TCC Podcast #315: Building a Profitable Business without a Website, Email List, or Social Media with Rob Perry

Rob Perry is our guest on the 315th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob Perry is a SaaS and B2B copywriter and consultant who has built a solid pipeline of clients without using a website, email list, or high-profile social media presence. In fact, he grew his business using a platform you may be familiar with: Upwork. How’d he do it? And could you do the same? Stick around and find out: How Rob went from President of sales to copywriter and how he leveraged his skills. The struggles of abruptly moving your family overseas. How he used Upwork to start copywriting and became a sought-after copywriter. Standing out on a platform like Upwork and becoming the go-to choice. Are 3 minutes of value worth your time? Upwork 101: Setting yourself up for success in 3 steps. Why you need to filter jobs on Upwork and cut out the noise and save time. How to avoid clients who have unrealistic expectations. Did Kira get kicked off Upwork? How to tailor your proposals to each job. The top reasons copywriters should use Upwork to fill their pipeline. Can you build and make connections OFF the platform? Finding the projects you actually want to work on. How to dig up the pain points of your ideal client and create a solution. Rob’s advice on closing sales calls and being a better salesperson. What mistakes are copywriters making in the sales process? How to step into different personas and voices as a copywriter. Why it’s crucial to practice confidence and adjust (and take care of) your mindset. What NOT to do when adding retainers to your client load. Avoiding bad habits and thinking strategically about your business. When to use Upwork and how to keep it from being your only lead source. Thinking about building a team? Do this first. How to get to where you want to go FASTER. Press play or check out the transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website Rob Perry's Free Upwork Workshop  The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM Episode 19 Episode 248 Episode 265 Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  In the past five years of interviewing successful copywriters on the podcast, I can only remember one who was running a successful business without a website or a social media presence, or an email list for that matter. And perhaps coincidentally, that person, I believe, is the highest-paid copywriter working in the world today. Now, I'm guessing at that assumption, but if he's not the highest-paid, he's definitely in the top five. And you might be thinking, "Well, sure, a copywriter with a good reputation and a steady flow of very high-paying clients can get away without a website or an email list or a social media presence. But what about an almost unknown copywriter working in places like Italy or Chile or Spain without any high-profile clients? In fact, a copywriter who might be getting the bulk of his clients in a place like Upwork?" Our guest on the Copywriter Club Podcast today is copywriter Rob Perry, and he says that it's not only possible to do that, but that he's been doing it successfully for years. You're going to want to stick around for this one and hear how he's done it. But before we get to our interview with Rob Perry, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank. That's our combination of coaching, training, and Mastermind for ambitious successful copywriters who are ready to take their businesses from where they are now, maybe somewhere around $5,000 a month and doubling, tripling, or doing even better with it. Or maybe they want to launch a new product or a podcast or create a course or membership or something different in their business, the Think Tank is the place that you can do it. And we're just in the planning stages right now of our upcoming Think Tank Retreat. It's going to be an in-person retreat this January. And so if you join before then, you'll be able to jump in, meet everybody in person, and have a lot of fun with us at that retreat. Anyway, if you want more information about the Copywriter Think Tank, check out copywriterthinktank.com. There's a little information there. There's a short video there that you can watch. Just get a sense of what happens in Think Tank. And if you want to know more, you can just schedule a short information call with either Kira or me, and we will help you figure out if that's a fit for you. And then one more note, today, I am alone today. No co host. So this episode is just Kira, Rob Perry, and a double dose of me. Having said that, let's get to the interview with Rob Perry. Rob Perry:  We all feel like we have a similar story, right? None of us started as copywriters or most of us didn't. But I was living in New York with my wife and had a job, working actually as a partner in a skateboard company, and my daughter was born. Life got immediately very complicated, very quickly because New York's pretty expensive and my wife was actually from Italy so she was from out of the country and had a little bit of trouble adjusting to being there as well. So we decided to move back to Italy to her hometown to spend some time closer to her family. Obviously, when we got there, I needed work and I couldn't take my job with me, and I knew we probably weren't going to be in Italy forever. So I decided, "Hey, I need to do something." I need to create some sort of business that I can take with me because we may be moving again and I don't want to have to look for a new job in a different country another time, maybe more than once. So I started looking at a little bit of content writing initially because I knew I could write. I was an English major and a Theater minor. Writing was always something that was a passion of mine, not something I had worked on professionally. So I started looking into content writing. And as I dug into it a little bit more, I started exploring and discovered that copywriting was maybe a little bit more up my alley. I had a lot of experience in sales, particularly B2B sales and face-to-face sales. So moving into copyright kind of felt like a really sort of natural transition from that experience. But at the same time, I had no real-life work experience in copywriting. I had no real-life work experience in marketing really. I had overseen marketing teams, but I never worked in marketing. I was more on the sales side. So I set up a profile and Upwork and just started looking for jobs. I sent a couple of proposals, I got lucky. One of my first few proposals got accepted and I was often running. Wrote a website, a couple pages of website copy for a hundred dollars for some guy, which at the time felt like it was perfectly fine, right? I was getting paid to write and it was always kind of a dream. Rob Marsh:  Okay, so do you remember that first pitch, what you said or what you did in it? Rob Perry:  I don't remember the first pitch, but I remember the first job well, because I remember it was a clothing company and they were based in an east coast city, not New York. They wanted to kind of redo their brand, but they had a very specific feel and they didn't want to completely redo everything. I guess they wanted to sound more professional, but they also were appealing to a younger segment. So I didn't want to sound too professional. So I wrote the copy. I tried to do the best that I could to make it grammatically correct at least while I was staying within the bounds of what I thought they wanted. And the first feedback I got from the client was, "Oh my God, what is this? You're going to ruin my brand. What are you doing?" And I freaked out, right? We all do that the first time we get negative feedback. This was my first job ever. But it all worked out. I got on the phone with him. Fortunately, I took the feedback head-on, got the phone with him to figure out what was actually happening and realized that his changes weren't so significant. It wasn't so different. We just needed to change a few things up. At the end of the job, I got a five-star glowing review from him. And that was really, I think, the launching point for me on the platform was getting that first review under my belt and then other people could see what I was about in terms of what it was like to work with me. Rob Marsh:  So I have a feeling we could talk about Upwork for the entire hour, but I'm curious how you go from that first project. I mean, you've basically grown your business on Upwork, but how do you turn that into a pipeline of projects coming to you? Rob Perry:  Sure. I mean, it was one step at a time, right? The first year it was kind of piecemeal. I wasn't working full-time either. I didn't need to at that point. We were kind of in a family-focused stage, and I knew that I wasn't going to dedicate 40 hours a week to it. So I kept pitching clients and I didn't raise my prices immediately. I probably should have gone faster than I did. I think my initial hourly rate was around $40 an hour. I didn't take hourly projects though, I worked on fixed-price projects. I would just find a job looked interesting to me that I thought that I could do that didn't have too much competition or that had a specific reason that looked like I thought that I had some sort of an in, there was something I could offer to the job that I didn't think somebody else could.And so that was really my opportunity. My strategy was looking for those strategic opportunities where I felt like I had an advantage. And so I would apply to jobs and give what I thought was a fair price and eventually worked my way up. As I got more reviews, it got easier. Pretty quickly, I became "Rising talent," which is one of the badges they give you on the platform,