Looking for clients? In this episode I'm sharing 21 different ideas for ways to connect with clients for your copywriting business. I guarantee you'll find at least one idea—and probably more like four or five ideas—that will work for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.



 
Stuff to check out:
The Copywriter Club Youtube Channel
The Finding Clients Ignition Kit
The P7 Client Acquisition System
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground


 
Full Transcript:
Rob Marsh: How do you find new or better clients? Here are 21 different ideas you might want to try. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

This episode of the podcast is going to be different from any episode I’ve done recently… in fact, in more than 450 different episodes, I can’t remember ever having an episode where not only did I not have a guest, but also didn’t have a co-host or someone else to chat with and bounce ideas around with. So in a sense, we’re making Copywriter Club history right now.

But we’re not covering a new topic. In fact, we’ve talked about finding clients on almost every interview we’ve conducted with copywriters over the last eight years. And my guests have shared a ton of great ideas for finding clients. At some point in the future, I’d love to create a supercut of all the ideas we’ve shared over the years… but that would be dozens of hours long and it’s not at the top of my to-do list at the moment.

However, on this episode, I’m going to share 21 different ideas, actually it will probably be more, 21 different ideas for ways to find clients. Not all of them will work for you. But I promise, if you stick around to the end of this episode, you’ll find at least one and probably five or six ideas that WILL work for you and that you can start using right now.

I’m also going to share some advice… the dos and don’ts of reaching out to clients—some of the things you need to do first and what you absolutely can’t afford to do.

If this topic appeals to you, I’ve got a couple of resources for you. The first is The Copywriter Club Youtube channel. I’ve posted several videos there about finding clients, pitching clients, the questions to ask to attract clients and more. Those videos are relatively short and will help you improve your outreach process so be sure to check them out.

And I’ve put together a mini offer I’m calling the Client Finding Ignition Kit. It includes a 36 page report that covers what I’m talking about in this episode at more depth, and also includes three different workshops on finding clients. One focuses on Upwork and other online marketplaces, another is all about what’s working on LinkedIn, and the third is all about what to do if you need to find clients right now. And it also includes a one-time coaching call to talk about your approach and your pitch to make sure it will work. If you want that, go to thecopywriterclub.com/ignition

Finally, I won’t go through all the stuff it includes, but there are a ton of resources in The Copywriter Underground to help you find, pitch, and land clients. If you want to find a full-time job, there’s a workshop all about that. If you want to improve your discovery calls, there’s a workshop and playbook all about that. If you want to go deep on what’s working on LinkedIn, Upwork, and several other places to find clients, there are resources for all of those too. And that’s on top of all the other workshops, coaching, community, lead sharing and more… that’s all available at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

Before I jump into that first idea, though, I want to just talk about a couple of things that are really important to keep in mind before you start finding clients. The first idea is that you do not have a business without clients. This is the thing that we do. We write copy. But if we're not writing copy for a client who's paying us to do it, we don't actually have a business. We're just doing this thing. So whether you have one client you spend all of your time on, or you have 19 or 20 clients, you're writing small things for over the course of the month, someone has to pay the bill. Someone has to pay you for this skill that you have, and if you don't have clients, that's the very first thing that you need to do. So don't spend any time getting ready in your business.

And by that, I mean don't spend any time building a website. Don't think about even building a portfolio. You don't have to worry about having a social media presence. You don't even need a LinkedIn page or anything like that. What you need is a client. And so I want you to go out there and land that first client. Now there's some things that you're going to have to do in order to do that. We'll talk about these in a minute, but I want you to land that first client, and then once you've had that client, you've done. The assignment. You've created a piece of copy, you've solved a problem for them. You're going to do it again. You're going to find a second client, and you're going to do the same exact thing before you do your website, before you have a LinkedIn page, before you have social media presence, you can go out and find the second client. You're going to solve a problem for them, and then the third time, you're going to find a third client, and you're going to solve a problem for them, probably writing copy or the thing that you want to do. And once you've done that three times, once you've acquired and proven that you can find clients, that's when you're going to back up and say, Okay, I'm going to get my business assets ready. So it's going to make it easier for me to find the next client.

In order to do that, you need to do a couple of things. First, you need to identify who you serve. There are so many ways to look at this, and mostly we think about this as choosing a niche. I help people in the health and wellness niche, or I write copy for finance companies, or I help Coaches find clients, right? We talk about this generally by industry, the industry that we work on, but there are so many different other ways to think about niching as well. You can niche by the type of client that you work with. Let's say that you like working with enterprise level clients or mom and pops or startups that have gone through their second round of funding. Lots of different ways to cut this so that you're working with a certain kind of client, but if you you know, help mom and pops solve their marketing problems, or help them solve their email sequence problems, or whatever. The thing is, you can do that for mom and pops across many industries, or you can do that for a variety of different clients across all kinds of other ways that we think about niching.

Another way that you can be thinking about this is the problem that you solve. So if you are a copywriter who helps businesses or memberships reduce churn, or helps a SaaS company reduce the churn on their monthly signups. You could you're basically identifying that problem reducing churn, right? Or maybe you're the problem you solve is onboarding customers into different kinds of programs or software. Maybe the problem that you are solving for people is acquisition, customer acquisition, Facebook ads, those kinds of things. So there are lots of different ways to look at marketing problems. In fact, there are so many marketing problems always copywriters can solve.

We put together a list of more than 30 different marketing problems and included it with our P7 Client Acquisition Program. I didn't talk about that at the beginning of the show, but if you want more information about that, you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/p7 there's this massive list of problems that you as a copywriter or a content writer as a marketer can solve for your clients. Oftentimes it will involve writing copy or writing content, but sometimes these problems are attached to the things that we do, and we can think a little bit bigger about the problems that we're helping our clients solve.

Another way to think about who you serve is the voice of the style that you write in. There are certain clients who want a particular voice or style, and if you can capture that and talk about that in a way that attracts them again. It's another way to niche your business. You could also help businesses at different stages. So you know, whether they are a startup, whether they are in a later stage of development. You know small to medium size or medium to large size businesses, the different stages that a business goes through, comes with additional problems that they need to solve, and additional opportunities where you can step in and help.

Another way to think about this is the deliverable you create. Maybe you are the only person who writes welcome sequences for your clients, or you help them solve a problem with creating weekly regular content that drives traffic to a variety of products, whether that's on their blog or elsewhere online. Maybe you help with social media and the deliverables there are related to the platform where you're posting. So there's lots of different ways to think about who it is that you serve, but after you have found those first three clients, what are the things that those clients have in common, and is there something that can indicate who it is that you are able to help right now that doesn't have to stay static. You can change this over time, but when you're just getting started, or when you're looking for clients, you want to be looking at some of the clients that you've already worked with. What do they have in common? Because you know, you can help them, and you should be able to find more people like them.

You also want to be able to identify the problem that you're solving. So we've talked a little bit about that as we're talking about niching, but the more you know about the problem you solve, the better. You can talk about it,