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how to get killer copyrighting jobs on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by ECM Rush started in 2008 with one mission to make online competition fair and transparent, with equal opportunities for all. To find out how SCM Rush can help you compete with the big boys. Go to serve no master dot com Backslash ECM rush today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Last year, my favorite platform for freelance work was purchased by my least favorite, a website called Oh Desk, which I'm always hated and was really filled with the bottom into the market. When you're looking to pay $7 for a job, you goto desk and really get an inferior product. I had problems with money with them, you would pay for a project and then the money would disappear in the back. Sorry, it's your problem, not our problem. And I was hated dealing with them. So after I don't know, Dexter or three times a few years ago, I stopped doing business them. And for a long time, the lance, which is really the premium place to hire freelancers, is where hire workers and also an amazing place for workers to find work. Now, oh, desk bought the land. So the bad website bought the good one and became up work. And now I can tell you this I really hate is vest that I can say as someone who hires people and as a freelancer on both sides of the spectrum, people really hate to transition. The website is often down. They've made hang very, very complicated. If I want to pay someone for a job, I have to log in three times in a row, answer multiple security questions and go through all these jumps, and you think you've paid the person we actually haven't. You have to enter your password one more time. They've really made the entire process hard. And when I post a job? I There are really two types of freelancers there, people that our premium freelancers people like you people listen to show who are high quality workers, good at their job, know what they can do and come deliver something really good. And then you have a large group of freelancers who will reply to every job, even if they can't do it. And they just try to get that initial payment released before you realize they're totally unqualified. And I'm also dealing with very often bait and switch. The price at the start of the project is never the price at the end of the project, and that's something you constantly have to deal with. So someone, for example, I posted for a graphics job. I said, Here's what I'm looking for. Here is the exact tax. Someone responded with a bid, and I accepted their bid and then they were offended. They go, How dare you suggest that my work is worth so little money? And I said that was your bid. You said I'll do it for $150 I said, okay, and you're offended and I've run into this with up work on almost every single project, the only project in the last six months. I've actually hired someone paid them. I did end up paying more than the original thing, but they also did a really, really advanced technical job. But I also know that if it had been through the lands, they would have done the whole job for the initial price. So very much it's become. There's really no great place to hire people right now because the lance is gone. The one good platform has been destroyed and replaced with a very much inferior. They basically took the worst workers in the world, and the best workers will emerge them. And they also destroyed the ranking system used to build a rank, a worker. And now it simply says, What percent of the time they finish the projects? What does that mean? I would ever hire someone only finishes 70% of the jobs they get paid for. So, looking at it from the hiring standpoint, I can see why people on the freelancer site people trying to make a living as a copywriters are absolutely struggling and Maur andMe or even people that we're doing all right before getting tons of work through the lands are no longer able to find jobs. It's very hard for the premium customers to connect with the premium providers. So how can you find people? How can you build up your own database, your own set of clients? Now most of my clients do not come through those types of websites. Most my clients come through referrals, networking connections, so let me take you through a little bit at process. This is an advanced, very specific process for copywriters, and this can also work. If you're doing freelance content writing, you want to write books or make videos for people. But really, today I want to focus on copywriters. The first things you want to be friends with other copywriters. Here's what happens. I know probably 20 to 30 copywriters on a first name basis that I talked to one sky Bright talked on Facebook at least once a year, some of them I talked to every week, but I have a circle of friends that are all copywriters and the highest level copper. I have a friend who's at least $20,000 a project to get him on the phone. What happens when someone with a $10,000 budget calls him? They say, Hey, buddy, I've got a $10,000 budget. Oh, that's lower than what I do. What Hell then do is, say, But I have a friend. Charges 10. And then what happens if you approach that friend of charges 10. And your budget started 500? Well, he says, Oh, I don't do that's too low for me. But have someone who do it for 5000 and so having friends were other cooperators, they're not competition. There's so much work right now for copywriters that there's always extra work to go around. I always have more work than I can do for projects. Haven't taken on a new project in almost two months of first time. Ever gone this long without accepting any new projects because I'm still working on stuff that I took way back in the summer, and this is how you build it so people and my circle will come to me with projects. I'll say I was sorry for me, but I know someone, and when you get into the circle referral, some amazing things happen so How can you make friends with these types of people? How can you make friends and connect a network with these types of people? And there's a couple places that you can start. You know, there's groups like Facebook groups for writers and copywriters, and my friends run several groups that are pretty good, where people have caught posts and accept cooperating jobs all the time. And that's a good place to start, but really making connections. You won't be more than digital C. I have people. Like I said, I have close friends in faraway friends and the faraway friends or people that I've only met online and the close friends, the people that would really offer jobs to our people that I met through someone in person or I met them in person. So going to actual events going toe places will allow you to connect with people and to go to the right events you want to look for just to get started, right to build up your network of other copywriters. It's good to go to copyrighting events, and there's great websites that are all about copy like copy blogger and copyrighting sounds, other ones that are all about cooperating when they have an event, it's something worth going to. A bunch of people I know who are really into podcasting recently went to a podcast in conference. And if you want to make friends with tons of other podcasters, that's the type of event you go to. You can start off in your area. What I would really start off doing is going to local events, and I teach a lot about this in my networking training course. You know my full advanced course, but I want to give you some really basic, powerful stuff here, and you can start by going to local meet up events. I would go to events for PR people or for flax. These are people whose job it ISS right is to get people's message out into the media. They're often the people that will hire a copywriter from company, and they're often people that will have connections right, because they're working for a company and they hear about a comp writing job that descended to someone independent cause they can't take the job. That's where I would start for my contacts and as you build up your circle of friends and they see some of your copyrighting work. Project will come in and sometimes the work, and sometimes they want. I recently got approach for a cop writing project where the budget was so low that I actually don't know anyone who could do it. He had a budget of $2000 but for that they wanted someone to write the main sales video. They wanted them to write all of the up, sell videos, a bunch of emails and record and produce all the videos. And I think they wanted live action stuff, you know, in graphics and all of those things. And I said, That's expensive all of those different elements. I mean, I could find someone who could maybe do the sales letter and the up cells for that or the sales are on some e mails. But to get someone to do so much work with so many different skills, you'll never find anyone to do the job. And, of course, it faded away. So sometimes you'll run into that. But projects come that way into my life every few weeks. At least. There's always things flowing in because I built up this network of contacts, and it starts with simply meeting other people that are also coppers are on the same path and kind of finding out what they're charging. And so, as you work your way up right, you'll start off. Maybe you'll be someone who does 1 97 or $297 jobs. You're doing small jobs. That's okay. You then become someone who surround yourself with people that are $500 copywriters, and when they pass you a job, you'll do that job. And once you've done about 10 you've got some testimonials. You can get bigger jobs so you don't have to go through, especially because the main platforms are kind of broken. There are people who are looking to hire people, and they're people who are looking to be hired that just need help meeting each other. There's always work for copywriters. I'm not even a great cooperator. I'm just pretty good. And if you look at the link to my networking empire text self paid, you can see the love of Mike operating right now. You could see what I'm capable of doing, and that is the level where people will pay me to $5000 for a project and more. That's really the range on that. I'm not a $10,000 letter copywriter yet, but hopefully I'll get there with the next 12 months. So starting out by building up your network, building up your contacts and you can also build up context with people who are kind of around your industry. So you don't just need to meet other coppers you want to meet. Other people that hire copywriters are friends are cooperative, so other people in the industry you wanna work and so figure out what type of industry do you want working? Do you want to do software as a service copyrighting, or do you want to do direct marketing? Copyrighting. Do you wanna do education? Health care? Choose your specialty. See people who hire e commerce copywriters. That's very different. I don't do that. If someone had a big store and wanted me to write product options for everyone, their products, that's not my skill set. I'm a long form sales letter, long form Selves, video and email, copper, and that's why I know what d'oh But person to person. Sales, not business to business and not e commerce. So finding out your specialty means you could choose different events. You know, if you were gonna wanna work and like s e o copyrighting, well, then you want to go to events there for S e o conferences, and you only need to go one or two conferences a year could really focus and be very strategic. And you conform the context you need. Once you start forming context surrounding yourself with people, you will find that people want to partner up with you on projects. And you say, Hey, let me read your letter and I'll read and you read mine and we'll kind of review each other. So you're getting people who are a little better than you. So if you're a 1 $97 letter copywriter, you've got a friend is a to 97. You review there's which gives them value because they get to see a second set of eyes and they review yours. And now you're getting even more value because they're a level above you. And you continue to do this because what also happens when you have a contact who's a lower level cooperator? Sometimes people approach someone who knows me and approach one of my friends and say, Hey, we need a really big project and they'll realize it's above their skill up on this happens to me Sometimes someone comes me and he's a $10,000 letter. I'm not good enough. Let me show you to someone better. So referrals actually go uphill and downhill now we also as much as we want to turn co workers into referrals. We also want to develop a system for turning our clients into co workers. Every time you have a client, you want to establish a way for them to make easy referrals. All my best work comes from referrals, networking, and so the way to do that is you create a template email or automated email that you sent out. That is kind of your template, so you don't have the right from scratch every time. But you wanted to be very similar because for most clients it's always the same thing. It was so great working youth on the project about X, and you put in the name of project. It was really great working with you on that project about the fitness sales letter. I'm so glad we worked together. I'm really glad you're happy with the results. My business really depends upon a referral on recommendations. I work for myself, and it's all about giving a client a great experience. I'm really happy you had a great experience, and there's ever anything more I can do for you. I'm always there for you, but it also would mean a lot to me. If you know anyone or you ever run into a fellow, you can send my way. Here's my contact info. Or you could even send them a link and say, Hey, if you know someone is interested in copper and you sent him in its link to your portfolio page, right? So back in the day when I was doing more and more of this, I had a website called Jonathan Green dot Emmy. I don't own it anymore. I stopped using because it was too silly, but I would be like Jonathan Green, not M E, and the home page was all my referral stuff. It was all my testimonial from great things about my writing, and you could see my portfolio so you could make a simple website and say, Hey, if you know anyone who and accept you just give him this link. It's very valuable. And you say thank you so much for working with you. You know, I'm so excited that you're still dollars converting it 4% or whatever that is. And this will keep you in their minds, right? You want to mention any of the positive things. Like I'm so glad I was able to deliver your project in less than seven days. All of those good things. Now, you can also say that a za final push right as a final bonus. Like as because you're one of my premium customers. I always wanna keep that in mind so that, you know, every time you send me a referral, if you sent me no fur and your referral comes in and decides to work with me, I'll give you 10% off your next project as a way of saying thank you for spreading the word and help me maintain my business. It means a lot to me, and I like to reward my premium customers. So it's really simple and very valuable to have a simple template like that And that would get people to send you lots of lots of referrals. The more actions you take to drive referrals in your life, the better. And you can use a similar template as well with other coppers like, Hey, if you know what he was looking for, someone on a project or just let me know. Throw me any work I could tell you right now that I hire HQ operators all the time. As much as I take high level project, I have coppers work me all the time, and I'm constantly have little project in big projects. So I'm on both sides of the fence. Sometimes people come in, you say, help me find someone higher, some on both sides of it. And I have a lot of experience, and I can tell you that cooperating is a skill. The more you develop it home, the skill, the more you can really take control of your business. I was just have a very important meeting last night with one of my top clients. One of my biggest clients is someone I worked with on a lot of different freelance projects, and actually, I'm working with them less and less because more and more of my own projects are growing. But I like to maintain those relationships, and we're talking about. A mutual friend who developed a product about two years ago is actually I built the product a product for someone, and they never released it because he never wrote the copy, for he kept running into roadblocks. He tried to hire someone. The person didn't do a good job, which I hire some whales constantly trying to hire discovered cooperators. And, you know, when I offered to do the job, didn't you know, couldn't afford my rates and didn't want to give up a percentage, which, if you can't afford the flat rate, you've got to do a percentage, You got to do something I need to. I need a taste of the action. So after all of this time, two years, right, investing thousands of dollars just probably mentioned between five and $10,000 in this project. It's never been released ads because he can't write his own copy when you can't write copy. It's a really big limitation, and it's a monster that I face for a very long time. Listen, some previous episodes have talked about how before I couldn't write copy. It was always my grace limitation. It's one of the reasons that I worked with many, many partners over the years, and even now I'm still trying to get better and better and better, better copyright. I'm not perfect. I have to constantly work to an improvement. I'm always going through cooperating courses and looking at ideas and reading stories toe help improve my store writing skills because copies so much of that is about weaving a story that people connect with. So what I want you to dio is really develop a plan for building your business is a copywriter. In previous lessons we've talked about in the past, we talked about copyrighting finding work about how you can't get work through five or get work through the warrior form and some other websites like that where you can posting ads saying of a new copywriter. And I wanted to do a job in exchange for testimonials. So you do a couple of free job, you say, Hey, here's my rate for 97 but I'm willing to dio 60% off, you know, for the 1st 10 people and you start to build up a book. See the mistake people make and this is so classic is when they say, Hey, I want to duke operating for you. But I don't have any examples of my work. Why would anyone hire you without anything? If you don't have a project, you don't have a client, right? A sales letter for yourself, right? Your first letter on your own following the templates I've shared with you over and over again in the past. How to do it. You have to have that initial portfolio. So when you're saying if you say I listen to this episode in all of its awesome but I don't have any examples of my work, I'm never in the sales letter in the mail for anyone else. You've got to start there even if you don't have a client, start by creating a fake one as a demo. When I first started selling CEO, I had no clients. I made three websites National Construction dot or GE national contractor dot Net and I think Nashville limousine dot org's something like that and made all three of them Number one and I'm a miniature websites that were just squeeze page websites to prove what I could do, and I tracked their rankings and I had all these graphics and say, Here's three projects I've worked on and you go look at the website and see them so you can make a website that's for client that doesn't really exist. Our product that doesn't really exist and that's okay. People can then see your work. It's not about whether or not it's realigning those things, that here's an example of my work and you know the stuff around and making it look like a real website. That's just about a little bit of wedding website around it. That's just a little bit of sizzle. That's just adding a little something to it to make it exciting something. Okay, I get what's going on here. I like the look. You know, some people, some copywriters I've talked to in the past. They're all about sending you a word document as their example. They never want you to see a graphical version of their work. They make it very clear for some compromise. It's very, very important that you know that they'll write the text, but they don't help with the graphics at all. It's very important to say to five or 10 times when you're negotiating with them. If you're not like that, then people will like you more if you don't have to be annoying all the time. No one really expects their copywriters to do all the formatting, so you don't have to constantly tell people that you don't. But I find that low level coppers like to tell me that a lot. So normally, if someone's lying, you have to hire the copywriter right. Then you hire Graphics person to convert the copy to something that looks nice. That's pretty normal. And I've I've done that a lot in the past, especially when you're doing low ticket project, you paying two originals for copping than $200 for the graphics. So people around that range, that's what they're used to doing. If your example page And if you look at any of my examples right, all the examples I can show you are really live cells pages, so they have tons of graphics and people will respond to those more. Sometimes when people see just a letter like here's an email that's just a big 30 page word document that's an example of my projects people don't really respond to. It is Guess what? That's not how the audience is gonna see it anyways. So taking the time to make it look like a live page line, a lot of value to it, and you can start to present yourself in a very positive way. You wanna have a strong portfolio for any field you go into? I get this question all the time. I want to do some demo articles. What should I write them about? What should I do? A sales letter demo about? Here's an idea. Just find something really successful and write your own version of a sales letter for that same product you go. Here's my version of a sales letter for P 90 X Fine. That's perfect, right? People can say, OK, I get it. I know that product. It's very famous. It's on Amazon. Everywhere else is on TV. Here's what your cells that would look like And it can be very simple. Say I did a demo one for this. The real thing is, just do one about anything. The problem is not writing a sales letter for the wrong demo. The problem is that you're not doing it. Any time you find an excuse for inaction, it's gonna hold you back. And I know we're kind of meandering, but I'm really trying to help you succeed as a copywriter toward the fastest ways to make money alive. One of the easiest ways to make money. And as you start building your own business, the ability to write copy will determine whether or not you control your destiny. As I said, my friend, after two years, my mutual friend he hasn't made one penny from a project that is invested in $10,000 in because he can't write his own copy has all of these other issues as part of the project, right? There's other problems with It's not the only problem, but that one simple ability. If you could write good copy on his own, the project would be live in making money now, so that limitation right there holds it back. Take action, start taking his little steps. Don't let your lack of clients keep you from getting more clients. You can go to a media event every night for the next seven nights this week and just start making contacts. It's the same strategy talk about when I talked about and local insulting millionaires getting local S E O. Clients getting local businesses. You go to the exact same type of events and meet all the local markers. And here's what you do. Okay, go to the local small launch murders, meet up group and ask each of them to let you see their website and the terrible upsides they always have. I always have the worst luck Web sites in the world of terrible copy. And that's why their businesses are all struggling. You. Hey, why don't you let me do the copy on your website? Let me improve the words on your website, so that works even better. And when you make more money, make more sales at the next meeting, you could give me a referral. You could, you know, do a testimonial for me and shoot a video saying how great I was or something you could actually get local people to face the face. Say yeah, I'll let you do free work in exchange for testimony, and that's all you gotta do. You can start building stuff just by taking action, you could have your first client. Yeah, it's a non paying client, but so what? You have your first client tonight simply by going out there and taking action depending upon third party Web sites to provide you with work is risky because you're not in control of your destiny. All those people. We're making an amazing living working for the lands and are now making nothing, cause their destiny was controlled by single vendor. See, when they merged all the websites together, there's nothing you couldn't stop it. I, as a customer, said, Please don't do it. Let me keep hiring people to this website and they said no. We have a vision for emerging all the premium workers with all the low quality workers and destroying all the records so people can't tell who they're hiring, and I don't know if the business will succeed or fail. I'm sure it's gonna probably do okay because people need the service. But the quality is definitely down to the floor. I have never heard anyone say I'm so happy with the change. Everyone I know is looking for a new alternative. So the problem is letting someone else control your destiny. If you get all of your work through a single third party source, whether it's a website or a single referral or anything, if something happens to it and it's outside your control, you could lose your whole business. This is why you want to diversify and buildable large network. See, I get a lot of work through referrals, but that's because I have a network around me of over 500 people that know me. It's not from a network of three people or network of 20 people, is very diversified. I have a lot of clients in a lot of contacts, a lot of projects to come through networking, but they don't come through the same middle person. They always come from different, different, different people. So I want you to be very proactive. And if you want to learn more about networking, take a second and look at my page. I talk all about networking, how you can build your own networking empire. It really is the key business accelerator. There are many ways to make money online, but when you add in strong networking, you can really terrible charge your efforts and strong networking, strong referrals and building up your portfolio Now are some of the key steps to making a killing as a cockerel. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's best seller, serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening To serve no master podcast. Head over to serve no master dot com back slash podcasts right now to find out how you can win a free copy of my brand new book.