looking for gigs on job boards. So there are literally hundreds of these out there. I can name off just a few flex jobs, remote of IO, let’s work remotely. There are other copy writing boards on Facebook, things like cult of copy, contently, skyward. Some of these may have been acquired by other job boards. They change over time. You can use LinkedIn for this. There are other job sites as well, ladders, lensa, again, there’s so many out there, and most of the stuff that you’re going to see posted on these job boards is not going to be a fit for what you do, but you want to keep an idea out, or, sorry, an eye out for the opportunities that might be applicable to what you do, and you want to figure out a way to respond to those posts so that you stand out from all of the others.

Now a job posting on LinkedIn will oftentimes receive 100 200 maybe even more, applicants to a job. I was just talking to somebody earlier this week about a job posting that they posted, and they had 1400 respondents to it. And so you definitely need to figure out a way to stand out when you’re going to be competing with other writers on job boards. But job boards are really good at collecting the various jobs that are out there, and if you can find a couple of really good ones, you’ll have two or three different jobs every single day that you can consider and possibly respond to. Oftentimes they are full time jobs or part time jobs, but there are contract and freelance jobs out there as well.

So job boards can be a great place for you to find clients. I mentioned LinkedIn earlier, but number five way to find clients is looking on LinkedIn. Now this can be a longer term strategy, but by posting content on LinkedIn, and by having a completed profile that tells people exactly who you help and what you do, the problem that you solve, the value that you bring to your client. Once you do that, now you can use LinkedIn to search. So that’s certainly one way to do it. You know, go to the Jobs tab search for freelance copywriter or contract copywriter or sales copywriter, or any of the words that are related to the kinds of work that you want to do. You can add a location filter if you only want to look for jobs, say in the United States or maybe in Atlanta or maybe in Texas, or however you want to filter those out, and then you will see things that are there. You do need to be a little bit careful. There are a lot of fake jobs out there. There are content farms that, you know, post jobs that are looking for cheap help. And so you do need to put a little due diligence into this. But you can find good opportunities on LinkedIn. There are lots of them.

And like I said earlier, you just need to figure out a way when you respond, a way to make you stand out. You’re not just responding with a hey, I’m interested, and here’s my resume. You really do have to stand out from the hundreds of other people that are out there while we’re talking about LinkedIn. Also, you can cold pitch prospects on LinkedIn. So as you connect with people or follow people on LinkedIn and comment on their work and see the content that they post, you start to see opportunities that you might be able to help with. And so you can use the DMS on LinkedIn in order to reach out to potential clients as well, and if you’ve got a decent template for that, that can, you know, speed things up.

As far as making that connection, we talk a lot about how to connect, how to warm up cold leads in that client acquisition system, the p7 client acquisition system I mentioned briefly, and you can find out more about that at the copyrighted club.com, forward slash p7 Is all about how to warm up somebody from cold or from a loose connection to somebody who is really interested in working with you, and it’s all because you write what I call a love note pitch. So you can find out more about that, but look for five to 10 people in your niche on LinkedIn, the exact person that you can help and send a connection request. And then, you know, follow up with them as they post content. Post your own comments on that, not just Hey, nice, nice work or good idea here, but really substantive, thoughtful comments so they start to see you. And then when the time is right, you can reach out with a direct message offering to help with whatever problem that they have.

Idea number seven for finding clients is using social media. So again, there’s nothing new here. If you’re posting content on Instagram or on LinkedIn or any of the other social media channels you’re you’re basically doing the right thing. But you don’t just want to be talking about copywriting, because potential clients don’t really want to learn how to be copywriters. They want a copywriter who’s going to handle that stuff for them. So you want to be posting about the problems that you solve. You’re going to want to share case studies and testimonials and talk about the work that you do. You’re going to want to talk about your process and how effective it is. Post about exactly how you solved a problem for your last client. And of course, be sure to respond to the comments that you get that your prospects might be leaving on your content if they’ve interacted with you a few times, reach out with a DM or an email, let them know exactly how you could help solve a similar problem, and obviously we’ve been talking about doing that in various different ways, but social media can be a great place to find clients. If you’re into the kind of content that you want to post on social media doesn’t have to be there. Again. We’ve got a lot more ideas to go through here now.

Idea number eight is to start your own group, especially for your prospects. So this isn’t what I would call a beginner level strategy, but if you are an experienced copywriter, this strategy can create a steady stream of clients that literally could last for years. As the leader of a group, you are collating a bunch of potential clients that need your experience and expertise, and as the thought leader in the connector, the person who is connecting people in the group, you’re able to show up as the expert and become the natural person that they want to reach out to. So you can create a group in all kinds of places, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack circle, again, so many different places to do this. But the key here isn’t to create a group for copywriters or for content writers. You want to target the people in your niche. You want to choose a name that makes it easy for your prospects to see that that’s the place where they can connect with people like them and hear your expertise. So if I were going to create a group for coaches, I would choose a name like the coach marketing group or something like that, where people are easily able to see the value that might be in that group from the name, and then, of course, once they see that, they’ll want to join.

Idea number nine is finding clients by cold emailing so much like cold calling or reaching out via DM on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can find emails of potential clients and reach out to them directly. Hunter IO is a tool that’s fantastic for this. I think there’s a free option with hunter that you can get something like 20 or 25 different emails a month for free. But when you’re looking for these clients to reach out to, you know, listen to for podcast interviews, or look for posts on their blogs or or look for the movers and shakers in the industry or the niche that you serve, and reach out directly. Don’t use standard cold email templates that you get from someone else. You’re going to want to customize it. You’re going to want to write, basically, again, what I call a love note pitch and send that to them in order to warm them up.

But there’s just so many different ways to identify these people, and email is a great method for reaching out to potential clients related to that is idea number 10, and that is finding your next client by snail mailing. So good old fashioned show up in the mailbox with some paper or with something that is so different. Now, one of the things I love about this idea is that you are virtually guaranteed to be the only copywriter or the only content writer or the only marketer showing up in that place. Unfortunately, with cold pitching and email, there are probably going to be, certainly, within a week, three or four others that may be doing the. Same thing. But if you’re willing to pay for an envelope and a stamp and write a letter, you can actually show up where nobody else is and where people are actually looking for something besides credit card mailers and card stacks and newspaper deals that all go straight to the recycle bin. They’re looking for some kind of one to one contact, and if you can be the person that creates that for them. You can create a really good connection where nobody else is, and like I said, that’s their home. You can actually do something even more creative, if you want to create something that we would call a shock and awe mailer. That’s a term that I’ve borrowed from Dan Kennedy, but this is where, instead of just sending a letter and a standard envelope, you’re going to get a larger envelope. You’re probably going to put inside it some samples, sales materials. If you have a book, you can put a book in there, you know, some kind of tchotchke or something that makes it lumpy, because people, once they receive this because, you know, it’s in a colored envelope, or it’s in a big envelope, or a FedEx envelope, something like that. It’s different. It’s unique, and it can really stand out. Something as simple as a greeting card can also stand out because people like that. Personalized one on one, one copywriter that I know did this with a newsletter and created a newsletter identified 200 different people that they would mail this four page newsletter out to, and over the course of three or four months, sending out to these 200 potential clients with just advice, the sales material, you know, all of the different ways to solve the problems that they had filled his entire client roster, and he has gone on to make more than a million dollars a year, and that is a true million dollars. Fantastic way just to get in front of your ideal clients where nobody else is.

Idea number 11 is to connect with fellow copywriters. So I’ve mentioned this even recently on the podcast, but if you can reach out to other copywriters who know you know the work that you do, and you know you staying in touch with them when they get leads that they perhaps can’t work on because maybe they’ve got too much work, or it’s not a fit for them because it’s not the right niche, or some other thing, they can often pass them on to you, and obviously you can do the same for them, but this is a little bit of a long term strategy. You’ve got to do the groundwork, you’ve got to create a relationship and build trust with these other copywriters in order for that to happen. So you’ll be reaching out to them in places like social media or LinkedIn or at conferences, masterminds and in person events, so that you can get to know each other and trust each other, so that you’re willing to share those kinds of leads and relationships. I mentioned this, I think, in last week’s podcast, but copywriter I know passed my name on to somebody she had been working with but didn’t have time to help that person ended up doing three or four projects with me. They passed me on to a project manager who did another three or four projects with me. It was almost six figures worth of work over time, and that was all through one friendship made in one group, when I connected with a fellow copywriter. And I’ve done that over and over with a variety of copywriters over the past 10 years or so.

Idea number 12 is to build partnerships with content agencies or marketing agencies, SEO agencies, design firms, anybody who might need copy but maybe doesn’t have their own copywriter on staff. This is a tactic that can result in work and a full roster really, really quickly, because a lot of agencies, when they get too much work for their internal team, they need resources that they can reach out to. And so if you can become the freelancer for a an agency that they’re turning over their extra work to, they can do their overflow and hand that off to you. That’s a really valuable service for them, and that’s a great way for you to find work without having to pitch a variety of different clients. Now if you do this, oftentimes, you might need to have an agency rate, because agencies are going to mark up your work and pass it on to their clients. So this probably won’t matter a whole lot. If you’re charging, say, 50 or $75 an hour, agencies will generally market up considerably more than that. But if you’re charging, you know, 150 $200 an hour, you may need to reduce what you charge to something like 70% of that so that the agency can mark it up 30% and, you know, pass it on. But because you’re not doing the work of finding clients, you’re not even doing a lot of client management work, trading that small percentage off of what you normally would get paid can often be very worth it. So reaching out to agencies can be a great place to find clients.

Idea number 13 is hobnobbing with clients. Conferences and events. So again, this is a really good way to establish relationships, face to face and build trust, where a lot of other copywriters are not going to be too many copywriters are there in social media, or they’re showing up in the DMS, or they’re pitching in the inbox, but very few actually show up to industry events for their clients. Now I’m not necessarily talking about showing up at events for copywriters or for marketers, so this might not be,
you know, a Content Marketing World, or, you know, those that kind of an event. But if you serve a niche that has industry events, and most industries have events. Let’s say that you work with attorneys. You might want to show up at, you know, an event or an expo for attorneys or for whoever it is that you serve, and a couple of things that you may want to do, because you are the only copywriter there. But you need to make sure that everybody knows that you are a copywriter who works with the people at that event, and so you may want to wear a t shirt with the word copywriter on the back, just so people can see them. If there is an opportunity during any of the presentations to ask questions, you might want to step up to the microphone and say, hey, you know, my name is Rob. I’m a copywriter who works with you know whoever is there at that event, name, you know the the person that you help. So, you know, coaches, attorneys, whoever that is, and then ask your question. So everybody in the room is focused on you, saying you’re a copywriter. You work with people like them, and then you’re going to ask a smart, strategic question. And they know that you’re, you know, a thinker and able to help them. Other copywriters I know, who’ve gone to events have printed out stickers with their business and logo and handed them out. They’ve, you know, my friend, Joel, he did this at an event, and he offered prizes to event attendees who shared photos of the stickers on social media. And so they were posting them on all kinds of places, you know, even sticking them to walls, and maybe some places where stickers don’t belong, but it’s a good way to get your name passed around. Get Noticed. If you’re using the event hashtag, you can see stuff like that. And of course, you can always hand out things like notebooks or pens or give out different things that remind people that you’re there while you’re at the event. Being at an event and being the only copywriter there, whether it’s in your own city, whether it’s somewhere nearby, is a really good way to connect with clients that I promise other copywriters aren’t going to miss out on.

Idea number 14 is using online ads. So again, this is not a beginner strategy, but if you’ve got a proven offer that clients respond to, you could post ads in places like Facebook or Google. It’s becoming more and more popular to run ads on YouTube, even Reddit does ads. Now you can run ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, Tiktok, Pinterest, Amazon, there’s so many different places, so find the place where your audience is set a daily budget doesn’t have to be a whole lot. Could be 10 to $20 a day, and have an ad that’s going to either introduce a lead magnet so that you can be start emailing and connecting with these people or advertise your offer and your service. We recorded a podcast a few weeks ago with Tara Zirker about this. If you want to check out what you can do with ads, that might be a great way just to follow up and take some action on that I did.

Number 15 is connecting with marketing consultants who have related services, so like the agency strategy SEO consultants or sales funnel consultants, email system consultants or ESP, like, there’s so many different marketing consultants who don’t write copy, but oftentimes they Need copy to put into the systems that they are building or working on. And so you know, if you know a HubSpot consultant or maketo consultant, Email List Manager, Facebook ad consultant, you may be able to connect with them, and they could connect you with their clients who might need ad copy, sales enablement, copy, case studies, emails, all of that kind of stuff. Idea number 16 is to attract prospects with the what I’ll call the free ideas method. So with this method, you are providing a mini critique or an audit that identifies mistakes that potential clients are making on their websites or in their funnels or email campaigns or other marketing assets, and you’re going to suggest ways for them to improve.

So once you find a prospect that you want to work with, check their website or their funnel or email sequence, whatever it is that you want to audit and look for things that you can improve, and what would you do differently or better, and what could they be doing to improve their responses? And once you have a. List of ideas, send an email and ask if you can share those ideas. If they don’t say yes, follow up with another email, with a recording, say, using a tune, a tool like loom or zoom, where you’re actually walking through the ideas that you came up with. Now you want to be a little bit careful with this method, because most clients don’t like to be told that their copy is bad or their marketing assets suck, or that they’re terrible at what they do. So you want to make sure that you’re keeping things positive, that you’re suggesting ideas for improvement, and you’re not assuming that things don’t work just because it doesn’t look like what you would do. Oftentimes, the stuff works, and if you don’t have access to the numbers behind what they’re doing, you don’t want to be saying, you know, you’re definitely not getting the clients that you think you are. You’re not doing a good enough job. They may be doing a pretty good job. And so you’re really looking for a way to keep it positive, but to offer some improvements.

Idea number 17 is to reach out to clients with remarkable content, wherever it is that you post. So LinkedIn, medium, another publishing platform, when we say remarkable, we mean it’s really got to be something that’s a little bit different. So you’re not just regurgitating the same old, same old. You’re not just posting AI fluff, but you’re doing really deep thought leadership that stands out. There’s just so much mediocre content in the world. We’ve all created it. We’ve all put it out there, and it just disappears into that sea of sameness. And it’s not worth doing if that’s the level of create creative work that you do. But if you’ve got ideas, or you can do surveys or information that’s not readily available anywhere else. It can be a great way to attract the audience that you’re looking for. So one example that we have done at the copywriter club, and many of you have participated in, is our annual salary survey. Now, obviously we’re talking to copywriters, and so we’re asking copywriters information about that. But in your niche, you could create some kind of a survey or industry report that has this kind of proprietary information that you have collected, you’ve curated in some way, and you make that available for people so that they will connect with you. It’s a little bit of a long game. You may need to follow up with people after you’ve published it or made it available, but it’s a great way to get attention and reach out and connect with the clients that you want to be working with.

Obviously, I did number 18 guest posting, so this just gets your work in front of your ideal clients. You can post on your own website, but my guess is you probably have very little traffic there. Most copywriters don’t get more than a few visits a day, if that. But there are large sites that publish content that have audiences that are eagerly awaiting for more ideas. There are newsletters that you can connect with that will help you get in front of the people who are reading those kinds of newsletters or guest posts, and so look for those kinds of opportunities. One way to identify that is to go to Google and search for terms like submit a guest post or guest post guidelines, become a contributor. Things like that will help you identify those sites that accept guest posts. And of course, you want to put those terms in quotes so that it looks for those specific terms, as opposed to, you know, pages that include all of those words.

Idea number 19 is to attract prospects with a regular newsletter. So I touched on this when we were talking about showing up in the inbox. But I want to come back to it, because I really, really love this idea. So there are newsletter platforms now with recommendation engines and Paid Subscriptions. You know, online tools like sub stack, beehive, Convert Kit and so you can create these kinds of newsletters that are hyper focused on the kinds of clients that you want to work with, whether that’s an industry or whether it’s a type of problem or service or deliverable, you could easily create the preeminent newsletter for that industry. And of course, tools like substack, beehive, they are online, so it shows up in the inbox. There’s tools for helping you find additional readers that can be super effective. And I mentioned, you know, the idea of taking this and actually making it a hard copy and sending it out again. Just worth underlining that idea, because it’s such a great way to connect with your ideal clients.

Idea number 20 is to place an ad in a newsletter that’s already out there. And so there are dozens of newsletters that may already be going after your industry. If you’re writing in AI. There’s probably 30 different AI newsletters on sub stack that have readerships of more than 5000 or. Readers, and some of them have hundreds of 1000s of readers. If I wanted to put an offer in front of them, I can buy an ad in that newsletter and show up as a sponsor. Newsletters do it in different ways, but you can show up as the sponsor of the newsletter with several paragraphs talking about you or your product. Maybe there are smaller ways to do sponsorships, but to be seen by 100,000 potential clients with an offer that you know they want to sign up for, that you’re putting in front of them can be a great way to start that client attraction funnel.

Idea number 21 we’re on a podcast right now. So being on podcasts can be exceptionally good for talking to the clients that you want to talk to. Again, it matters the kinds of podcasts that you choose. So you want to be looking for podcasts in the industry or the niche that you serve. You know, again, if you’re a copywriter and you show up here on the copywriter club podcast, that’s great. You’re getting in front of other copywriters, but if you’re writing for coaches, your reach for coaches may be a little bit limited by the audience that listens to this show. So look for shows that help or talk to the audience that you want to write for, and then pitch the hosts of those podcasts you know show up and let them know what are the three or four things that you can talk about, what are a couple of topics that they haven’t covered over the last four or five months on their shows?

I’m serious when I say, go back and listen to all of the shows to see what they talk about. Because if you can find those ideas that are missing when you reach out to the podcast host and say, Hey, I noticed you haven’t talked about haven’t talked about this idea or that idea, and I would love to talk about my framework for that and my process for accomplishing this, or how your listeners can do these three things in order to see a success, those kinds of pitches really do work when you’re Talking to the right podcast hosts.

Okay, so that’s 21 ideas. Of course, there are lots more, and maybe we’ll get into more in a future episode. Before we leave off, I want to just mention a couple things you don’t want to be doing when you’re looking for clients.

Number one, you do not want to wait to be chosen. You can’t sit back having built a great website, or knowing that you’re a great copywriter, or knowing that you can solve a problem for a client and wait for the client to come and find you, or wait for somebody else to say, Hey, Rob is a great copywriter. You should hire him, because that’s not going to happen. You have to get out there. You have to find one or two or four or five ideas where you can start showing up and say, hey, here I am. This is the problem I solve for you. You are. This is the person that I help, and this is the value I bring to the table. Let’s talk about how I can help you.

Number Two, don’t beg for work. So even if you are desperate, even if you know that you can help this client, you don’t want to show up, asking them or begging, putting yourself in a subservient position, because when you do that, clients can feel that you’re desperate, and people who are capable, people who are expert at what they do and are proven successful at things like copywriting, they don’t have to beg for work, because people come to them. And so when you start to beg for work, when you plead, when you show up desperate, it shows that you are not the expert that you need to be. So don’t ever beg for work, no matter how desperate you are.

Number three, don’t list is, don’t waste your time convincing people that they need copy. If the person that you’re talking to doesn’t already believe that copy is part of the solution to their problem, move on, because you’re going to spend way too much time convincing them they’re not really going to believe you until they see proof. They’re going to be difficult clients to work with. You’re going to have so much more success if you are talking with clients who already believe in the power of copywriting or the power of marketing to solve many of the problems that they have and finally, don’t work for free. Now let me be clear on what I mean by that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t get paid, because you absolutely should get paid, but there are ways that we get paid that aren’t necessarily in dollars, and so it is perfectly okay for you to work for no dollars, but when you do this, you should be getting something else from the effort that you’re putting in.

Number one, you should be getting a sample that you can use or in order to drop into your portfolio or to share with other potential clients, to show that you do this kind of work for real clients, you should be getting a case study that shows the thinking that went into the process. It talks about the problem. You’re trying to solve, and the various approaches that you considered, and then the results that you get, if you are, you know, doing a project for no dollars, you should get a referral from the person you’re doing it for. You know, let me know, you know, one or two people who you know, who also need help. Or, you know, talk to them about me. There are different ways to do that referral thing, but these are all ways that you can get paid if you’re actually working for no dollars. That’s not for free, because, again, you’re getting paid, but it’s by something that’s not money. So don’t ever work for free, even if you are not getting paid.

Okay, I mentioned a bunch of helpful resources the top of show the ignition kit, which dives into what I’ve shared here in much more depth, and gives you three different workshops to help you find clients if you need them right now, and includes a short coaching call to help you dial in your pitch, your niche and more that’s at the copywriter club.com, forward slash ignition.

I’ve referred to our p7 client acquisition system a few times. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s included in that. And you can find details about that proven system at thecopywriterclub.com/p7 and I mentioned The Copywriter Underground at the top of the show, which is like a home for all kinds of resources, including leads from other copywriters, workshops, coaching, community and more you can find that at thecopywriterclub.com/TCU-2.

And of course, I have linked to all of those and more in the show notes for this episode. As I said at the top of the show, this episode is a little bit different. So if you liked it and you would like more episodes like this with me, just sharing some of the things that I know, in addition to the regular interviews that I do, please email me to let me know I’m at rob@thecopywriterclub.com that is my real email, and I do get all of the emails sent to that address. And I really appreciate your feedback. You know, again, tell me if this is helpful and I can share more thoughts on other topics, anything from say, AI to offer creation to how to get better as a copywriter. So let me know.