According to Indeed.com, copywriters make an average of $61,748 a year. For a copywriting business that averages 20 clients annually, their yearly earning could be hitting a multi-million dollar figure.
This could be a good business idea for copywriters with exceptional copywriting skills as business owners want to turn every single traffic they generate to spend time on their landing pages and eventually turn to paying customers.
So, how do you start a business as a copywriter and scale to multi-million dollar annual revenue from your current position?
This might seem impossible right now because of the following:
- You don’t know how to turn your skills into a full-time business
- You’re worried about how you can land your first client and deliver
- No guide on how to fund your business
The steps on how to start and grow your copywriting business will be discussed in this article, so read on.
What Is A Copywriting Business?
A copywriting business is a large or small business established to write copies for email, blogs, magazines, advertisements, landing pages, brochures and many more.
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Ogilvy’s famous ad for Rolls Royce
Copywriting skills is high in-demand because some business owners don’t know how to write copies that sell their services or products, or might be too busy with other arms of their business that they want to outsource the copywriting activities to a freelancer, and in-house writer, or a company that specializes in writing copies for other businesses.
Copywriting jobs are high in-demand, with an average of $250 paid to copywriters every hour (Source: Freelancing Hack) and these are the reasons for their high employment rate:
- Business want to optimize their ads click-through rate and convert more leads
- If you don’t optimize your landing page, you’re setting your page up for a high bounce rate, hence the need for professional copywriters
- Business owners can’t afford to have a low conversion rate from emails, hence the need for email copywriters
- Most business owners don’t know how to write high-converting headlines
- etc
These are just a few reasons why business owners would rather high a copywriting firm to handle their copies for a high conversion rate.
What Exactly Does A Copywriter Do?
For the sake of copywriting for beginners, this question “what exactly does a copywriter do” has been one of the most asked questions in every copywriting gathering.
A copywriter writes copies for emails, advertisements, landing pages, sales pages, perform A/B split testing on already-written copies, social media writing (e.g. LinkedIn posts, Medium, Twitter, Facebook, etc), web pages, case studies, industry reports, web copies, presentations, video scripts, headlines, product descriptions Lead magnets, etc.
The intention for these copies is to be written in a way that is well optimized to guide the searcher to perform an action. This means that these copies are written to guide a reader to take an action.
Aside from writing copies, they also research, Interview, Edit written copies for errors, Proofread, source images, use conversion elements example; social proof, sense of urgencies, emotional-triggering words, etc.
With all these, how do you then start a copywriting business?
Steps In Starting A Copywriting Business
One of the unknown facts that most people miss in starting a copywriting firm is that you must not know how to write copies yourself, but you must know how to put a team together who are experts in this field.
Having the skills to write is a huge plus, but it’s not a necessity. And to set up your business, these are the steps to follow.
Step 1. Know how to write copies –
Just like earlier stated, this isn’t a must for any copywriting business to scale through the waters and land high converting clients. Some top copywriting businesses are being run by non-writers and this is also applicable in your business. But if you care so much about writing, then you can learn how to write copies.
In learning how to write, this will mean intensive studies, signing up to copywriting institutes, taking copywriting courses, and actually writing good great copies. Most copywriters who go-ahead to set up a copywriting firm first start off by learning how to write for a specific niche or a couple of industries, then becoming freelancers, before setting up their firms.
This step provides them with ample experiencing writing for clients, and it helps them build their portfolio for landing clients.
NB: one of our students has made over $100,000 from Fiver as a professional copywriter. He has also learned other digital marketing skills from our paid class which he combines with his copywriting skills to render more services to businesses.
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Step 2. Choose your preferred industry
This steps is very important because it directs you to the clients you should be working with. People who specialize in a particular industry are rather seen as experts by their clients, and it gives you time to optimize as you’re not distracted by the too many noise from tens of industries.
You could design your copywriting business to only write digital marketing copies, or copies in the medical line, or for engineering companies and clients. There are so many industries to pick from.
“but why should I limit myself from writing copies for any client, I will make more money from more clients if I write for every niche”
This is a very common question that most people ask as they don’t understand the power of niching down to just one or a few related industries.
Take for instance, there are two copywriting business in town. John & John copywriters and Chris P writers.
A. John & John copywriters specialise in writing copies for any business type in any niche.
B. chris P writers writes for digital marketing startups and will help them in nurture their cold leads to paying customers.
Who do you think a business will go to if they want digital marketing copies, and which of the copywriting company do you think will charge more?
Chris P writer will certainly charge more and secure more clients in the digital marketing space more than any other copywriting firm.
Step 3. Pick your writing role
Just like picking your niche, there are specific roles you might want to choose as your most preferred areas of writing. These could be any of the following:
- Emails / Sales funnels
- Social Media ads copies
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Blog posts / Articles
- Video / Podcast scripts
- web pages
- sales scripts
- etc
The image above shows that clients on a popular freelancing platform seek for specific roles when posting their copywriting requirements. This does not mean that you can’t always add other roles as your copywriting business grows, with time, you will find your strength in other roles.
Another way to pick what you write about is to make a search on what clients might want more than others.
Some clients might want email copies and advertising copies more than they will need a web page, as new ads are set up daily and email campaigns are sent daily.
Finding your role doesn’t have a formula, all you need to do is to study the trend in your industry and know what majority of your clients will need.
Step 4. Land your first, second, third…and multiple clients.
Landing your first client is where your success starts, but it could be intimidating as your first few clients will need to see your successfully completed jobs, and clients reviews.
This is why starting a copywriting business from your freelancing career is a strategic way to climb your career ladder with ease. Here, you must have established credibility in your industry and have what to show.
However, not having worked with anybody can’t be a hindarance, read on to find out how to land your first client.
How do I get my first copywriting job?
Upwork is one of the places to find your first client. This is a place where small and medium-sized companies, and individuals also post random jobs, so you can pick up any one that meets your services and write a proposal to the cient.
Aside from upwork, you can also find business that might need your services based on the service you render.
Take for instance, if you write email copies for high schools, you can make a random search of high schools that you can sell your services to, then write a cold email to them especially when they are not making use of email marketing as their marketing channel.
You also have a chance to land them as your first client if they are not writing good copies. You can offer them free copies just to show them how well you can use email marketing for their business.
Step 5. Use digital marketing to run your business
If you want to grow your business as quick as possible, then you must use digital marketing to grow your business. This implies:
- Running targeted ads for your business
- using social media to nurture your followers and create awareness for your services
- using email marketing to nurture and sell to your leads
- SEO
- etc
Digital marketing will help you in reaching a wider audience and converting more numbers of clients more than you would be able to do with traditional marketing.
Creating an online presence for your business has to start from designing your website, setting up your email marketing channel, setting up your social media accounts, running targeted ads, etc.
NB: from our paid course, you will learn how to use the digital marketing skills that we will teach you to build a successful copywriting business online.
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Step 6. Structure your pricing
This is one part of the job that will require a perfect balance, but it doesn’t come so easy.
Pricing structures can differ by client, industries, roles, work loads, etc. But a perfect structure is to charge a fair price that your client doesn’t feel that your services are over priced, while you also don’t feel robbed.
It’s very important to follow this structure.
NB: as part of our support for our student, we give our student pricing templates which they can use to price their services.
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Here is a pricing structure idea for your services.
Houryly charge –
You can decide to charge your client per hour you work for them. This makes it easy for your client to stop your work anytime they feel like, and also, you get paid for the hours you’ve put in.
Payment by project –
Some clients might want to pay you a fixed amount to cover for the project. This means that even if it takes you more hours every week to complete their jobs or less hours, they will only pay you the agreed fixed price that you signed for.
By retainer –
This payment structure allows you to get paid per month or quarter, or mid year, depending on your agreement with your client. This means that your client will always have access to you whenever they need you, and you can render service to them anytime they need you. Though as a new copywriting firm, you might not land such clients early in your business days as most clients agree to this structure because of a long time existing relationship.
Payment by commission –
This payment plan can provide you with great reward as clients’ businesses can make real good revenue. Good thing is, you can still earn commission along side other payment structures.
Imagine when your client promises to pay you 5% commission on the conversion they make from your email copies. If they make about $100,000, that would mean $5,000 commission for you.
starting out, you might want to stick to hourly payment or payment by project as most clients will need to work more with you to trust your services.
With these steps, if followed properly and optimized, you can build a 7 figure copywriting business as your full career.