#061 Steve Roller on How to Successfully Run Your Freelance Business While Traveling the World

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing.

Podcast, helping you propel your writing business.

To a whole new level.

And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Well, hello there and thank you for joining me for episode 61 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find detailed show notes for this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 61. You know, one of the biggest reasons freelancers treasure self employment is the flexibility that it gives you. And when you're your own boss, you set the schedule right, you pick whom you work with and you pick the projects that you take on. And you know, granted, sometimes we have to do things that we don't necessarily want to do. Sometimes, you know, we got to bring in a client and it's not perfect, but that's fine. But you know, overall, you get to pick these things. And one of the things you can ideally pick is also where you get to work, where you're working from. The unfortunate part of all this is that most of us don't take full advantage of our business portability, if you will. Some people might have young kids. I know I have kids. You know, you got school to deal with, right? Other people have aging parents that they have to take care of. You know, maybe they got parents who live with them and they got to keep an eye on them or they might have a medical condition that would limit extended travel. But, you know, after talking with my colleague Steve Roller from Copywriter Cafe recently, I realized that in just for me at least, this is mostly an issue of both commitment and fear. I haven't made a working vacation a priority. I haven't really explored what I could do and where I could work from. And I think the other thing is that fear, fear of the unknown, you know, how do I make this work? What about all these things that could come up that I'm, I'm not thinking about right now? There's a third reason that I know stops me in, stops many solo professionals, which is the belief that you have to go to an exotic location, exotic location, I should say, for an extended period of time in order to really get the most out of this. And none of these things are true. There always is a way to work around these fears and misconceptions. If you're even remotely interested in travel and in taking working vacations and seeing the world or seeing the rest of your country. I urge you to listen to this episode because Steve is going to really open up your mind and show you the different possibilities out there. He's going to talk about his own motivation for getting out of his daily environment and seeing more of the world. He's also going to talk about how he's able to make it work. And he's also going to give you many useful tips and tricks, very practical information for successful vagabonding, if you will. So I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. It's inspirational, but it's. It's practical that this is something you want to do. And I tell you, it really inspired me and it got me thinking about different things that I could do in this area and, you know, maybe kind of gradually go to where I would eventually want to go. This is not an either or scenario. I think this is something you can work into little by little. So I hope you enjoy it. I'd love to hear your comments at the end and so join the discussion on the Show Notes page, which are. Which is a b2b launcher.com episode 61. So with that, let's get to it. And I'll come back at the end with a couple of quick announcements. Steve, welcome to the show, man. It's so great to finally have you here.

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me, Ed. I'm looking forward to this.

Well, you know, we're just talking a little bit offline about, you know, how much I've been wanting to have you in this show. And, you know, ever since I've seen your traveling adventures, of course I've been jealous. And then I told myself, you know what, I have to talk to Steve when he gets back because I think you have something to share here, which is not only really exciting, but I think inspirational. And I hope listeners will get that from what you have to share. So it's awesome to finally have you here.

Yeah, thanks. Good to connect, Ed. I know we touched base this summer when I was gone, and it's good to finally do this. And I do hope that what I have to share will inspire people and let people see that it's not. I think the thing that I want people to know and we'll get into this is that it's not as hard as it may seem and it doesn't take as much money as it might seem. So anyway, we'll get into all that. But yeah, I think this will help people see that it's possible. Perfect.

All Right. So let's take, let's backtrack and why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, the work you do, the types of clients you work for, that sort of thing.

Sure, sure. I'm a full time copywriter. I've had a copywriting business for about five and a half years now. My background is in direct sales going back to 1986. I was in direct sales for most of my career. Really enjoyed the sales process. I did well at it. I made some good money, won some incentive trips, had some good experiences with a couple different companies and really enjoyed it. But about 10 years ago, in fact, 10 years ago this year, last month, I discovered this idea of copywriting, which I had never heard about before. And when I found out that I could kind of combine the idea of, combine my sales skills with writing, which I actually had never done before, but I liked the idea of it, combine that into a portable business where I could take it anywhere, that really appealed to me. But what I do is, I mean, you know what a copywriter is and I know your listeners do, but I mean, essentially I write marketing messages that help businesses get more customers. That's how I explain it to people that don't know about copywriting. So I help convert readers and viewers to buyers. And as you know, it's all about connecting with your audience and writing persuasively and moving people to action. So that's what I do. I work with. I specialize in helping clients in the fitness, travel and publishing industries. I've worked with a chain of fitness studios in Southern California for about four and a half years and helped them grow from seven locations to about 28 today. I've worked with a number of different publishing companies. I've worked with some big name copywriters like Dan Kennedy and worked on projects with him and some other people like that. But I've also done a lot of work in various areas. So I don't necessarily have just one very narrow niche. I've done some things in real estate investing, I've done some financial, newsletter publishing, copywriting. So kind of a wide variety of types of work that I've done.

Okay, and you said you've been at it for about five and a half years. Did you start full time or did you transition from a part time side gig?

Yeah, I was doing it part time, actually. Five and a half years is how long I've been doing it full time, Ed. So March of 2009, I left the full time job that I had I did transition into it, so it's not like I jumped off a cliff and just decided, hey, I'm going to be a full time copywriter. Kind of like you and I know your story a little bit. My background was in sales and while I was doing that kind of stuff, I was trying to transition into being a full time copywriter. So I'd say it was only maybe about a year or so, a year and a half though that I was doing it part time and I didn't do it quite as successfully as you making the transition. I was finding it very difficult to do my job and be a copywriter. Just splitting my time, the mental energy and just the physical time that it took. So I had a very small part time business but I had a few steady clients and I thought that the only way that I was ever going to make a go of it is to jump into it full time. So I didn't necessarily transition seamlessly from the part time deal to the full time. So it took me a while to ramp up to replace what I had been making as a full time income.

Okay, okay, well and you know I tell people, listen, what you never hear is a sleepless nights, you know, the seven day work, the sheer amount of just mental and emotional strain. So yeah, there's no heroic, there's no heroics here. Right. It's. Everyone has their own path and.

Right, right.

You know, there's no right or wrong. So that's. I think the amazing thing though is that you go after something you believe in and you do everything in your power to make it happen.

Yeah.

So, so tell me a little bit about. And then we'll kind of move into kind of the, our main discussion. But so fitness travel there, you know your work, you've done work for publishers, information marketers and so forth.

Right.

What we in in terms of the type of work, what would you say most of your work consists of really?

Lately it's been two things. I do a lot of email marketing messages. So where a company needs a series of autoresponder emails, for example, once somebody signs up for their free report, just a series of emails that will engage the reader and just kind of build a relationship and build the trust. So writing those kind of messages. So shorter email marketing messages. I've also done quite a bit of long form sales letters, both online and print sales letters. So you know everybody's seen these, the monster length 20 page sales letters. So I've kind of done the very short stuff and the long stuff. I enjoy both Sometimes I enjoy the quicker work that can get cranked out quicker and that I can just spend, you know, a few hours on or a day or two on, versus the big projects that can take a month or so. But I enjoy both. The nice thing, the thing that I like about the long form sales letters is that's really engaging the whole sales process and there's really an art to it and an architecture and a structure to those sales letters. So I've kind of done both and then I've done landing pages, I've done short three minute video scripts for companies. So kind of a variety of stuff. But pretty much everything I'd say I do is, almost everything is online these days.

So, you know, I think you're one of the only writers I know who everyone talks about having the portable business, right? And it sounds great on paper. You're one of the few people out there who have made that model work in a big way. Not just portable as in, well, you know, I go see my mom every other weekend, four hours away. You've really taken this to the next level. So I'm curious, what attracted you to the idea of taking what I would call long term working vacations for part of the year?

Well, a couple things. I mean, way back, this is going back to college. I took a semester off of college in 1989 and a buddy and I just, we had a one way ticket to Europe, we bought a Eurail pass and we just backpacked all over Europe for three months. And that, that got me hooked on the travel thing. And I've had a serious case of wanderlust ever since. And I've always, I've always enjoyed traveling. And I guess when I was working in sales, one of the things that, you know, I, one of the things I liked about it, just like copywriting, is you can dick, you know, you can decide how much money you want to make based on how many clients you have and how much, how many sales you make. But the thing was, I worked for a company and even though it was kind of my own business in sales I really was limited to usually about four weeks, maybe five weeks of vacation a year. And I couldn't take that all at once. So I do like going on longer vacations, but I was never able to go on a trip that was longer than maybe a week or 10 days. So I wanted to find something that allowed me to do that. So I guess two things, the travel that I did way back in college and then another thing that really sparked this idea of extended Long Term Travel was a book that I read a couple years ago by a guy named Rolf Potts. P O T T S. It's called Vagabonding. Some people might have heard of it.

Yeah, I've heard of that, but it's.

A fantastic book and I think I actually first heard about it from Tim Ferriss in the Four Hour Workweek and he mentioned this guy Ralph Potts and this book, Vagabonding. Once I read it, I was like, oh man, that's what I got to do. This guy, and he advocates taking like six. I think his version of extended travel is something that's at least six months and I haven't quite done that yet, but I've done two to three month type things and it made me see that, yeah, it's possible, you don't have to be tied down to one place and you can go and it's affordable if you do it in the right way. So those two things, that book really sold me on the idea and just having a love for travel.

Where have you taken these longer term vacations so far?

Well, we started out when I first finally was able to do this five years ago. We went to, we spent three weeks in Nigeria visiting my wife's family. That was my, that was kind of my first test run on taking my work with me on a trip longer than a week or so.

So you went all out. You didn't just go to Chicago, you didn't go to San Francisco?

No, no, I mean we, you know, we, we went to Africa, you know, we went to West Africa and that was just a completely different. I've traveled a lot. But I'll tell you, Ed, that was a different experience than anything I had ever done and probably will ever do in the future. But here's the thing, I took my laptop and even in Nigeria, people might have different visions of what Africa is like, but even in Nigeria, I had WI fi at the place I was at. We stayed in two different places. One of the places had WI fi and the other times when I didn't, there were Internet cafes all over. So even in what people might consider a third world country, in West Africa, a world away from here, you're connected. And surprisingly, this is a different note too. But I would say there's more people that have cell phones in Nigeria than there are in the United States, believe it or not, everybody has a cell phone. So everybody's connected. They have WI fi just like we do. And that's all you need. If you have a laptop, you have WI fi, you can do your work if you're a writer, if you're copywriter. So that was my first.

And when you went there three weeks, did you do any work?

I did, I did. In fact, I had just taken on my first big website project. So this was only about six months after I had gone into this full time and I had my first what I would consider a big project. It was like a sixteen hundred dollar website project, which at that time was a pretty big project to me. And so I had to get this done while I was gone. It was, you know, it was due, you know, when I, before I got back. So yeah, I had work and so pretty much I just worked on that one project while I was gone. But, but yeah, I took my work with me. In fact, on all these trips that I'll tell you about too, I, I've taken work with me, I'd say on pretty much every trip I've gone on.

Okay, okay. So. So where did it go from there.

After that trip? You mean other things? Yeah, well, three years ago I had been reading International Living and it's a publication that advocates possibly moving to other countries because they're more affordable and stuff like that. Well, I had been reading a lot about Ecuador down in South America. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to put this to the test a little bit further. So we spent. This was in the summer when my kids were off of school. I took my, I have four kids and we, we went.