When it comes to selling your services, confidence is essential. Along with this, the following is also needed:

1. Freelance writing resume – This should include your name, contact information, experience, education, special skills, and any other details that you deem important. I have found over the years that a good resume can do a lot of the “sales work” for me.
2. Samples – Anybody can create an appealing resume, but not everybody has a hand full of high quality samples. Along with your resume, you need to forward samples to potential clients. The more you have the better off you are going to be. As your career grows so will the number of samples in your portfolio.
3. The ability and willingness to talk about yourself – Sure, your resume and samples will carry you a long way – this is to be expected. At some point you will have to open up to the buyer, tell them a bit about yourself, and show them why you are right for the job. No matter if this is done on the phone or via email, you have to be ready to show your confidence (not arrogance) and to prove that you are the right hire.

The point of this post is two-fold:

1. To show that marketing is important.
2. To show that marketing your services is just the beginning of the process.

Proper marketing will get your foot in the door. But it is your sales tactics that will determine if you land new gigs.

Do you think you have what it takes to succeed as a freelance copywriter? Before jumping into freelance copywriting, take some time to learn more about the following three things: marketing fundamentals, sales, and consumer psychology. Understanding these three things to a better degree will absolutely help in a copywriting career.

Marketing Fundamentals – You can’t write effective copy for a client if you don’t fully understand who their target market is. Not all clients can tell you that – they expect you to figure it out. So brush up on market research. This is also going to help you work with the client on using the copy in positioning them against competitors.

Sales – Take some time to look at existing sales and marketing materials (company websites, brochures, sales letters, landing pages, etc.). Find samples from sites you know are successful, and look for similarities, trying to understand why certain things work.

Consumer Psychology – You know your target market, and you’ve looked at lots of examples. Other than simply copying the copy of others, you need to understand at least a little bit about consumer psychology in order to go from being an average copywriter to a great one. What does this mean? You’ll want to understand why consumers do what they do, buy what they buy, and react to things in certain ways. For example, consumers react differently to different colors, and that knowledge is used in crafting marketing material all the time (so you might want to know what colors headings should be in a sales letter for example). This also goes back to market research. It’s one thing to identify who that target market is. It’s something else to really understand them and what motivates them to do what you want them to do (and what makes them decide against it). For example, if you’re writing copy for a company targeting parents of young children, you’ll need to understand what concerns those parents have, and what values they have when it comes to making purchases that affect their children.

You won’t become an expert on all three fronts overnight. But start early, and make it a point to continue learning. Here are a couple of resources to get you started:

• Principles of Marketing – free online “textbook”
• Consumer Behavior: The Psychology of Marketing