TCC Podcast #74: How to 10x your business in 6 years with Prerna Malik

Copywriter and founder of The Content Bistro, Prerna Malik joins Kira and Rob for the 74th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. And we cover quite a bit of ground as we talk about... •  how she became a freelance content writer (thanks to a family illness) •  how she has grown her business despite living thousands of miles from her best clients •  why she’s only invests in training that delivers a real ROI •  the activities she spent time on to get her first several clients •  how she went from $21,000 in 2011 to $200,000+ this year •  how she thinks about the packages she offers (and how she prices them) •  how she splits duties with her business partner (and husband) •  what copywriters should be doing differently with social media •  how she schedules her week to get things done (the hacks and systems she uses) •  what she’ll be doing differently in 2018 •  the advice she would offer to a “just-starting-out” copywriter, and •  where she thinks copywriting will go in the future Note: Because Prerna lives in India, we weren’t able to use our usual recording software, so the sound has a few hiccups… we’re really sorry about that. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Content Bistro Art of Simple Launch Grow Joy Fearless Launching Mogul Mom AWAIhttp://www.awaionline.com/copywriting/p/ Mass Persuasion Method Copyhackers books 4-Hour Work Week Fully Loaded Launch Miers Briggs 7 Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned in Our 7th Year of Business Biz Bistro Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 74 as we talk with content specialist and copywriter Prerna Malik about creating high-performing content for clients like Amy Porterfield and Katrina Springer; what we need to know about social media copy; what she did to earn $200,000 in a single year; and what’s it like to work with your spouse every single day. Kira: Welcome, Prerna. Rob: Welcome, Prerna! Prerna: Hi! Thanks so much for having me here! Kira: It’s great to have you on the show, and a great place to start is with your story, and how did you end up running Content Bistro with your husband? Prerna: So, I blog; like a regular “mom” blog, it’s called The Mom Writes. And I started it in November of 2008 because I was a new mom. My daughter was nine months old, and while I love being with her, I also wanted something that was creatively stimulating and, you know, I used to read a lot of blogs when—you know—between feeding her and, you know, being with her and all that. So it just kind of started to so make sense to my sleep-deprived brain to, you know, start one! That blog...it started growing, and it led to me getting noticed by small businesses who then started reaching out and saying, you know, “Would you write for us?” That then led to things like social media gigs because, at that time I was super-active on Twitter. Now, I’m not so active, but yeah. I was super-active on Twitter, and then clients starting asking, “Okay, would you manage our social media for us”, you know? Especially Twitter. So I took a couple of courses to be sure that I knew what I was doing, and I started doing very part-time social media management and blogging for small businesses. And things were going okay, and I was you know, having a lot of fun; I was being able to stay at home with my daughter, and I had some creative work. And this was very part-time thing for me because my husband, Mayank, his full-time job was what was supporting us financially. So it was good. But then, around January of 2010, Mayank got really, really sick. He was in a lot of pain, and the doctors just couldn’t reach a clear diagnosis. We were just going from one doctor to the other. We were told we had everything from arthritis to TNJ to gout; it was really crazy, and it finally reached a stage where he was in so much pain that he couldn’t go to work. So, there we were—laughs—no job, no real income, and you know, our savings were getting, you know, not super-fast because of his medical bills. And I couldn’t go back to full-time work. I used to be a communication skills trainer with Dell, and before that with American Express, but I couldn’t because my daughter was real young and Mayank was in no shape to look after her. So, we needed to do something and, we often now look back and say that, you know, 2010 was the worst year of our life, and also the best year, because while we did struggle a lot, we also decided to start a business! Because that was clearly the smart thing to do, I guess...laughs. But honestly we realized that, you know, we had a few clients with, you know....who...to The Mom Writes, and we could just focus on growing this and see how it went from there. I mean, what was the most that would happen? So, March 2011 is when we came up with the name Social Media Direct. Content Bistro happened way later; Social Media Direct was what this current business was called at that time, and we started reaching out to our past clients and our current clients and telling them we were during this full-time now, and we would appreciate the referrals. On the personal front, a writer friend reached out to me and told me that, just get your husband---because I’d been blogging about it on The Mom Writes and talking about his sickness—so, she said that, you know, “Just get his PH levels tested, because I think he’s got chronic inflammation”, and that was the case. He did have chronic inflammation; he PH levels were very acidic. And that kind of what’s started our journey to healthy eating, and eating better, and we started working our diets as well. So that first year, 2011, was a lot about hustle and learning humility. Laughs. Like I said, we had no money, so we—I reached out to a friend of me and asked him to make our website pro bono because, yeah. I had no money. In that first year, all we spent was like, literally $100 or so on hosting from Bluehost. So yeah, that’s pretty much how we started; cold emailing. I sent out tons and tons of emails; I made like a database of businesses, and I reached out to them, and I still remember. On the fourth of March 2011 is when one of the persons that I’d emailed to emailed me back saying, “Okay, you know, I would like to know more about your social media management services”. And, yeah; we were in business. This was a lady who had a doll business, and it was a social media management retainer contract that we signed her on, and by March 2012, a year later when we completed our first year, we made a little over 21K, which I know is not much, but it felt like 200K for us at that time! Kira: (Laughs) Prerna: Because twelve months earlier, we had nothing. Like, nothing, you know? So it just went from there; social media management and then blogging was what I started to be noticed for, and we got the opportunity, you know, over the years to work with some amazing, amazing entrepreneurs, including Tish Oxenreider of The Art of Simple, Andrea Ayers of Launch Grow Joy, Anne Samoilov of Fearless Launching, The Mogul Mom....so many others. So....but, it walled further, and around 2015 is when I started getting a lot of requests to do copywriting for my current clients. And, I’d taken AWAI’s Six-Figure Copywriting. I didn’t really, you know, dive deep enough. But then I also took Mass Persuasion Method by Bushra Azhar, and then I had all of Johanna’s Copy Hacker ebooks. She had this big bundle sale, I don’t know....I still remember I scooped all of them up at that time. And then, I got into copywriting. And we re-branded to Content Bistro in June 2015, so, to include both copywriting and content services as well. So, if you kind of look at it, I’ve been doing copywriting for about two years now, full-time. And it amazes me how far we’ve come from 2010 of course, and even 2015 for that matter. So that’s how we started Content Bistro! Laughs. It’s a long story, but yeah! Rob: It’s an amazing story and, before we go any farther, you know, going from 20K to over $200,000 a year, we need to mentioned you’re doing this from India. You’re not, you know, based in New York City; you’re not necessarily surrounded by the people that we would normally think of are the great clients we should be going after, so how do you do that? How do you do it from so far away? Prerna: The first time that I went to the U.S. was last year! You know I never been to the U.S. before that. And, this was in October, November is when the first time I ever went to the U.S. for a couple of conferences. But yeah, it’s not been easy, but it’s not been as difficult or challenging as well, because I think it all comes down to three or four big things. One is, you know, just showing up. Doing the work. And just, you know, building relationships you know, being present; offering value; doing good work, and...and essentially, being willing to put in the hard yards, you know? I honestly am not a fan of the “four-hour workweek”, and I don’t see that happening for me. It’s my Type-A personality; I do not like four-hour workweeks; I like just doing the work, so yeah. Building relationships, trusting our gut, you know—that really worked, you know! It gets easy to kind of get overwhelmed with all the noise out there, and kind of say, “Oh, you know I should be going out to this, and I should be doing this, and I should be doing that” or investing in this, and that’s a another thing, you know. We are very careful with what we invest in.