So, you want a side hustle as an email copywriter, eh?
Email is still the most popular marketing tool for businesses, and you can make serious money with this opportunity.
One of the reasons email copywriting has exploded over the years is because it is easy to access on a cell phone, and this means there is opportunity for copywriters to cash in.
If you are new to copywriting, you could spend years writing nothing but email messages for businesses and clients and always have plenty of work.
You could go crazy there is so much demand.
In this post, I will show you the fast track to getting started in this lucrative writing opportunity.
So, let’s get started…
Email Copywriting is a Massive Opportunity
Becoming an email copywriter will allow you to launch into higher-paying copywriting side hustles. For example, direct response copywriting is one of the highest-paid writing venues, and email marketing can give you the experience you need to break into it.
What is direct response marketing?
Direct response is any advertising which allows prospects to respond to it.
Here’s a good example:
Any reader of this message can immediately respond to this billboard by picking up their phone and calling.
The wonderful thing about direct response is tracking your success is very simple.
If you call Nasty Boy, the lawyer, the answering service will ask you how you heard about their services.
The marketing agency for the law firm can then determine how successful the billboard campaign was by the cost of the billboard ad versus how many people responded and became clients.
It’s even easier to calculate the success rate with direct response sales letters sent in the mail. Here’s what I mean:
Say that you send out 100 sales letters at .63 cents each, and ten people buy into your offer, giving you a 10% response rate.
The product you are selling is a widget for $45.
100 x .63 = $63
10 x 45 = $450
Your profit is: 450 – 63 = $367 profit
See how easy that is to figure out?
It is the same way to figure out email costs in a campaign, but there is one clear advantage.
Email doesn’t cost .63 cents per unit unless you send out offers using an email platform like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact, where you can send thousands of messages for around $30 a month.
Email is the cheapest and fastest way for a copywriter to learn the basics of direct response.
Of course, there are differences between sending out sales letters and emails, but you can learn the basics of direct response using email marketing.
How to Develop Your Skills as an Email Copywriter
If you are going to enter the world of copywriting, you are going to have to pay your dues.
Email copywriting is like any other skill – you will need to learn the basics of writing before you can start making money at it.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a brilliant writer to get started.
All You Need Are the Basics
I know copywriters who got started with nothing more than basic writing skills and are pulling in over six figures.
So, don’t freak out if you don’t have good writing skills yet, because you can learn them.
Step A: Start Writing Blog Posts
Head over to the free blogging site Medium and get an account.
The Medium site doesn’t cost a dime to write blog posts, so you can practice writing all you want on that platform.
The faster you can start writing and learning the basics, the quicker you can start writing copy for money. If you have no clue how to write sentences and phrases, you can take free or cheap writing courses online to help you get started.
Step B: Learn from the Best
Once you brush up on your basic skills, you need to learn the art of persuasive composition. The best way to do that is to follow the greatest copywriters on earth and learn from them.
Here are the sites I recommend for you to learn from:
Smart Blogger – This is the site of Jon Morrow – a millionaire blogger and copywriter who has paid top dollar to take hundreds of writing classes to become the best.
When you read a post on his site, I can guarantee it is epic, and you should learn as much as you can from it.
The Gary Halbert Letter – This website is a newsletter site by the late great Gary Halbert, one of the greatest direct response copywriters to grace the planet. If I were you, I’d copy these newsletters and stick them into a file for further study.
Here’s a tip: If you want a blueprint for becoming a good copywriter, Gary tells all in a newsletter titled Hands-on Education for Basic Experience in Advertising Principles. It goes into great detail on how to study and learn the art of copywriting, and if you want to dig in and learn how to master this craft, this is the kind of study you must do.
John McIntire’s Udemy Email Course – Mac has been around for quite some time, and his copywriting superpower is email marketing. He goes through the entire process of setting up an autoresponder and writing different kinds of email messages based on different kinds of marketing campaigns.
For example, John shows you how to compose and release emails in sequence for a product launch from start to finish, so you will understand how to write them in a way that gets results. His course is not expensive, and you can get through the lessons in a week, and I have personally taken this course and recommend it.
Don’t merely read these sites; take their posts, emails, and articles and break them down into learnable chunks to dissect them. Try to figure out what makes them work so well.
The wonderful thing about following the best writers is you will be learning from proven winners. These professionals are rabid, constant writers.
Jon Morrow, for example, wrote no less than 2000 words a day when he started. Gary Halbert once flew on a plane to New York City to visit a library there that had a book on copywriting he wanted to read.
Step C: Start Gathering Your Resources
Every professional copywriter I know of has a collection of books on their shelf that they can refer to while working.
Here is a list of the best ones for you to get started with:
The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy – One of the best books ever published on copywriting and focused on direct response marketing. (Mostly direct mail, but those principles are the same as email marketing.)
Dan tells you where to gather information about your target market and delivers a step-by-step process for writing copy with detailed examples.
The Copywriters Handbook by Bob Bly is a must-have resource on writing copy. Bob Bly is the world’s hardest-working copywriter, with approximately one-hundred published books on the market. He covers every aspect of copywriting, including a chapter on email copywriting.
Words That Sell by Richard Bayan – I use this book constantly because it primes my brain with great ideas.
Words That Sell is a quick reference guide with hundreds of sales phrases and words handing you ideas on writing better sales messages, and perfect for writing email sales letters and a must-have book for copywriters.
Step D: Subscribe to the Best
While building an offline bookshelf of resources, go online and find the best entrepreneurs and businesses, and get on their mailing list. You will need a massive swipe file on your hard drive for ideas and templates for your email copywriting business.
Since you will be an email copywriter, you should subscribe to as many businesses and entrepreneurs as possible and collect their email messages. The reason why you will want to do this is so that you can read and analyze them to see what makes them work.
You will need to save these ideas into different files or categories and pull them out to get ideas from them.
Check Your Mailbox Outside
When you open your mailbox at your home, keep an eye out for advertisements.
Several days ago, I received two direct mail pieces that used stories to sell their services. Whenever I see mail like this, I keep them in a swipe file in my office.
Sales letters like this are valuable to you as a copywriter because top-dog copywriters who get paid mega bucks write them.
Here is a sampling of what I got this week:
The copywriters who penned these sales letters got paid a lot of money.
How do I know this?
Those letters went out to thousands of customers, which takes big money. Businesses that run those campaigns cannot afford to hire some schmuck to goof it up for them.
So, whenever you get sales letters in the regular mail, they will be crafted by high-paid direct response copywriters.
You should read, dissect, and file them for later use.
Learn the Art of Storytelling
Did you notice in those two direct mail pieces above that they are using stories to promote their businesses?
If you want to increase the engagement of your email copywriting, you need to learn storytelling.
Why?
Stories create emotional connections and help the reader understand the information better.
Merely talking about a product like foot powder and telling you how great it is will be boring.
But if I tell you a story about how my love life was ruined by having smelly feet with sore crusty calluses that made my dog puke – you would sit up and pay attention.
(Especially if you had the same problem.)
Stories are relatable, and because they are relatable, they make concepts, benefits, and features of a product or service easier to understand.
So, learning how to tell stories is essential for an email copywriter.
The Best Way to Learn Storytelling
I bet you’re wondering if I will ever stop telling you to learn things.
Here’s the thing – if you want to become a professional email copywriter, you will never stop learning.
A science teacher I am friends with has a sign in his classroom that says, “A little learnin’ is a dangerous thing.”
You must increase your knowledge of your craft daily.
The great thing about storytelling is that it is very flexible because it is creative, and there is no set way to do it.
If you want to know how to write great stories, learn from people who have already penned them.
Go to the library and get some books of short stories by Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, or Rod Serling and try to figure out what makes their stories work.
Your goal is not to become a great fiction writer but to learn enough to make your stories resonate with your target market.
Also, do a blog search online for the best posts ever written because they usually have stories in them that are epic.
One of my favorites is by Jon Morrow, where he details how he wrote a post that changed his life.
Start Writing for This Person First
Telling you to do this will grind you, but bear with me on this part.
You could spend years studying email copywriting, but you will not get any traction until you get your first client.
So how do you get that coveted first client?
You start by writing for yourself.
Yes, you read that correctly – START WRITING FOR YOURSELF.
Here are a few reasons why you will need to do this:
You Need a Showcase for Your Work
You will need a writing portfolio that will display the fact that you can write different kinds of email campaigns like these:
1. Promotional Campaigns
2. Newsletter Campaigns
3. Welcome Series Campaigns
4. Transactional Emails
5. Abandoned Cart Emails
6. Re-engagement/Win-back Campaigns
7. Lead Nurturing Campaigns
8. Feedback/Review Request Emails
9. Milestone/Anniversary Emails
10. Social Media Integration Emails
Of course, you will not need all of them, just one or two of these email series to get started. The easiest way to start writing sales copy is by selling something familiar to you.
You Will Gain Something Valuable
How can you write for a paying client if you have never done it before?
Even if you read 25 books and took 30 courses on how to write email copy, you still need to write an email campaign.
Besides that, no one will take you seriously.
Once you have written a few email campaigns and built a portfolio, it will demonstrate your ability to write copy for potential clients.
A portfolio will give you an edge over applicants trying to land a job, and examples of your work will help editors and owners looking for the right copywriter for their company.
The bottom line is to write for yourself first so that you have something to show.
Reach Out to Other Copywriters
While building your email copywriter folio, you should get feedback on your work from professionals in the copywriting business, so begin networking with people in your industry and ask them to critique your writing.
My two favorite places to meet with other copywriters are LinkedIn and the Warrior Forum.
Anyone serious about building their email copywriter business is on LinkedIn, and it is easy to find them using its search engine.
Just type in the word copywriter, and you will see active professionals. Once you join their network, it is easy to ask them questions or take a look at your writing.
The other place I love to get feedback from is the Warrior Forum (WF) which has a lot of entrepreneurs and copywriters who will help you.
WF is the site I joined years ago to get help with my copywriting, and they were more than happy to shred my writing.
Before you start contacting these pros, there are a few things you need to know. First, you need to be patient. Follow them for a while and add valuable comments to their posts. Let them get to know you before you start asking for help.
Once you start asking questions, be super polite. If they sneeze in your direction with anything valuable, thank them profusely.
Use This Trick to Build Your Email Copywriter Portfolio
Head on over to Amazon and start looking at your favorite subjects. Pick a book or an item you like and create an email series around it.
For example, I am a big fan of Darn Tough socks and could easily create a series of sales emails for that product.
The more passionate you are about your subject, the easier it will be to write about it. Create a mock email campaign based on your passion and save it in a file for future clients. Once you become an official email copywriter, get a website and make a portfolio page for your work.
Tip: If you already know and use a product you have bought from Amazon, great – that will make your job writing about it easier. However, read all the comments people left about it because they will point out features, benefits, and even criticism you would have never thought of.
Getting the First Clients for Your Side Hustle
Once again, I’m saying something you don’t want to hear.
You will track down bottom feeders and write for next to nothing.
There, I said it.
Listen, if you’ve followed my instructions, you’ve been writing for yourself for nothing, so if you only make a little moola with your email side hustle, that’s a step up, right?
Let’s face it – at this point in your writing career, you are not David Ogilvy or Dan Kennedy. (If you were, you wouldn’t be reading this post.)
So, grab any chance to work for dirt because it will give you EXPERIENCE. (You will gain experience working with clients, experience writing, editing, using email platforms, etc.)
If someone offers you a gig writing for them – take it, even if it is only $20, and once you’ve gotten better at it, you can start raising your rates by increments of 15%.
Tell your first cheap clients that if they want more written in the future, it’s a 15% increase, and while you’re at it, start reaching out to potential employers and clients.
Yeah, It Is Degrading – and that is Good
There are two trains of thought on approaching the cheapest clients you can find when starting as an email copywriter.
The first train of thought is that writing for ka-ka money is degrading and may cause you to give up.
The second way of thinking is that you want it to be degrading.
I started with the cheapest clients I could, which sucked, and writing for those cheap clients made me want to learn more and become an expert mucho-fast.
In other words, I didn’t want to keep working for cheap-assed clients.
I wanted to start making better money.
So, this is what I did: I treated those first clients like they were royalty and worked my butt off for them on every aspect of the job.
In my mind, I was writing for Elon Musk and busted my ass for them.
And I hated writing for nothing, but that’s the point – I wanted out of that position as fast as I could, so I pushed myself to write more and better.
Once I got clients that would pay me decent money, I kept the same standard.
And guess what?
I got clients who paid me more.
Now, I turn down people.
Want to pay an email copywriter crap? Get someone else.
Don’t have an email or content marketing plan? Bye-bye.
Want me to use a piece of keyword-stuffing software? Forget about it.
How to Get on the Fast Track to Client Acquisition
If you want fast results getting clients, I have a recommendation for you.
Head over to Corbin Buff’s site High Impact Copywriting, and take his Ultimate Easy Client Generation course.
Corbin is a fast-rising star in the copywriting industry, and he shares with you the methods he has used to get good-paying clients.
This course will help you launch your high-paying copywriting career very quickly by handing you cold email templates you can use to get clients.
If I were you, I would get on board with his course because it’s very affordable, and the way this guy moves, the price might escalate quickly.
Don’t believe me?
Check out his in-depth copywriting advice on YouTube – Corbin Buff’s YouTube Channel
Best Places to Get Your First Clients
My advice to a newbie email copywriter, is to grab as much low-hanging fruit as possible and get them out of the way fast. Don’t just look for email copywriting gigs but look at doing blog posts, website copy, eBooks, or any kind of writing that will get you more experience.
Get any gig you can and write.
As the Nike commercial says – Just do it.
And remember to treat those clients like royalty and do top-notch work for them because this is how you’ll do business in the future.
Remember, you’re not only writing but learning to deal with clients.
Here is the list of places you can find your first clients:
- The Warrior Forum
- Fiverr
- Upwork
- Craigslist
- Local Job Boards
- Solid Gigs
- Contenta
- Writer Access
- Contently
Getting a Good Paying Email Copywriting Client
As I mentioned above, go through those first cheap clients quickly.
Once you’ve completed contracts for five of them, you’re ready to move up, and now I will tell you how to do that fast as an email copywriter.
Step 1: Start Looking at Local Businesses in Your Area
Local businesses are the fastest track I know of to start a copywriting business, so hop online and do a google search of local businesses in your area.
You are looking for a business that fits the following criteria:
They have been in business for at least three years.
Take a look at companies that have been around for several years and are growing because those are the companies that have money to spend on marketing.
The owners embrace marketing.
If you go to their website and they aren’t collecting email addresses from visitors, you will not be able to convince them to start, and it will be a waste of your time.
Also, if you meet them at their place of business and don’t see any marketing materials around…run. Hand them your business card and politely get out of there as fast as you can.
They understand that doing consistent email marketing will increase their revenue.
If your prospect knows the value of email marketing and is open to hearing your proposal to write for them, you have a winner.
It also helps if your prospect understands that hiring you will cost them money because, for some reason, people think that because you sit at a laptop writing or doing something you like, they can pay you dirt.
Step 2: Reach Out to These Business Owners
The easiest and cheapest way to approach these clients is to call them.
Write yourself a short script and memorize the crap out of it.
“Hi, my name is _________ _________, and I’m a local email copywriter. I was on your site and signed up for your email information, and I noticed a few things that could help you increase your revenue. So, I would like to make an appointment to share some ideas with you. When would be a good time?”
You want to make it sound as natural and calm as you can.
On your first call, you’ll be nervous. But after you make a bunch, it will get easier. As a matter of fact, after 30 or 40 of these, it will get boring.
I’ve made thousands of phone sales calls, and nobody has ever been rude or unkind to me.
Alternate Route to Cold Calling
If you are afraid to cold call them, there is another way you can do it.
Locate the email addresses from their website and send them at least three messages like the script above.
Once you have sent a very polite email or two, give them a call and ask them if they received your email and tell them something like this:
“Hey Joe, my name is _________ ________, and I have a way that can help your company generate more revenue, and I would like to set up an appointment to discuss how I can help you. I am open tomorrow afternoon – when would be a good time?”
Make the appointment to do a phone chat, zoom call.
Tell Them This if They Want to Know
If they start asking you questions, tell them all the benefits you can offer them by being their email copywriter.
If you want to blow their mind, tell them you have subscribed to their email subscription and spotted a few ways they can make more money with email marketing.
Give them an example of things they can do that they may not have thought of, like:
- Have an email content plan
- Send out more offers
- Write emails that will make them an expert in their field
- Use visuals to sell more
- Segment their list
- Use calls to action
- Repurpose their email messages for social media posts
If they have been doing half-assed email outreach, just telling them this list will shake them up. Also, you could tell them why hiring you to be their email copywriter would make their lives so much easier by:
- Taking the burden of writing them off of their shoulders
- Giving them timely updates on their email marketing plan
- Segmenting their lists for them
- Helping them manage their email platform account
- Editing the messages
If you have told them all this by the end of your conversation and they are still hesitant, move on.
Face it – if the prospective client does not understand the value of email marketing, you will have an uphill battle contracting them as a client.
Step 3: Rinse and Repeat
Once you start marketing your copywriting business like this, keep going because this business requires persistence and consistency.
Despite the ads and sales videos you have seen from people selling copywriting courses, copywriting is a tough business.
Here’s a video by professional copywriter, Linda Formichelli, who holds nothing back about the reality of running a copywriting business:
https://youtu.be/ko1EEaIUFBk
I have sent hundreds of cold emails to prospective clients and gotten two gigs.
Prospecting gets easier over time, but the first few years will not be easy. If you keep at it, you will develop relationships with clients who like you and return to you for your skills.
So, if you start working as a copywriter, do not expect an easy path because this business requires work.
Conclusion
OK, you are ready to launch your email copywriting career into the stratosphere. I hope I have given you enough in this guide to get you started immediately.
But one last piece of advice.
Take immediate action because the faster you get started, the more successful you will be at email copywriting. Action is the catalyst for success – the more action you take, the faster success will arrive at your door.
You will have setbacks.
But that is good because you will develop tougher skin. And besides that, if having an email copywriting business as a side hustle were easy, everyone would be doing it.
OK, now get going.
Oh, by the way, please comment on my post and share it.
If you share it, I will be able to write more posts that are of value to you.
So, share this right now – it will make my day.