TCC Podcast #223: The Ins and Outs of Cold Pitching with Chris Collins

Copywriter and philosophy graduate, Chris Collins is our guest for the 223rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. He's a member of the Underground and the Copywriter Think Tank so we've seen first hand how cold pitching has transformed his copywriting career and helped him get the clients he wants.  We knew this is something we wanted to hear more about directly from Chris, so we asked him about... •   how being a mommy blogger launched his career •   how he saved himself hours of time streamlining his pitching process and scaling it •   how he got past his fear of cold pitching •   exactly how many emails should you send to your email list? •   the importance of building relationships versus up leveling yourself •   why just learning “stuff” isn’t enough •   what to do if you don’t have money to invest in yourself or your business •   why research is critical for a stand-out cold pitch •   Chris's highest converting subject line – averaging over a 90% open rate •   how he combines automating with personalization •   his not-so-secret shortcut for how he built his copywriting business from 0-10K per month in the same year •   his advice on pitching if you’ve never had a client •   what his graduate studies in philosophy taught him about strengthening his copy •   what he did right in the beginning of his business that you should too •   Rob and Kira’s advice on getting started and dealing with rejection To hear more of what Chris has to say, scroll down and hit the play button. Keep scrolling for a full transcript and, of course, you can subscribe with your favorite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: reply.io The Copywriter Think Tank The Copywriter Accelerator Chris's LinkedIn christophercollins.co Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Kira:   There's an old cartoon that was published in the New Yorker Magazine of a dog in front of a computer, and the caption says, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." That might ring true for a lot of copywriters who write for clients in voices that don't quite match their own, like our guest for the 223rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Chris Collins, whose first assignment was writing content for a mommy blogger. In real life, Chris is an academic, doesn't have kids and gravitates to philosophy, not family planning. We asked Chris how he transitioned from mommy blogger to SAS, and in the process, he revealed a ton of tips about the ins and outs of cold pitching. Rob:   But before we dive into Chris's story, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Accelerator. That's our program for copywriters who want to build a solid business foundation for everything that they do. Members of The Accelerator work through eight different modules together, and those modules cover topics like branding, pricing, client management, getting yourself in front of the right clients, and a lot more. If you've struggled to get transaction in your business, or you're making a change in the kinds of clients that you want to work with, the kind of work that you want to do, or any other thing in your business, you simply want to get better at your processes and the services that you sell, you owe it to yourself to learn more at thecopywriteraccelerator.com. Kira:   Let's jump in with a question about how Chris got started as a copywriter/ mommy blogger. Chris Collins:   My first gig was being a mommy blogger, and that wasn't necessarily where I wanted to be as a writer or where I wanted to start out, but it was just honestly the first gig that I got. I had just been thinking, "Well, maybe I can try my hand at writing online. I'm a pretty good writer. Let's see how that'll go." And the first client I found, she ran a sleep consultancy to help new moms. And she was looking for a blog writer and I sent her something and she really liked what I was doing. That ended up being my first gig for the first six months. And it was the first time that I really understood the power of research actually, because right off the bat, I was writing on topics that I did not know anything about. I'm not a mom or a dad, I don't have kids, I don't have a ton of firsthand experience with kids, but what I could do was research these topics that she would give me. She would want to write about, why do kids wake up in the middle of the night? Or, why is my kid a reluctant pooper? And so I would dig into all these articles and research the why behind this and write I think pretty well-informed articles that... She was really happy with the content, but I also knew that I don't speak the language of parents. I'm not in that social circle, I don't know what parents talk about, or are interested in. Kira:   I don't know either. What do parents talk about? I have no idea. Chris Collins:   I don't know, but what I did to make my articles I guess more relevant was search for phrases like "Potty training" on Twitter, or Facebook or whatever, or things like, "My kid won't poop." I would just get all these posts and it was the first time I'd ever searched for VOC data. And I really didn't know what I was doing, but I would just get all of these social posts where people were like... I was reading what parents were saying in their own words about their kids potty problems. Anyway, I think this is a lot, but it ended up being a really good first experience in doing VOC research and writing about that topic wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do forever, but it did leave me to other kinds of content writing and copywriting that were a better fit. Rob:   Before we jump to that stuff though, Chris, in addition to the voice of customer research that you were doing, did you have to adjust your writing in any way to match the mum blogger voice, or does that just come naturally out of the research that you were doing? Chris Collins: That's a great question. It's been a while since I did it. I definitely felt like I had to go... I looked at a bunch of other mom blogs to see what their voice looked like and sounded like, and I was trying to match that. I was definitely doing some competitor scanning as well, because the way I would naturally write, I think, is a little bit less personality-driven, a little bit better suited to the SAS world where I've gravitated to. But for sure, I had to do some research just on, what should the voice of this piece be? What should that look like? Rob:   In all the research that you did, was there anything that shocked you about children or about parenting that you're like, "Whoa, I did not know that?" Chris Collins:   Well, it definitely reinforced my impression that parenting is really hard. As someone who is not currently a parent, I would go over to my sister... My sister has two kids, and I would go over to her house and it was right about the time my niece was potty training and she would be having exactly the kinds of issues that I was writing about. And they had tried three-day potty training without a ton of success. And they tried different things to make it go smoothly. And I would just be like, "He’s to young for that. You should try this." Mary, my sister, she was just not having it. She was like, "I'm not interested. I don't want to hear it." I don't know, nothing terribly shocking, I guess. Rob:   But how did this first gig then launch you into gig number two and to the point where you could start your own freelance business? Chris Collins:   Even as I was writing for this client, I wasn't making much money doing this, to be frank. I think that by the time that contract ended, I think I was making less than $40 per post. So not a lot. But I was very aware very early on of what was possible in the world of copywriting. I had been following this very podcast that we're on very early on. And I think I was pretty clear that I wanted to work for better clients and clients that I would be more interested in working for. I started to just try to find clients who were more of an ideal fit. I think for most of the first year, I was still on Upwork and trying to reach clients on Upwork, and I think it took me a long time to realize that was, for me, not likely to be where I was going to find my best clients, but that whole first year was a process of gradually finding clients who were going to be more in the tech space, clients who were going to pay me better than what I was currently making. I think over the course of the year, I landed... This was over 2019. I landed a couple of four figure projects, which at the time just was a big mind blowing thing for me and just helped me to see, "Well, you can actually make some decent money doing this and you can work on projects that are really fun." Kira:   Can you talk about what you were doing before you got into copywriting, your background and education in philosophy and how that background and lessons in philosophy have shown up in business? Chris Collins:   Oh my gosh. Yeah, I can talk about that. I never ever thought that I would be doing copywriting at all, although I think what's turned out to be the case has been it's been a really natural... coming full circle in terms of being something that really leverages the writing and research skills that I developed early in my career. But I started my career going to grad school planning to be a philosophy professor. The thing that jumps out at me the most from that experience was just that when I was in graduate school, it was just very different right off the bat from anything I had done before. I remember my very first seminar that I was in, we were reading philosophy of language that was just at this really high level that I'd never read anything like it before, I was having a hard time with a lot of it.