#112: eCommerce — An Under-the-Radar Opportunity for Freelance Copywriters

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing.

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To a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there and thank you for joining me for episode 112 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 to this episode which include links by going to b2b launcher.com episode 1 12. You know, part of my job is host of the show is to present new ideas and opportunities to my listeners. At least that's the way I look at it. And one of the ways I do this is by showcasing different types of writing assignments and what those assignments entail. You know, everything from how do you tackle it to how do you get client, how do you pitch it, how do you price it? Everything, everything from beginning to end. I also talk about new ideas and strategies and ways of thinking about your business and ways to land more clients and get more for the work you do. And I talk about industries or markets that you may not have considered before. And in this episode we're going to focus on that latter topic. The industry, specifically an industry and a market opportunity you may not have previously considered. More specifically copywriting for e commerce companies. Now, I got a little bit of a long intro here because I want to be very clear about something and I want to have full disclosure that my guest in this episode has a company that hires freelance copywriters and and places them with e commerce clients. His name is Nathan Hirsch and he is the founder of freeup.com that free up has an extra E there. It's got three E's. So he's biased. You know, he has a vested interest in getting you to check out his e commerce company that matches clients with writers. He profits from this. However, I should also tell you that I am very selective about who I bring on the show. Now I've never worked with Nathan. I've never been a writer working with him through his company, in working with his client companies. But here's what I do know. I get pitched several times a month by companies that are trying to sell to freelancers. They want to come on the show, they want to, to expose their business, they want to talk about their opportunity and what they're doing to my audience. And I always press them pretty hard for a show topic and content that will add real value to my listeners. And I would tell you that in 90% of cases, if not more, when I grill them about this, they fall short. It's very clear to me that all they want is, is to get free publicity. Now, Nathan was different. I grilled him pretty hard, just like I do with everybody else when he first approached me. And you know what? I'm glad I had him on the show because he really does have some great ideas to share. And I could tell from the beginning that, you know, this is not going to be for everyone, but he was going to add value. He was going to present good quality content to my audience. This opportunity is not for everyone. And frankly, it's not the path that I would recommend if you're trying to follow the smarter freelancing objectives of earning more and less time doing work you love for better clients. I'm just not fond of the hourly model that freeup.com and others use or the production focused approach that's just necessary to make that model work, that business model. However, if you're a good copywriter and you have some experience with this type of writing, this might be a good way to either kickstart your freelance business or to fill a temporary gap in project work. And who knows, it might be a way to get into an industry that you actually have a little bit of experience in, some experience in, but but haven't really done much in lately. It might be a way for you to get in the door, get your footing, and then expand that in other ways. If anything, I think the show might trigger some new ideas for you or give you a backup plan should you find yourself needing some sort of stopgap either now or sometime in the future. So with that long introduction in disclosure, let's go ahead and go right to that interview with Nathan Hirsch. Nathan, so great to have you on the show, man.

Thanks for having me, Ed.

All right, so this is an interesting topic here because this is not something we have covered before and is specifically talking about a specific target market, specific industry. I do get asked about this occasionally and honestly, I have very little experience in this area. So I'm excited to talk to you about E commerce and how freelance writers and copywriters can impact E commerce companies positively. But before we get to that, give us some background. So tell us about yourself, what you do today, where you came from, what you were doing before, your current work, all that good stuff.

Definitely. So I'm from Massachusetts. I went to school at Quinnipiac University in Hampden, Connecticut when I was 20 years old. I started buying and selling textbooks from my classmates and reselling them to pay for probably some extra beer money, which is what it was for.

Books always translate to beer, don't they?

Exactly. I took the money I made from that and textbooks led me to Amazon because naturally you learn about Amazon from selling books. I started buying and reselling different products that I would find at different deal sites to sell them on Amazon. And I became addicted to selling on Amazon. This was back when Amazon was mostly books and getting more and more into other things. Now when there's 100 people on a listing, back then there were two or three. So I didn't have a lot of competition. And I could buy stuff from Walmart and Target and put them on Amazon, write up a description and get them sold. Then I actually expanded that company, started hiring people. I was running a multimillion dollar business out of my college dorm room before I was legally able to drink. That kind of exploded out of nowhere. When I graduated college, I had the do I go get a real job, which was the reason I went to college to begin with, or do I pursue my entrepreneurial passion? Which I decided to go the entrepreneurial route, moved down to Florida, open an office, continue to hire and grow my Amazon store. When I moved to Florida, I was introduced to Odesk, which is called Upwork. Now a friend of mine's like, hey, you got to check this out for hiring remote workers. Fell in love with that. I called it my Odesk army. I just started hiring like crazy to help expand my store because I saw it as a very fast, efficient way to do that. Hiring a lot of different positions from customer care to people to list products and copywriting everything. From there. I started my second business, Free up, because I wanted to make hiring easier. Back when I started hiring in college, I had no idea what I was doing because I was hiring people for the first time and I was hiring people older than me. Then when I moved on to Florida and I became more mature and I got introduced to people around the world, which was a whole other learning lesson. Right now, Free up is the hands on way to hire remote workers from all over the world. From $5 to $50 an hour. I really built it to be the hiring platform that I wish I had when I was hiring for the first time or when I ran into hiring struggles along the way.

You're addressing both sides of that transaction. Those who are looking for freelancers and those who are looking to provide services.

Exactly. I've been on both sides. Right now I run A freelancing company. But I was on the client side for seven years and I still am. I still run my Amazon store. I try to work with people that have the talent but don't necessarily have the skill side. I'm sorry, the sales side. Because I know what clients are looking for and I can talk to the clients and put policies in place that if the freelancer follows, they're going to get lots of work and be successful and make lots of money while also making the client happy because I know what the client wants.

Gotcha. All right, so when, let's just talk a little bit about your focus because I believe your focus is E commerce companies in terms of the client side of things. So when we, when we talk about E commerce, just to be clear here, what, what kind of companies are we referring to? Are we talking about companies like Amazon or are there other categories in this field that people don't really think about? Can you give us some examples?

Yeah. So E commerce is selling, essentially selling stuff online. It doesn't even need to be a product, although most of my clients sell. A lot of people don't realize that Amazon has their own warehouse and they sell their own products. But it's also made up of a lot of third party sellers that are selling either products they made or maybe they private label it to China or they just buy stuff online and wait for it to go to be out of stock everywhere and then jack up the price and sell it there. You've got your third party marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Bonanza. There's a lot of different ones. Then you've got people who create their own website. Whether they use, whether they build it from scratch or they build a Shopify store or BigCommerce. There's a lot of different programs out there that make it easier. Or really any type of online business where you don't actually have to walk into a store or meet the person face to face.

Okay, gotcha. So it really runs the gamut. Let's talk more specifically then about the opportunities that you're typically helping your clients fill, especially for writers and copywriters. So what are you seeing out there? Maybe if you can give us some examples at different places in the spectrum.

Definitely. When I first started this, I thought it would be more of your basic customer care people, graphic designers, people who do advertising campaigns like Google, AdWords. But it turns out there's a huge market for people who need good copywriters and good writers. Also people do translations as well. Because if I'm a seller and I have 20,000 products to put online. I need to write really good descriptions for all those products and I'm competing with other people selling similar products or new competition is coming out there all the time. So I need writers that can write better descriptions of my competition, that can make them SEO friendly, that can do research on keywords and implement that into the writing. And it's a really big thing. And that's a lot of build hours for my clients go towards those copywriting. I call it listing because you're listing products, but it's really writing descriptions for different products over and over.

What I'm hearing here is that this kind of work is very, it's recurring work. So if I as a writer land one of these clients, then there's a good chance that I'll have work for a while if I'm good.

Yeah. And it's recurring in a lot of different ways. It's recurring because if you're a client, you're always coming out with new products. There's also times of the year where you want to edit things. If different holidays are coming up, you want to edit the keywords or the search terms. Right before the busy season, you probably want to do a full audit of your listings and make sure everything's perfect. But you're always taking a step back. Industry standards are always changing. You're always going through past descriptions and trying to optimize them more and more and more because there's no end of the line and you're always getting new competition out there. And all these third party marketplaces like Amazon, ebay, they're always changing their policies and their search engines as well as. So if you're good at what you do and you can do the research into taking it from that level of being a good writer to being a good Amazon writer, there's a lot of potential work out there for you.

So let's say that this is sounding really interesting to me, but I'm just curious if I am actually cut out for it, if I would be good at it. Let's say I don't have any relevant experience writing E Commerce copy. How do I know if I would be a good fit?

Sure. So if you don't have any experience doing E commerce copy, you're probably not a fit for me at Freeup. Just because we're trying to take the 1%. We get hundreds of applicants every week and we're looking for people with a lot of experience. But with that said, there's tons of Amazon courses out There, some of them free, some of them not. Become a seller yourself, open up an Amazon store, start selling books or buying things here and there. You don't even have to do it to make money on it. Just do it to learn the system and become better and better at it. You can go on a lot of different freelancer platforms and post your portfolio at maybe a cheaper rate to get in the game. Tell some people that you're willing to do some descriptions for free. Although I don't encourage free work, it's a good way to just get someone to give you that chance. Once you're in Amazon, there's so many things from seller support to forums that you can continue to learn and improve on your craft and then work on bigger and bigger sellers. Because even if, if you start at the basic and you don't really know what you're doing, there are people that have those mom and pop stores that can't even afford an expert even if they want to. But they do have all these descriptions that they need to write and get out there within a reasonable amount of time or else that product is just sitting there. So even if you don't have years of experience, you can still get in the door writing these descriptions. And that's what a lot of my clients will do anyways is they'll hire a cheap writer, at least get all the products up because then they're for sale and you have the chance to get a sale and, and then you can hire the experts down the line to go in and optimize it more and more and more.

So you mentioned there are a few courses out there on Amazon and I'm curious, are there a couple that you're familiar with that you keep hearing a lot about?

Yeah, if you go on Udemy, I never pronounce it right. Udemy.

Udemy.

Yeah, there's a bunch of them on there. I don't have the names of them, but my personal recommendation is to check out Store Startup Bros. It's from a friend of mine, Will. It teaches you from the beginning how to sell from Amazon from scratch. It's honestly about taking your business from zero to a million dollars on Amazon. Even if you don't want to be a million dollar Amazon seller, you don't think the entrepreneurial way is in you. You're still just going to learn a lot about Amazon and what it takes because learning the products and learning how the products get from point A to point B and how you talk to Amazon customers, which is different than how you talk to eBay customers really gives you that background and that foundation to write good descriptions and good copywriting on Amazon.

Yeah, I love that idea because if somebody's already figured that out and they can show me the ropes and I can really shortcut my progress. Right. And then the other thing too, I love your idea of why not start an Amazon store, even if it's just for the practice. Not necessarily to make a million dollars, but hey, I'm trying to get in the door here and if I can do this on my own, this might be a great way to really learn fast.

Exactly. Or just go out and find the popular websites that you shop on all the time. Maybe it's Wayfair overstock and instead of going shopping on them, click on different products and see what their descriptions look like because they're hiring the best of the best. And if you can write on that level, there's going to be a need for your services.

So that's a good segue into my next question. With these e commerce companies, and not necessarily the top tier, but just even the middle tier, what are they looking for in a writer or copywriter? I know obviously they could write well, but any specific things they value and then what kind of experience are they looking for?

Just how it pertains to writing. They're essentially looking for proper grammar, good English with any translations that come to it. Because a lot of Amazon sellers will sell on Amazon uk, Amazon France. But if you don't do translation, they can always hire someone to translate it afterwards. But once you get past the basic, then they're really looking for SEO and keywords, which is a whole thing by itself. You could take a six month course on SEO and keywords and still have more to learn. That's really what separates the good writers from the good e commerce writers, because SEO and optimization and keywords is what generates sales.

One of the things with SEO or any direct response kind of marketing is just having a track record of results. If you're a copywriter in this field, how can you get that kind of information or feedback from your clients so that you could boast, hey, I've gotten these kinds of results.

Ask my biggest thing. If I was a freelancer, which I've never been a writing freelancer before, I would find different sellers and be like, let me write product descriptions for you for free or for cheap to get me in the door in return. When I do get you sales, let me use you as a reference. Let me take a screenshot of your product on your account and show what I've done or let me share the links to my products to send to other people. Most clients are open to it. That's what a lot of my clients will look for. And I have different level of workers all the way from the $5 an hour to $50 an hour. The clients might come to me and be like, hey, send me 20 hours, $20, A$50 and A$5. Send me. And I'll send them three samples and they can see the difference. Building up your portfolio of samples is huge. And also results that back up those samples. So being like, hey, this is a pair of shorts that I wrote the description for last busy season. We sold X amount.

Gotcha. Yeah. Very important. I'm curious how these companies work with writers in terms of how they onboard them. And let's just talk specifically with your organization because I'm sure outside of that, there could be a number of ways. But through your company, what's the process typically like?

Sure. So we only bill hourly. We don't do any fixed price. We don't do anything by the word. I personally just don't believe in it. And our software just isn't set up for it. So you're allowed to meet our worker for. All right, first of all, you got to become a client. Becoming a client is free. It doesn't cost you anything. It's a quick setup, process questionnaire. So we have your contact information, e signature on an agreement saying you won't steal our workers, and a credit card on file. So we can bill you every week. From there, you can request a worker at any time. So they can request the Amazon expert, the graphic designer, the writer. We provide them that really quick. Whenever it comes to writing and graphic design, it's one of those things that every client's different. I might have someone on my team that gets really great reviews 95% of the time. And I send the one client and that client's like, I hate his writing style for whatever reason. I kind of know that. And I assume that going in it's not a one size fits all industry. So what I try to do is collect samples of portfolios and have them ready to go. My workers are first come, first serve. So if you ask for a worker today or you ask for a worker in a month, I'll have different people available depending on their workload. And I try not to overwhelm my clients either. I'm not going to send them 25 different samples to look through. So I usually send them one to three different samples. Get Their feedback. Maybe they're like, hey, I don't like this person's grammar. Or I want someone who's more positive in their writing, whatever it is, and then adjust accordingly. So that's usually the process. Become a client. Once you're a client, you can request a worker whenever you want. If you're dealing more with graphic design and writing, I'll send you a few different portfolios. You tell me who you want once you meet them. A lot of my clients come to me because they don't want to interview the workers. So they just get started right away. But if you want to meet with them for 10 to 15 minutes to talk about their experience or their background and stuff like that, you're good to go. But before they actually start doing work, you have to hire them for their hourly rate through our software.

Gotcha. So they're on an hourly rate. I assume that maybe they'll give them a project or two to kind of test them, get a feel for how they are and before they give them just a huge stack of work.

Exactly. And we coach our clients just as much as we coach our freelancers. We encourage our clients to not just be like, okay, go work 50 hours for me and for me, and just show me what you've got at the end. It usually doesn't end well. Usually it's, hey, do an hour, send me what you wrote so I can give feedback. And most workers, the good workers, they work very well off feedback. And I encourage my workers to ask for feedback. And if you are a client that you know what you want, you can provide the feedback to make the freelancer adjust more towards your business. Because the way that you want something written is going to be different than the way that I want something written.

Yeah. Okay, so in terms of. And I know that it's here again, it could be all over the place, but give us an example of a good copywriter who's working really well. But what are we typically looking at? Are they typically working just one client or is it common for them to be on multiple accounts?

It really depends. I have some clients who manage 40Amazon stores and they're actually like a marketing company and they just hire My freelancers 40 hours a week and I give them my top people and boom, it's their full time job. And once they get a full time job, I can't really give them other clients unless it's very small projects here and there. I have other clients that are other workers that are made up of three or four different clients. It really depends. I mean, in this industry, I never know what's going to walk into the door. I might have a week where the only thing people want is ebay experts. Then the next week, everyone might only want writers. So it's really random. And it's a constant battle of supply and demand. We don't want to have. We don't want to be understaffed for obvious reasons, and we can't fill demand. But we also don't want to have workers just sitting there that we're like, hey, we're trying, we're trying. We don't have any work for you. So we try to have a little bit extra supply than demand. But it's kind of timing of whether a worker is working with five different clients or one specific client.

Tell me again what the ranges are. You mentioned this a little bit earlier in terms of hourly payments.

Sure. So our workers are from five to fifty dollars an hour. Keep in mind, we have both us and non us workers for every position. So we have international writers that are in that five to $12 an hour range. And then we've got us writers that are in the probably $10 to $50 an hour range. I mean, we have some $50 an hour writers, but they also do other things like marketing and branding, and they have a background of that too, and they just happen to be a really good writer. So it depends on your skill set, depends on the other things that you bring to the table, and it also depends on what the client's willing to pay at the end of the day.

Okay, I'm curious about how you get your e commerce clients. So are you growing from that perspective.

How we're adding clients to free up?

Exactly.

Got it. Well, I do a lot of podcasts like this and that helps get the name out there. We do a lot of. We use our own freelancers, so I kind of practice what I preach. Our top freelancers also work on my internal team. You can check out the Free up social media page. My assistant Nera does a great job with that. We're constantly reaching out to different e commerce companies and explaining what we do, doing different webinars where we teach people about hiring that are maybe hiring for the first time or who have bad, bad experiences hiring. A lot of podcasts, we do guest blog posts, we have our own blog. A lot of content marketing, and then we have a great referral program. Any clients that refer other clients to us get 50 cents for every hour that we build to that client forever. A lot of our clients that have good experience with us, tell all the different sellers, all the different online businesses that they know, and we get a lot of referrals that way.

With somebody who might be listening right now and thinking, wow, this sounds really interesting. I maybe would like to earn a little bit more, but the idea of having steady recurring revenue and working for a couple of clients, doing this kind of work is very attractive.

How?

What would you tell them in terms of they're trying to figure out would this be for them. And let's say they have a really good experience with direct response copy, so this would not be, you know, a huge adjustment for them. And let's say they already have some e commerce experience as well. So because we've already talked about how to fill that gap, what would you tell them in terms of trying to figure out, you know, would this be for them?

Sure. And let's not forget we were only talking about e commerce. I have plenty of clients who don't need Amazon writers or ebay writers. They need someone to write their newsletter letter or just create content for their book, or write a sales pitch, whatever it is. So there are a lot of opportunities. Even if you don't have Amazon experience, if you're just a really good writer, there's always jobs out there for you. I mean, you can always apply to us. You can email us@hreup.com with three Es. It's the only way to apply to us. You're welcome to check out our Facebook page. We post a lot of different articles about getting into e commerce. You can contact people on my team. We're happy to answer any questions that you have. If you contact the freeup.com Skype account, someone's always there to help you. We can definitely point you in the right direction with different articles, forums, different people in the industry that we know. Because don't forget, we work with a lot of clients that aren't your typical Amazon seller. They might own a company that somehow relates to Amazon or relates to ebay. They're doing a lot of different things with their own content marketing, their own blog, their own educational system that you can check out. So those are kind of the ways that we can help you. And you can always go on the other websites, Upwork and Freelancer.com that aren't so exclusive and get your foot in the door that way.

Let me ask, because I think where I was going with that is if I'm trying to figure out if this would be for me, what kind of temperament would you say the right writer Copywriter would need to work well in this kind of environment.

Sure. So I get it now. You have to be able to appreciate feedback and be able to not take it personally. And that almost goes for any job and any people that I hire. I kind of mentioned before that what one client likes might be what another client hates. So you have to be able to adjust your writing style for the correct situation. The way you write about boxers is not going to be the same way that you write about candles. So you have to keep that in mind. And keep in mind the people that you're working for in the e commerce industry are so passionate about their products. They've spent their entire lives building this product, manufacturing this product that they want their product displayed exactly the way that they want it displayed. If you can adjust to those clients needs and take constructive criticism, well, those are the people that usually fail on the writing side.

Yeah, I think that applies right. In every industry. But I'm getting a sense that this is, this is a fast paced business and it's all about results and you need to be able to take feedback the right way in order to learn and improve.

And it's a timing thing because remember, we're not billing by word, we're billing by hour. So with that said, the client is expecting a certain amount of descriptions done. They're expecting you to get better over time and at the end of the day they're expecting sales. So it's almost like you're a salesperson.

And a writer put together in terms of turnaround. I mean, would you say this is very fast paced and high pressure in terms of being able to turn around the work?

Oh yeah, for sure. If you're billing someone by the word, it doesn't really matter if you're billing someone by the hour. They want to see consistency. They don't want to see you working three hours on one description and one hour on the next. Then there's also deadlines. People will have these products sitting in their warehouse that they're trying to get out the door. And you have 24 hours to get all 10 of these products online looking great for their customers or else their time is money. It's definitely more fast paced than your average writing job.

Love it. Excellent. Nathan, I know you gave us a little bit about the company, social media, etc. But what would be the best place for people to check you out if they're interested in learning more?

Yeah, you can go to our website, freeup.com, f r e e e u p don't forget the third e. Check out our Facebook, our Twitter, our blog. Anyone that signs up as a new client and uses Ed's Name gets their first hour of any worker under $15 for free or 25% off their first hour of a worker $15 or more. In addition, you get 10% off your first worker for life. So just put down Ed's name as a referral when you sign up. It's free to sign up, there's no monthly cost. Takes you five minutes and then you get access to our exclusive working network.

Awesome. Nathan. Thank you so much. It's been great.

I really appreciate you having me. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is.

A production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher dot com.