By Peter Bowerman
A proposal and executive bio (~32 hours): $4000. A 12-page marketing brochure for an international heavy equipment firm (~45 hours): $5000. A tri-fold marketing brochure (~7 hours): $1000. Three sales letters (~8 hours): $1500. Web copy editing (~6 hours): $800. Writing “blurbs” for supermarket store signage (~42 hours): $5000. A four-page sales sheet (~11 hours): $1400. All projects I’ve worked on and all examples of the lucrative – and surprisingly accessible – world of commercial writing.
Oh, and then there’s the lifestyle: Work at home, get up when you want, take vacations when you want, earn $60-$125+/hour, work in your sweats. Hey, we’re writers. Who among us wouldn’t want a life like that?
For the past few decades – and even more so recently – downsizing and outsourcing have sculpted the corporate American landscape. Companies everywhere are doing more with less. As such, many rely heavily on well-paid freelancers to write their marketing brochures, ad copy, newsletters, direct mail campaigns, video scripts, web content, and a ton of other projects. And I hear it all the time from clients: how hard it is to find good, smart, reliable writers who “get it.”
It gets better. Given the times, many companies that formerly hired pricey ad agencies and design firms are shedding them in favor of more economical freelancers (especially talented designer/writer teams), and discovering they get better work at far less cost.
So, what do you need to get your share of this lucrative work?
Writing Ability?
No one’s going to pay you up to $125 an hour or more if you’re lousy. That said, there are plenty of fields such as healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, high-tech, and plenty of others, which have steady, ongoing needs for clear, concise copywriting that doesn’t have to be a work of art. Start studying your junk mail, the little newsletter inserts in your electric bill, the rack brochures at your bank. Could you write that?
Marketing Ability?
Yes, first and foremost, this business is a sales and marketing venture. But, don’t freak. Marketing isn’t some arcane science understood only by Harvard MBA’s. And it’s NOT about being a slick, pushy salesperson. Marketing is simply letting your market know you (or the clients you write for) are out there, consistently, and in a variety of ways that cut through the clutter. And that can be for YOU as a writer or for your clients.
Get a few fundamental sales and marketing principles under your belt – i.e., Audience (understanding who you’re writing to and trying to “reach”); The Features/Benefits equation (focusing on what’s important to readers, NOT talking about your product, service or company); and USP (Unique Selling Proposition; what you/your client does better than anyone else) – and you’ll set yourself apart from most writers. Not to mention being able to talk intelligently – and write for – just about any client.
Plenty of Work
The sheer volume of potential commercial writing work is mind-boggling. What we see as consumers (e.g., ads, direct mail pieces, consumer newsletters, brochures) is just the tip of the iceberg. That’s called B2C: business-to-consumer. What we don’t see – except as employees of a company – are two additional gargantuan arenas of work. First is B2B (business-to-business), all the materials created by businesses to market their products and services to other businesses.
Add to that “internal communications,” another enormous arena of work representing all the projects that exist solely within a corporation to communicate with employees: newsletters, sales sheets, web sites, presentations, videos, CD-based training programs, procedure manuals, and the list goes on and on. Much of it is outsourced.
While we can just picture the huge volume of this kind of work within large corporations, imagine the vast number of small-to-medium-sized companies (25-200+ employees) with so many of the same needs. Yet, firms of that size are even less likely to have the in-house staff to execute them, but usually DO have the money to pay for it. They may need more educating – not only as to the very existence of outside writing resources like us, but how to craft these projects as well. But, rest assured, the work is there. Check back on Monday to learn more about landing this type of work.
Peter Bowerman, a veteran commercial freelancer and business coach in Atlanta, Georgia, is the author of 2010 title, The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less, an updated edition of his original 2000 award-winning Book-of-the-Month Club selection. For more details, and to subscribe to his popular monthly ezine and blog, visit www.wellfedwriter.com. He chronicled his self-publishing success (60,000 copies of his books in print and a full-time living for eight-plus years) in his award-winning 2007 release, The Well-Fed Self-Publisher: How to Turn One Book into a Full-Time Living.