How to Start a Freelance Copywriting Business

Launching a freelance copywriting career is not only possible, but profitable as well. Here are some steps to get you started.

Steps

1. Start telling all your friends and relatives about your career change to get the word out. They may not be able to help you directly, but they’re bound to know someone else who needs your services.
2. Read personal experiences about others who have had success starting a freelance business.
3. Print business cards with your contact information to hand out at parties or other social gatherings. Any time you land a client, make sure you hand out multiple business cards.
4. Take a writing or grammar class at your local community college if you are worried about the quality of your writing.
5. Accept writing projects from charities or non-paying clients to build up your sample portfolio.
6. Try to find other freelance copywriters in your area to create a network. If they have extra work, they can pass it on to you.
7. Buy a book, such as Writer’s Market, that lists available writing markets and guidelines.
8. Call marketing firms in your area to see if they hire freelance copywriters. The worst thing they can do is say no.
9. Create a brochure or postcard advertising your services and mail it to local businesses.
10. Continually check online job listings. Copywriting jobs tend to appear and disappear quickly, so check often.
11. Always spell-check your work before submitting anything.
12. Consider scoring your copywriting effort against a database of historically most effective sales copies and ads using an automatic solution, such as Glyphius.

Tips

• Don’t be discouraged if your career doesn’t immediately take off. It may take several months to establish a client base that hires you on a regular basis. With determination, you will have a steady amount of work and income.
• Make sure to compile a “swipe” file as you go along in which you can store most effective and compelling sales copies. It will serve you invaluable service when in doubt or lacking inspiration.
• People in the Internet Marketing field are always looking for someone to write a great sales letter. Sales letters are the meat of any good IM business. Advertise your services on places like Craigslist, Scriptlance or Rentacoder.
• Use a sales letter generating software to help you get started. You’d be surprised how many people would rather outsource this work than purchase the software and do it themselves.
• A great way to get into the business is to offer to rewrite articles. Bloggers are always looking for content and often have articles or posts that need to be rewritten in order to make them unique. Always use a service like Copyscape to run your articles through once they are rewritten to ensure that they are unique.
• To work on your copywriting skills, you could purchase a pack of PLR (private label rights) articles and rewrite them. Make them into an eBook and then sell in on Clickbank.

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