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Steve: Hey everyone, it's Steve Murphey from makemoneyblogging.co. If you ever wanted to
build a thriving web business I think you'll find today's guest really interesting. We're
here with Amy Harrison of Harrisonamy Copywriting that counts to talk about how she built a
thriving web business by attracting clients and offering scalable services. Amy, welcome.
Amy: Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this, Steve.
Steve: My pleasure. Tell us a little bit about your blog first so we can get an understanding
of what services you offer.
Amy: Sure. The blog is over at harrisonamy.com, and it very much supports my business. It's
a really useful tool for me to attract clients and to engage with my community as well, who
I do products and training, and services for. It's a really integral part of my business
and I have specific strategies of how I use that in order to attract more copywriting
clients, and to increase more sign-ups for my newsletter, and to get people to sign up
to the events that I've run.
Steve: You offer a copywriting service; you write landing pages, you also have some other
packages that you offer, right?
Amy: Yes, that's right. My primary focus and my specialty is sales copy and that tends
[inaudible 01:31] people who really want to [inaudible 01:45} sell services but still
sound like them, and that's a really key part of my style is that I kind of take on people's
personas and help them sell in their own voice. But in addition to working for my clients,
I also do training for the [inaudible 02:08] writing their own copy and they want to get
better so they want to learn how to write a sales page, and I do a few products and
packages based around that.
Steve: You've focused specifically on online sales pages. You don't just write copywriting
for everybody, you're really focused on what kind of services you offer and who you go
after.
Amy: Yes, definitely. Oh, sorry, go on.
Steve: I was going to say, has that really helped build your business as opposed to trying
to go after everybody, being really focused?
Amy: Yes, absolutely, and it doesn't happen overnight. When I first started, about three
years ago, I was reading lots about finding your niche and I would sit down and try and
brainstorm, and I found it really difficult. So I thought well, I'll just try to start
and get any clients. Then basically, as time went on, after about a year, I was very clear
about who I wanted to work with, who I didn't want
to work with, and what style of copy I really liked.
But I needed some experience of working with people that didn't really match my style or
what I wanted to do, in order to find that. It really was a process of discovery but today
I'm a lot clearer on who I want to work with; who I can best help as well. I will get people
who might say, they might have something for me, and very keen to work with but if I don't
feel like my skills are best placed with them, then I won't take that job on because I want
to feel like everything that I do, I'm really going above and beyond. I totally dive in
and bleed for that client as much as I can. [inaudible 03:57]
Steve: So anyone who is starting out, you probably recommend doing a bit of a discovery
period. Don't worry about finding your niche right away, really just kind of go out there
and start offering your services to anybody who will take it so you can then learn, okay,
this is who I like working with, here's who I don't like working with, here's what I really
like doing.
Amy: What I would say is that some people come out of the gate and they know exactly
what they want to do and they've got total focus, and that's brilliant. It's just, for
me, I didn't have that, and I would say if you don't have that, don't worry too much
about it. If you know generally what it is you want to do, if you want to offer marketing
or if you want to offer career advice -- I work a lot with coaches -- start there. Start
with what you love to do and start with what you're good at and the more kind of action
that you take, the more people you talk to, the more people you get involved with, the
more things you do, the clearer whatever your specialty will become. But trying to sort
of sit down and do it with just a pen and paper, and no kind of external influences,
is a really tricky thing. I think a lot of people get stuck at that point.
Steve: How did you get started freelancing in copywriting? Did you just go out and look
for clients? How did you attract your first clients?
Amy: Well, for me, and this does happen with a lot of copywriters, I was working for a
group of private investors who bought and sold online businesses; I'd been working for
them for about three years. We'd buy and we'd sell online businesses and I would help get
them ready for investors, I'd help them sort of improve the business so that they could
improve their conversions with customers, etc. My first couple of clients I picked up
from people that I knew, and that isn't an uncommon place to start, especially if you're
starting to freelance and you start talking to people about what you do.
I would just casually mention I'm thinking of freelancing, I'm probably going to go into
copywriting and just talking to a few people, they would say, "That's something that I might
need." So that was just the first couple of clients. Really, I would talk about what you
want to do with as many people as possible, because you never know who might know someone.
In fact, one of my other clients came through -- I'd mentioned it, what I was doing, to
my boyfriend at that time, to his friend, who then worked in a restaurant and a guy
was coming in and he was chatting about needing some copy, and he gave him my name, and I
started working for him. You never know what avenues you're going to get work so you've
got to be out there and be proud to say what you're doing, so that people know where to
find you.
Steve: You mentioned something real interesting in that you kind of talked to everybody. You
said, "Here's what I want to do." It seems like a lot of people are afraid of talking
about their ideas, as if someone might steal it. Were you worried about talking about copywriting
and then someone else saying, "Oh that's great; I want to do that too", and then becoming
a competitor? Was that a concern or was hat just not something that people should worry
about? They should really get themselves out there.
Amy: It's funny that you should say that. At the time it wasn't too much concern about
competition. When I left we were just about to sort of hit a recession, so nobody wanted
to go freelance. Everyone thought I was crazy to turn my back on a job, but I would say
that there are some things that I'm very open and talk about and there are some things,
which I kind of won't talk about until they're ready to be released.
I would say that if your objective is to find clients then a great way to do that is to
tell as many people as you want. In terms of competition, it's never really bothered
me. There really is a lot of work out there for copywriters. You just need the persistence
and consistency of action to go out and keep finding new people, following up leads, and
that's the kind of grunt work a lot of people don't do so what happens is, people tend to
get their first, three, four, five clients and they might be regular clients, and they
hold on to those.
You can see that they really don't want to tell anyone they've got these contracts, they
don't want to tell anyone what they're working on; I've never been like that because I think
it's a loss mentality and I feel like there's plenty to go around. If you go out there and
if you just keep telling people what you do, keep asking what's going on and
what other people are
working on. I've always found, for me, you get much more abundant [morals] than [inaudible
08:48]...