Is Freelance Copywriting Dead?

Key Takeaways

Is freelance copywriting dead? We've been getting this question a lot from copyriters struggling to get their career off the ground. So, in this video, you're going to discover the harsh realities of freelance copyrightiting as it stands now. I'll reveal who freelancing still works for, who it doesn't, and how AI is changing everything. Along the way, I'm going to introduce you to the people who actually hire copyriters to see what they're looking for. You'll also get the secrets of top earning freelancers. And I'll even introduce you to copywriters making money in ways you may not have thought of before. So, if you're early on in your copyrightiting career and trying to find the right path for you, this video could save you years of struggle and wasted effort. First though, I want to show you something. This was me in 2017, more than 8 years ago. Back then, I just heard about this magical career called freelance copywriting. Basically, you could write words using nothing more than a laptop or your phone and you'd get paid money for it. What? Hell yeah, I wanted some of that. But there was a problem. See, I kept seeing posts on Reddit and forums like this. Is it just me or does it seem like a career in copywriting is oversaturated? It seemed that everywhere I looked, someone had something negative to say about starting this career. There are too many copywriters already. Cheap writers on Fiverr make it impossible to get hired. It's too late to get started. In fact, I nearly gave up before I began. But for whatever reason, I decided to give it a go anyway. And I am insanely glad I did. Launching my career in copyrightiting, despite the naysayers, has allowed me to make more money than anyone in the history of my family and has led to an extremely freeing and lucrative career. I've met incredible individuals and formed new partnerships. I've been able to travel the world for the good of my businesses, enjoying beautiful cultures and amazing people. And I've even got to hang out with some living legends like Mark Ford. And I did it all without a college degree or any sort of formal training. All of this is only possible because I started my professional journey with copywriting, the lifeblood of making sales online. And yes, it is still 100% possible today. But things have changed a little, so you need to understand exactly what you're getting yourself into and what path might work best for you. First though, I want to start with the most important lesson. No matter which path you choose, at Copy That, we still see beginners in our free Discord server, link in the description, who are making this dream a reality. We see it fairly frequently in people from very different walks of life. But the one thing they all have in common is that they prioritize gaining a good understanding of copyrightiting principles before anything else. Even before they begin thinking about outreach or applying for jobs. Being able to learn, practice, and then of course get paid for copywriting work is pretty essential if you want to take this career seriously. And that brings me back to the whole point of this video. What is the best way to do that today? Is freelance copyrightiting still the best way forward or has the ground shifted too much in the last decade for that to be viable anymore? Quite simply, what are your options? Well, today we want to talk about the two main paths that most copyriters end up taking so you can figure out which one is right for you. Let's start with the one you're probably already thinking about, freelance copywriting. See, when you're an employee, one business pays you. Your employer decides how much money you get. But as a freelancer, one business pays you, but now they're a client, not an employer, and you get to negotiate what that pay is, the kinds of work you do, whether your work is a one-off project or an ongoing month-by-month thing. And the best part, you can take on as many clients as you can handle. So, your income grows with every client you can onboard. For example, you could get paid in exchange for 10 hours of work to handle whatever a business wants to throw at you. Or you could get paid according to the specific projects or tasks you complete, like a new sales page or a series of emails. But at the end of the day, your clients have no obligation towards you beyond paying you for the agreed work. You're not an employee, so you don't get a guaranteed salary or sick pay or benefits, and it's much easier to fire you if your client isn't happy for some reason. There are some obvious benefits and drawbacks to all of this. On the one hand, you can juggle multiple clients and negotiate different rates of pay, potentially leading to a good amount of income. You can typically be more flexible in your working hours than an employee, and you can take on more or less work as you see fit. But on the other hand, of being a freelance copywriter, your income relies upon your continuous availability to work and potentially the results you can bring in. You may have to work beyond your expected hours to hit deadlines, and clients can drop you in an instant, leading to uncomfortable periods of lower wages and scrambling to find more work. So, if any of that worries you, then you'll definitely want to hear about the second path for copyrighters that I mentioned earlier. But for now, if freelancing still sounds good, let's look at what potential clients actually want from a freelancer these days. When I go looking for a freelancer these days, I really am looking for something pretty simple, which is somebody who makes my life easier and not harder. I do and juggle so many different things that it is a real time suck and a mental energy drain to have to like give constant feedback to somebody, to correct somebody, to ask somebody to do revisions on something when it's all stuff that they probably should have known in the first place. So really self-starters, people with initiative, people that are able to actually go over and revise their work and understand without me having to remind them of basic things they should be doing themselves. The one thing that makes me hate a person is having to tell them to do something twice. You have to remember when you want to get hired by a business, you have to bring undeniable value to that business. In some sense, you need to either make their life easier or you need to make them richer. Like Sha said, as business owners ourselves, it is not satisfying when a freelancer takes up more time and energy from us than they can give back. In some way, you need to remove a burden. And perhaps the best way to do that is to generate real results for that client. I guess the way I think about it is if you can make a a business more money with what you're writing and you know the how you the ideas you bring to their company then that's that's how you make money. The thing about copy in DR is that it's incredibly meritocratic in a sense like if you have like a smash it promo like you can like yeah you can have a lot of success with that you know but equally the the the reverse is true like if you're not good at it you're not bringing in the customers you're not getting the sales it's not like some magic get rich quick scheme you know it's it's bloody hard you know to to actually convince real people with real lives to part with their money on the basis of a few words that you've strung together. It's not simple. And I think especially in the sort of like copy bro ecosystem, it's like, oh yeah, this one like format or prompt or whatever is the key to yeah 10k a month, you know, but it's it's definitely not that simple in my experience. You have to work at it. You have to understand your product. You have to understand your market. It's not as easy as a lot of people, especially on the outside, I think, looking in make it out to be. >> Oh, hi. So, if you've been enjoying these little like interview snippets that we recorded uh with ourselves and then with our friends and professionals at a a chateau in France, uh the full versions of those are going to be up in the platinum collection, which we are soon renaming the copy club. Uh there's a link down in the description below. So, if you want the full versions of those interviews, uh go check that out. They are very insightful and if you want to know what like professionals are looking for and like what they're looking for in you when they're trying to hire you, uh those are definitely worth listening to and uh paying attention to. So anyway, uh back to the video. Uh thank you so much for watching. I I appreciate you. See you. So unsurprisingly, being able to earn a business more money is the easiest way to justify your position as a freelancer. I can tell you from personal experience that actually doing good work for clients and receiving testimonials like this, this, this, and this is the most reliable way to get hired again and again. But even if you could make a client's life easier or bring in more results, what's to stop businesses in the modern era simply using AI instead? Look, we can't hide from the fact that AI is clearly here to stay. But what do business owners actually have to say about hiring AI versus hiring humans? >> I use AI a lot. I'm a big fan of AI. I use it in my day job. Um, but I can do that because I'm an expert in the field in my day job. If I ask it the right questions, it gives me the right output. I think the thing with AI, like any tool, any computer based tool at least, is it's garbage in, garbage out, isn't it? I'm not an expert copyright. I don't know how that works. I don't know what works. And neither does AI really. AI just kind of builds things based on patterns and what's done before. It doesn't really create. It reacts, I think, is the thing that AI does. Which is fine in my day job. But if you don't know what you're asking, if you don't know what to ask, I think um you're going to struggle with the with the outcome. And also, I mean, if you hire someone to to do all that for you, rather than using AI, you get someone to blame. There's um a level of accountability. There is someone that you can go to. You can kind of bounce new ideas off them. And if it doesn't work, then someone is responsible. Someone's accountable. AI doesn't care. AI doesn't care if your business fails no matter how nice chat GPT is to you. >> I think the effect of AI is a lot of junior um sort of copyrightiting roles might sort of diminish. People will see chbt Claude whatever as being sufficient to do the stuff that normally a junior copyriter might do. I see way too many people calling themselves a copyriter now and you can just see that it's not them. It's not their words. It It's not their thinking. >> It's it's AI and they they will not get very far. There's that end of the spectrum. I think people have to sort of look at the other end of the spectrum to the things that never change. >> Mhm. >> Which is human nature, deep psychology, and be just as um passionate about learning about those things as they are about the tech. And I think it's those people that will have the advantage because they will know how to reach people, how to engage people, how to compel people >> way more than any AI. I prefer to work with freelancers over AI because AI sucks [ __ ] With freelancers, at the very least, when I tell them they suck [ __ ] they can actually get better. But the problem with AI is if you tell it it sucks [ __ ] it doesn't get better. You have to train it and prompt it and give it more feedback and then it just continues to suck [ __ ] As somebody with experience on both the writing side and also the machine learning side, AI is not on a track to actually getting better at writing. It still has all the same problems it had a couple years ago. And it's just not getting better at the things that I need it for. AI does not internalize a fraction of the the knowhow, the skill that a human, an experienced human does. I attempted a few weeks ago. I wanted to see what let's write a copy package with Grock, see how good Grock is. Uh, it went off the rails very, very fast. I mean, the hallucinations were immediate and you can get in a real danger zone compliance-wise if you take a lot of those claims as fact. So, you quickly discover that it's significantly more time trying to prompt out a copy package and then verify those claims, every single one of them, than it is to work with a writer who has who has internalized the principles of direct response copywriting, who has, you know, some experience writing and um just makes your life so much easier can deliver a fantastic copy package. Yeah, there's no comparison right now. Not to say there won't be, but right now we're good hiring. So, the future clearly doesn't look all bad for copyrighters in the age of AI, but there is something crucial that we do need to address that is going to kill a lot of copyrightiting jobs. And it's something that both Sha and I have had direct experience with already. Ever since chat GPT and other LLM AI tools came out and chat bots and stuff like that, I've actually been one of the first to say that AI is going to replace some jobs, but not all copyrightiting jobs. So, what are the things that AI is better than humans at? It is not coming up with spicy ideas. It is not being timely. It is not being like contrarian. What is it good at? It's good at iterating. Like, I'm not going to hire a human to write 10,000 different versions of something. That would be stupid. AI is better at that than a human ever will be. What else? Boilerplate kind of copy. The stuff like that's like loaded with buzzwords and jargon and things like that. You know, you don't need to reinvent the wheel for a lot of these like more corporate pages, about us pages, contact us pages. Who the cares? I don't want to hire a writer to do that. And also, let's be real for a moment. Writers don't want to be hired to do that. It sucks. That is a crappy job. It is where creativity and lateral thinking comes into play where AI really fails. And that's where a copyriter can really excel. Look, AI is killing C-grade copywriting jobs. The kind of jobs where the copy won't really be responsible for any change in sales and the kind of jobs where a ton of slight iteration is needed, like testing a thousand ways to write an 8-word Google ad. These jobs have never paid particularly well anyway. So the A-grade copyrighting jobs like coming up with brand new campaign messages and generating novel creative ideas are still out there and still lucrative. But the AI apocalypse has made things a little difficult for new freelance copywriters. And here's why. Even though the jobs that AI is replacing aren't the best copyrightiting jobs, they have traditionally been safe and effective ways for freelancers to get their foot in the door, to initially get paid for their words, to test the waters of working with clients for the first time, and ultimately to prove themselves. For example, my first proper copyrightiting gig was writing a blog post about the difference between crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending. Why would a business owner hire a human to do that nowadays when they could just type a single prompt into chat GPT? The point is without these C-grade copyrightiting gigs, some freelancers are now finding it difficult to land their first client. Therefore, the main alternative is going for gigs that aim to increase results or for gigs that involve building novel messaging from scratch and the kind of A-grade things we discussed earlier. The problem with that is that not many clients want to trust a green newbie with something so important. So ultimately, you need to persuade business owners to hire you when you haven't been able to demonstrate any results or any past clients yet. That's difficult. Now, of course, there are still ways to get past this barrier. We talk about the various methods of outreach as a freelancer in our free 22-hour mega course. So, go check that out if you want our full rundown of finding clients in the modern world. But even with these methods, it can still feel like a grind to land that first client as a freelancer. And even outside of the higher barrier to entry that freelance copywriting now has, there are other reasons that freelancing might not be as freeing as you actually thought. >> From the beginning, you will be exposed to some crazy situations. I've experienced everything from clients changing deliverables on me at the last minute to people changing what product they want me to write on after I've delivered copy to them. You're very much at the mercy of the universe when you're out here. And there is no one really to protect you. >> I love freelancing, but I have to admit I often ended up working 60hour weeks in my first year just to stay on top of all the client work that I needed to do to pay the bills. Unfortunately, freelancing doesn't actually equal complete freedom. So, we can see that not everything is as easy or as rosy as gurus can make it out to be on the freelancing front. Potential clients have higher expectations than ever before for both your pitch and the work that you do. So, if you're going to make it as a freelancer, you need to be committed and prepared to work hard. But that does, of course, bring us on to the second path that you could choose instead. This path into copyrightiting is looking more and more appealing to people as the years go by. It's a path that can still lead to long-term success and freedom, but it's one that might require you to undergo a mindset shift. If you are dead set on becoming a copywriter, then why not consider going in-house and working full-time for a business or an agency? Even if you most value high pay and time freedom. What? But Alex, getting a 9 to5 is counter to everything that I want. That just means I'd have a boss. I wouldn't be free. I'd still be trapped in the matrix. And besides, hardly any companies hire copyrighters anyway. So where would I even find an in-house role? Well, hold on a second there. I'll address both of those things in a moment. But look, we've already seen how freelancing can be far more demanding than just a 9-to-5. And we've already heard the strict expectations from clients who would hire freelancers today. Worst of all, the hunt for new clients and that next gig never really stops. And sometimes this lack of knowing where the next job is coming from is a big problem for freelancers like me. But for in-house copywriters like me, I usually don't have to worry about where the next project's going to come from cuz guess what? I'm not in charge of landing it. I just need to do the work and get paid. And that's pretty much it. So, I feel like my life is far more comfortable. And that comfort can be a major boost if your long-term plan is to build an offer of your own, like an e-commerce store or an info product. The lack of freelance stress and the additional free time that you get as an in-house copywriter grants you far more availability to work on your own projects. But even without that benefit, with most in-house positions, once 5 p.m. hits, you don't need to worry about anything workrelated again until tomorrow. That's great. But as a freelancer, the unfinished client work hardly ever leaves your mind, no matter what hour of the day is. There's more to it than just being more comfortable, though. In-house copywriting can potentially solve the problem posed by AI to those who want to break into copywriting because junior in-house positions aren't expecting experience. In fact, these businesses are often just looking for people with the right predisposition who they can mold and train for themselves. >> Hiring for a copy team is incredibly hard to do, you know, because >> you're you're not just like looking at experience and stuff like that. It is a lot of like can this person actually write you know and you're not sort of expecting people to have like oh yeah they've written 20 promos that have generated x million in sales but you know it's just like is there that spark you know do they get how to communicate ideas is their writing clear and it's not full of jargon you know is there an idea they are trying to communicate >> I basically blackged my first job which was direct response copywriting for a direct um company. I didn't really know sort of what direct response was. So what helped me was the marketing director and he sort of became like my mentor for during my time there. If you have a critical mass of experience already and you can be self-directed in in your sort of like learning, improving, getting feedback, which is critical, then fine, you know, you can be like freelance. I think if you're just starting out, I do think it would be more of a struggle. You've got to develop that taste effectively. You've got to know what good looks like and you can't get that from just reading a book on like like capables or oglev or something. You you know you've got to have that mentorship I think. So I think that that's that's a really important part. I've come back into writing more financial stuff and I'm I'm trying to improve a lot and I think I would benefit from going in house somewhere for for a prolong for a prolonged period cuz I just think being around other copyriters that are better than you on a daily basis and interacting with them and having them go through your work is so beneficial. Not only does in-house copyrightiting get around the need for prior experience, it also provides a clear route of entry via simply applying to job posts, which we also show you how to do in our 22-hour mega course. Plus, as our experts have said, it gives beginners an immediate chance at mentorship, which is a proven way to improve skills quickly and avoid mistakes in both the short and long term. Okay, all of that is great, but where are these in-house roles? When you search for copywriter on job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn, hardly anything comes up. So where would you even find any opportunities? Well, this is where we need to be a little bit clever. Firstly, yes, you should absolutely be searching on job boards for copywriting roles. That just makes sense. But there are two other things that you can do to unlock a huge number of in-house opportunities that most copywriters simply never think of. One, expand your search from just copywriting to marketing. The truth is, not many business people really know what copywriting means. To them, it's just writing or ad text. So, typically, they're not putting jobs up for copywriters. They're putting jobs up for marketers or junior marketers or marketing assistants. I mean, just look at this. When I search copywriting on this job site, I get four results. But when I search marketing on the same job site with the exact same settings, I get more than 50 results. That is at least 12 times more opportunities just because I expanded my search a little. And the majority of the tasks in these roles will be coming up with ideas, researching, writing copy, and helping build campaigns. So there is a huge crossover between purely being a copywriter and being an entry-level marketer anyway. Plus, by going for junior marketing roles, you will also get to develop complimentary skills that will help boost your career in the long run. Most of the high earning copywriters that I know didn't just stick with copywriting. Yes, copywriting is perhaps the most important skill to get good at. But marketing strategy, the basics of marketing tech, and perhaps even some knowledge of design or similar skills will make you so much more appealing to other companies in the future and make you better at selling things generally. So, the first thing to do is broaden your thinking and extend your goals beyond purely copywriting when searching for jobs. But beyond just extending your search parameters, the other thing you'll want to try is treating this in-house search a bit more like a freelance search. In essence, instead of using cold outreach to ask for freelance gigs, use cold outreach to look for in-house positions instead, be they local or remote. In my experience, you'll actually get a much more positive response from companies by doing this anyway. In fact, one of my first major copywriting roles only came about because I contacted an agency and said I wanted a full-time job with them. I used the exact same methods and techniques we teach in our freelance outreach master classes, but I simply flipped the context to searching for in-house positions instead. This works because if you can show companies that you're prepared to put the effort into getting noticed and you say that you'd really like a role with them before they're actively looking, you are standing out from everyone else who would only send a simple CV when they see an open job post. So, if you've ever felt like there just aren't any in-house copyrighting jobs going, think again. Using these two additional methods of searching will give you tons of opportunity. Anyway, let's get back to why working in-house can actually be pretty awesome for a beginner instead of freelancing. See, perhaps the best thing about starting your career as an in-house copywriter, aside from the free time, the clearly defined working hours, the income stability, the job perks, the mentorship, the progression structure, the done for you admin, the pension plan, the socializing, the training budget, and the bonuses is the fact that you can use your experience inhouse to shape whatever long-term career you want, including going freelance or even starting your own business. Well, when I first went freelance, I just contacted all the companies that my com my the company I'd worked for in house had worked with and then I just started working with them directly. It was fine. No one no one cared. The journey to starting my own agency was uh direct response. I did some marketing management went into film on the production side but also the marketing side. And then it was after all that I was like I want to sort of do this for my for myself. >> Mhm. So I was leveraging a lot of the the skills and experience I'd already sort of like built from working with other people and sort of leverage that into my own thing. I think I would have struggled without that. >> What working inhouse does for you is it allows you to absorb uh knowledge and information at just a significantly faster pace. I was just curious about kind of every facet of the business and every onion layer that I peeled back. It was another thing to learn and discover. You know, for example, when I when I wrote I decided I wanted to write my first financial front-end package. And doing that, I as soon as I did it, I was like, well, now what happens? I guess I should go to some marketing meetings and see what happens next. And that's where I learned about media buying and you know the ad networks and how to study data and and all of those decisions that go into how to actually scale campaigns and build funnels. You can obviously learn all of that stuff on the outside. You can you can you know join groups uh like the ones that copy that offers or buy courses like those that copy that offers. Um you are kind of learning a little bit in a vacuum though. it's not being directly applied live in the wild on a product. There's not kind of that fire of you have to sell this thing and make this business work. And so, um, for me, there's just there's really no substitute. >> Who knows? It may not be a coincidence that most of the great copywriters and marketers we know started their journeys inhouse. Look, I know this video may seem super negative about freelance copyrightiting, just like those Reddit posts that I used to see all those years ago, but it really isn't. We're just being realistic. We don't want to sell the dream of freelancing to beginner copywriters in order to sell courses. We want to be honest. And the truth is freelancing is hard. And the barrier to entry has risen in recent years. Going straight into freelance copyrightiting as a beginner takes a determined, disciplined, and perhaps slightly lucky kind of person to make it work. It's definitely possible. I'm proof of that. So is Rod. And if you want to start with freelancing no matter what, go for it. We've already made plenty of free resources on this channel to help you out. However, if you're still open to ideas and maybe want to make this whole copyrightiting thing easier for yourself, why not consider starting in-house? There is more than just one way to launch this career. But it doesn't matter if you're an in-house copywriter like me or if you're a freelance copywriter like me, because the truth is all kinds of copywriters need to adhere to a certain set of rules that means they will write good copy and generate results. But for now, as you decide which path forward is right for you, here are a few things to remember. Starting with freelance copywriting only works if you're prepared to be completely self-sufficient, creative and persistent with your outreach, consistently hardworking, unfazed by rejection, okay with sudden changes in priority, happy with working long hours, and stoic in the face of inconsistent income. If any of that doesn't sit right with you, then maybe you should look at in-house copywriting as an alternative launchpad. But regardless of which path you choose, check out our free 22-hour mega course created so every kind of copywriter can learn the fundamentals of persuasion and building a career. We can't help you with your mindset, but what we have tried to do is make videos like this one to build your skill set and make you the best copywriter you can be. Thank you for watching. We can't wait to see your success.