TCC Podcast #67: Setting Boundaries with Emma Siemasko

For the 67th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob sit down with copywriter and content specialist, Emma Siemasko to talk about her business, working with clients, and the advice she would give to someone just starting out as a copywriter. During our conversation we covered: •  how a trip to South Korea launched her freelance writing career •  Emma’s and Rob’s favorite poets—yeah, this one is a little different •  what she learned working at a bad content marketing agency •  the things she learned from starting her own business •  what she did in those first few moments as a freelancer •  how she landed her first few clients after going out on her own •  her advice to copywriters who are just starting out •  the mistakes she made in her first year that cost her a lot of time and energy •  the boundaries she has set up to keep her client relationships working well •  how her clients have reacted to the boundaries she set This isn’t the first time we’ve talked with Emma about boundaries—she’s really got this down. We also talked about how she packages case studies and sells them to her clients and the opportunities she sees in the future for copywriters. To hear this one, just click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Mary Oliver Sharron Olds Mira Gonzalas Billy Collins Another Reason I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House On Turning Ten OKCupid Frog2Prince.net Grasshopper Joanna Wiebe Maggie Patterson Roy Furr Stories by Emma The Worst Company I Ever Worked For Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join us episode 67 as we chat with freelance copywriter and content creator Emma Siemasko about her decision to go out on her own, working with clients and setting clear boundaries, writing in the tech space and what she’ll be doing differently in the new year. Kira: Welcome, Emma! Rob: Hey Emma! Emma: Hi Rob and Kira, thanks for having me! Rob: We are thrilled to have you. Kira: (laughs) All right, Emma, a great place to start is, of course, with your story. So, how did you end up as a content writer and then business owner? Emma: Sure! So I have been writing in some capacity basically since I could read, so when I was in first grade, I was writing. Like, I wrote a story about how my grandmother died, which I got a lot of attention on because most six year olds weren’t writing about that... so I was doing some pretty heavy stuff as a little kid... but I went on to study creative writing in college where I specialized in poetry, and after I graduated I actually went and taught English in South Korea for one year. And the funny thing about that was, I was hired to teach, which I did a lot of, but the school where I worked also published their own English language textbooks and I quickly began doing most of the writing and virtually all of the editing for the textbooks because my boss recognized like, whoa, she’s like the best writer that we have, not to be totally braggy, but, so I actually kind of got my first taste of professional writing in South Korea, funnily enough. And when I came back, I worked for a content marketing agency for a little while. I started my own online dating consultancy and then I worked for about three years at a software as a service company and that’s how I got introduced to the tech space. And the company was acquired and I was like, I don’t really want to work for anybody else—I’d been hiring a lot of freelancers when I worked in-house, so I was like, I know that I can do this, so I made the decision to leave and that was you know, two and a half years ago, and so, here I am! Rob: Okay. We haven’t talked about poetry with anybody on the podcast. Kira: No! Rob: And so... I’m going to jump on this and say, what’s your favorite poem or who’s your favorite poet and what kind of poetry did you write? Emma: I feel, when I look back, what I wrote was like, super angsty, college-girl kind of stuff, not to pigeon hole myself too much, but like, I would be like, writing about like, I don’t know—sex on the beach or something ridiculous or like bragging about getting drunk and high in college... I shouldn’t diminish my work THAT much, but I feel like… Kira: Okay, now I want to read your work. Rob: Yeah, this is a little crazy. Emma: I also wrote a lot about—my poetry focused a lot on relationship when I was in college. I was like, trying to figure out how to have romantic relationships but I was also like super reflective on my relationships with my family and my friends so there was a lot of poetry about that as well. And a lot of my poetry was connected to place, actually, so I’m from New England, and a lot of the poems were like very, very rooted in New England. And in terms of poets that I love, I absolutely adore Mary Oliver, who’s like the super popular poet. She focuses really on like landscape and the natural world but also, like, has very heart-wrenching and poignant moments of Oh my gosh, this is what it means to be alive. I also love Sharon Old, she has like really great poems about relationships. Those are like, two of my big favorites. There’s a relatively young poet named Mira Gonzales who actually kind of writes about those collegiate topics; I don’t want to diminish them, but like, getting drunk and high but she does it much better than I did. Kira: (laughs) Those are important topics. Emma: I don’t want to call it collegiate because like, people do that... but I was doing it in college. Her name is Mira Gonzalez and she’s really, really good and she also has an amazing Twitter presence so I think she’s done a really good job of marrying her work with social media and the online space. She’s really good. Rob: I’m going to have to look them up. My favorite poet is Billy Collins and he writes about a lot of like, everyday stuff like the dog barking next door, or you know, the gift a child gives their mother. Like, I especially love “Another Reason I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House”—which is like, if you haven’t read the poem or heard somebody read it. Look it up. It is so good. But yeah, it’s every day stuff. The thing I like about poetry—and I think it’s really applicable to what we do as copywriters—is that, poets have to see the world in a way that’s maybe not just like, a literal description, right? They’re looking for different ways to talk about things that are a little bit interesting and just sort of catch your ear in an interesting way. I think we could learn a lot from poetry, you know, even with the copy that we’re writing. Emma: Yes, especially Billy Collins, I think, because his whole thing—he was the Poet Laureate and he was all about making poetry accessible. Rob: Exactly. Emma: So my favorite poem by him is “On Turning Ten”, which is just like, basically, a heartbreaking poem about like, what it means to grow up. Every time I read that poem I cry. I mean, he’s really good. But that is written in very plain language. He’s not writing poems that are like, super, super highbrow and literary, so to speak. Rob: Yep. No, I think his work is brilliant. Emma: Yeah. Kira: All right, so I want to ask about your online dating consultancy. What? (laughs) Rob: (laughs) Kira: Tell me more about this! Emma: So, actually, this kind of segues into the question of what I learned when I was working at a content marketing agency. And actually, I worked at a really, really horrible content marketing agency. So I think it was 2011 and it was like, still kind of the recession. I had no professional experience and I got hired by this place—we can do more in-depth if you want—but it was so horrible that in my off-time, I was like, I got to be working on something else. And my husband and I had recently met online—we met on OKCupid—and we had lots of friends that were online dating, and they were asking me, as sort of a marketing writer, even though I wasn’t really that yet—hey can you help me with my online dating profile? So I started a little business called Frog 2 Prince—you can still visit the website I think—unless my credit card subscription has run out. (laughs) But yeah, I was charging guys, mostly, and I would help write their profile, I would give consultations, I actually partnered with a photographer and we would take photos of these guys... and it wasn’t a super lucrative business, and also, it was a bit of a creepy business because usually what happened at the end is the guy would go, do you want to go out with me? I’d be like, that wasn’t really... (laughs) Kira: That’s not the service. (laughs) Emma: Yeah, and I was pretty young at the time, I was like 24, so it wasn’t a field that I wanted to go into in depth but I got a really good taste of trying something out on my own and it ultimately helped me get the job at the tech company that I got, because it was like a line item on my resume. Kira: Side note: Frog2Prince.com is currently available... if anybody wants to steal it... Emma: Oh, no, it’s frog2prince.net, and it’s—see, this is like—I was inexperienced—actually it’s the number 2. Frog, the number 2, prince dot net. Kira: Oh no. Emma: Which is like, I mean, you don’t do that. Like, I did it because it was cute at the time... but it wasn’t even cute at the time. I was like, it’s funny, like if you go to the website it has this 8-bit cartoon characters... Kira: It’s great! It’s really great. Emma: I was trying to be “internet: 1998” or something.