How to be a Successful Freelance Copywriter, Designer, Programmer
Photo by The Jopwell Collection
Maybe I should have called this “How I Became a Successful Freelance Copywriter” because that’s what this is about.
This is the path that worked for me.
Some of these tips might not apply to you. That’s okay. Take what you need, leave the rest.
Let’s get going.
Get the Skills to Go Freelance
There’s no other way to say this—you need at least a minimum of skill at your craft to compete in the freelance market.
That doesn’t mean you have to be the world’s best copywriter, designer, or programmer, but you have to be good enough for the projects you hope to deliver.
For example, as a copywriter, you might have the skills to write ads, social media content, articles, or blog posts.
But could you manage researching, organizing, and writing a 50-page report? If not, then that’s not the job for you.
If you’re a programmer, maybe you have the skills to handle a feature-rich WordPress site. However, being in charge of a significant financial services portal would be beyond you. That’s fine. Once again, pick your spots where you can excel.
Understand your level of competence, where you fit in, and where you hope to compete.
Also, keep in mind that with experience, your skills will grow, and you can climb up the ladder if you choose. Bigger clients, bigger jobs, bigger budgets for you.
I still see too many ads promising “how to be a six-figure copywriter virtually overnight”. It doesn’t work that way.
Did You Go to School to Learn?
In some online communities, people like to dunk on school learning.
“Don’t go to school. You can learn everything you need on YouTube, X (Twitter), blah, blah, blah.”
Sorry, but bullshit.
Pick the right school, learn from experienced instructors, and you’ve got a big step up. Why?
As a student, you’ll be forced to turn in assignments on subjects that don’t interest you.
You’ll experience the pressure of deadlines.
You’ll get feedback and criticism.
You’ll see how other students handle the same project.
Lastly, your instructors can help you land a job.
This leads me to the next point. Before you go freelance, think about getting a job or three.
Before you Go Freelance, Work in the Industry
These days, many people want to be freelancers, run their own businesses, and get rich quickly (where’s my Lambo?).
Good luck with that.
The best advice I can give you is to get a 9 to 5 job at an agency or company to learn your craft, and equally important, to understand how business functions. You’ll have to know how businesses work when you’re in charge.
Let someone else pay you to learn.
With the right job, you get:
Experience. Here is where you put in your 10,000 hours to get good at what you do
Variety, working on many accounts/projects
Bigger client names in your portfolio than you could attract on your own
Mentorship from experienced practitioners. This will dramatically shortcut your development time.
Client feedback, the good and the bad
The security of a steady paycheck. Focus on your work without worrying about supporting yourself.
Your network—some of the people you meet in your jobs will be in your network for years. Some of them will become your clients when you go freelance.
A free education about the inner workings of business
I wrote about being an employee to get on-the-job training in this blog post.
While you’re working your agency job(s), you should start freelancing. Pick up a few clients along the way. Yes, you’ll be working nights and weekends, but it’s all for your business.
I wrote about whether employees should freelance here.
How Do You Get Freelance Clients?
This is the first question every beginning freelancer asks. How will I get clients?
There are many ways to do this.
If you worked at an agency, you should have a network of co-workers and perhaps some of your clients. If they’ve moved on, get in touch. Let them know you’re available for freelance.
Maybe your current co-workers freelance on the side. Could you work with them as a team on projects? It’s a great way to pitch bigger projects.
If you’re in an agency that has account people, make friends with them and let them know you’re doing some freelance on the side. Many of them have friends who might need your services.
Still in the agency, if you work with outside suppliers such as recording studios, filmmakers, or photographers, let them know too.
In general, get the word out. Tell everyone, even your dentist. In this connected world, your next job could come from anywhere.
Starting to Freelance? Work for Free. But Only for Friends
I know. Everyone says, don’t work for free. In general, that’s the right advice. You’re not a charity.
Here’s the exception.
If you’re starting to freelance, your goal is to build your portfolio with great projects as quickly as possible. Yes, you’ll have some portfolio pieces from the agency. But to get more, you’ll need work from other sources.
Perhaps you have friends who have started their own businesses. Likely, they don’t have much (any?) budget to promote themselves. Here’s where you can help. If they could use you, offer to work for significantly reduced rates, or better yet, for free. Maybe you can get paid in products or services. Make a contra deal.
If you’re lucky, they own a restaurant and will feed you delicious food and drinks. Do whatever it takes to get some variety into your portfolio during the early days.
This is also a good way to get experience freelancing and to figure out the type of work you enjoy doing.
Pick Your Niche by Industry or Discipline
When you start your freelance business, be a generalist. Try everything, just for the experience.
But after the first few years, figure out what you’re good at, and what you like doing. Put your focus there.
There are at least two ways to do this—by industry or discipline.
If you choose by industry, you might focus on a sector, say, organic food, for example. You could write or design for various organic food clients. Soon you’ll be known within the industry, and clients will come to you.
Or, it will be easier for you to approach them since your portfolio will show that you understand their business.
The other way to create a niche for yourself is to focus on a discipline. For example, as a developer, you could just concentrate on e-commerce websites, or even more specifically, optimizing Shopify sites.
As a writer/marketer, you could focus on email marketing. Learn everything about email marketing, get great results for clients, and just do that, nothing else.
So, think about how you want to focus your freelance business.
Your goal is to become famous for the services you provide in your niche.
For me, most of my writing work was in B2B and government-related clients. There were some exceptions, but these sectors were the bulk of it.
I wrote about how to pick a high-paying niche here.
Being a Successful Freelancer Requires Confidence
This is a tough one. Confidence varies depending on the situation or even your mood on any given day.
Some days you feel confident. Other days you just want to hide your head under a pillow.
To be a successful freelancer, you need to develop confidence in two key areas:
Your ability to do your work
Your ability to work with and interact with clients
How do you get that confidence? Like anything else, confidence comes from practice and mastery.
The more you practice your craft, the better you get and the more confident you’ll feel. There’s no shortcut for mastery.
Let’s say you’re writing articles or blog posts. After a while, you’ll learn what information you need, how much research you’ll want, who to go to for quotes or testimonials, etc. You’ll create a template for yourself, so you have a system for these types of projects.
When the next one comes along, you’ll be confident that you can get everything you need to write a great article. Does a client want 1,800 words on a topic you know nothing about? Not a problem. You’ll go to your system and get the information you need to write that piece.
Read how to build confidence—the key to successful freelancing.
Are You Confident in Your Presentation Skills?
Similarly, you might be shaky the first few times you present work to a client. Your throat goes dry. You’re stumbling for the right words, and you wish you didn’t have to do this.
But as a freelancer, presenting and selling your work is a huge asset. Sure, you’re often sending it in, but sometimes you’ll have to present either F2F or Zoom.
Tip: Practice your presentation in front of a mirror. Run through it, so you know what you’ll say. Also, slow down. Don’t race through it.
After a while, you should notice that presentations are no longer that stressful. You may still get butterflies, but even the world’s top performers feel that way before they hit the stage. Get used to the feeling as you develop presentation mastery.
In this blog post, I wrote about how to become a better presenter, aka showtime in the boardroom.
In general, confidence is built by:
Learning new things
Mastering these skills and building your own systems
Repetition
Overcoming failure and quickly recovering
Choosing to be optimistic, willing to take on new tasks
Recognizing your wins and progress over time
By the way, building confidence is another reason to get a job somewhere before you freelance. Your day-to-day work will give you experience in both key areas.
I wrote about how to build your confidence and grow your billing in this blog post.
Build Your Business Tools and Processes to Focus on Your Work
Let’s talk about the business side of freelancing.
What do you need?
You need visibility. That means a website with information about you together with a portfolio. Ideally, you want some social media presence. Popular platforms are X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube. Pick your spots and focus on building visibility there.
You want to be easily found so that when a prospect searches for you or your company, you show up at the top of the results.
Along with the website, you want an email address with your domain name, in other words, yourname@yourURL.com.
You need administrative processes. That includes a good template for writing estimates and invoices, a filing system that makes sense for your files, and a bookkeeping system.
There are many online offerings for all of these processes. Do some research, ask around, and get a free or trial account to figure out which works best for you.
You should also get an accountant. I know at first it seems extravagant, but over a few years, a good accountant will save you money. Find one who will also act as a financial advisor to you.
An accountant can help you:
Make sure you’re writing off all appropriate expenses
Guide you in regards to taxes you have to pay in your region
Decide whether or not to incorporate a company
How do You Get High-Paying Clients?
This is the question everyone wants answered. Enough with working for free or low-paying clients. Where are the big-budget clients, where I can make “six figures” a year?
Here’s the simple answer:
Big-budget clients tend to be big companies or organizations. It makes sense, right? Small companies don’t have the revenue to have large marketing budgets. It’s all in proportion. So, they’re not going to be big-budget clients.
Because they have the budgets, big clients can choose from the best service providers in the industry. They become your competition. You need the track record and the experience to compete at these levels.
Clients also need to see you as someone they can trust. That means you’re on their level. You can carry a conversation with experienced marketers. If you’re a developer, you would be comfortable meeting with their IT staff.
Imagine for a moment that you’re invited into a boardroom to be briefed on an important campaign. The client will have a few people there. There may be other creative suppliers that you’ll work with. They’ll give you a stack of research, take you through the project, and ask you to come back to them with any questions and an estimate for your portion of the work.
Could you handle those conversations in that boardroom?
If the answer is yes, there’s no reason you shouldn’t work for these clients. Get yourself in front of them.
If the answer is no, try to reframe it. Just say, no, not yet.
To get these types of clients, you have to work your way up through small and medium-sized organizations until you’re at the top. Your work has to be top-shelf. Again, there are no shortcuts.
The Right High-Paying Clients Give You Lots of Projects
My favorite clients were the ones that gave me one project after another without competition. I became an expert in their business, and they could trust me to deliver.
I know many “marketing gurus” will teach you how to hustle to get lots of new clients. Scripts for what to say on the phone, techniques to close the deal, how to charge the most. Hustle, hustle, hustle.
That’s not for me. If you’re constantly hustling, constantly trying to close, you’re not billing. It’s also tiring and demoralizing.
Most of these clients will give you a few jobs, and then you’re done.
But it’s your choice what type of clients you go after and how much you want to hustle.
BTW, have you ever thought about what marketing clients value most in a freelancer?
My Steps for Freelance Success
Here was my path to becoming a successful freelance copywriter and two-time agency founder. Your path with undoubtedly be different.
When I decided I wanted to be a copywriter, I asked a friend who already had a job at an agency. He said to put together a fake portfolio (obviously fake, no deception) to show you can write.
I got a list of agencies and knocked on doors.
Three weeks later, I was a very junior copywriter at a small agency.
I wrote for six agencies, each one bigger than the last. Print, radio, TV commercials.
In my last agency, I worked half days, using the other half to develop freelance writing. I wrote about my transition from full-time to freelance in this blog post. Maybe you can make it work for you.
I had a few small freelance clients, then through an introduction, got one massive one. I incorporated a company and went full-time freelance. Why incorporate? Here’s the blog post on three reasons freelancers should incorporate.
That one big client led to more clients in the same industry. I freelanced out of my home for six years. I wrote about how freelancers can find more clients here.
I found other freelancers to work with—designers, illustrators, and photographers. Think of it as a virtual agency. I wrote about forming a virtual freelance agency here.
I was so busy, that I decided to start a real agency with a partner. I was always comfortable working with partners. I wrote a post on how and why to find a business partner.
In our fifth year, with 30 people and building websites for major corporations, we had two companies wanting to buy our agency. We sold to a big IT company from Montreal. (The other company was a global agency headquartered in NYC. They flew us down for a meeting. Cool.)
Six months later, I was free to go. With another partner, I started a second agency. After 15 years of growing that agency to about 28 people, I sold my shares to my partners and retired to travel.
Traveling ground to a halt. It was the perfect time to write a book.
New Book For Freelancers
I’ve just published How to Become a Successful Creative Freelancer. It’s the essential business guide for freelance writers, designers, developers, filmmakers, and photographers.
Whether you’re just starting as a freelancer or have years of experience, you’ll learn a lot from this book.
It’s broken down into easy-to-understand chapters with strategies and tips you can use today. Not just “what to do”, but also “how to do it”.
It’s available now in Kindle ebook and paperback on Amazon.
Want to Grow An Agency? The Agency Book is For You
If you’re looking for tips on how to build and grow your agency, you’ll want to read How to Start a Successful Creative Agency.
Available at Amazon (Paper & Kindle), Kobo (ebook), Apple Books (ebook), and Gumroad (PDF).
The book is packed with useful information to help creatives start and grow their business.
This book is a must-read, highly recommended
“If you’re like me, and you were almost tearing your hair out, trying to understand how to reliably get high-quality clients for your agency, then this book is a must-read. Andy is an industry veteran, and unlike a lot of modern ‘gurus’ who can only provide regurgitated, surface-level advice, Andy is able to articulate everything in an easy-to-understand manner that can fast-track you to success in running your own profitable agency. Highly recommended.”
Sebastian
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