#149: How to Start Prospecting for Clients When You’re New?

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.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a reminder that you can find the detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com edu episode 149. Those notes include a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources that I mention during the show. Now, before we get to this week's episode, I have just a quick announcement. So I'm putting together a new coaching group of B2B writers and copywriters, and we're going to focus on getting your business off the ground quickly and on landing your first paying client. One of my recent coaching clients emailed me last week and said that working with me is the equivalent of cutting in line to get to year two or three of freelancing without having to wait as long without making all the mistakes along the way. I thought that was a great way to put that. I was flattered. So, anyway, if you'd like to work with me to get that specific result, email me at ed2b launcher.com, put the word launch in the subject line and I'll reply with all the details. All right, so now for this week's show, one of the most confusing and frustrating aspects of launching your freelance writing or copywriting business is looking for clients. Let's say your website is live, you're ready to get to work, and now you realize, wait a minute, I need some clients first. And it doesn't quite go that way. But I find that in our employer centric economy, we've been so conditioned to have the work come to us. I mean, think about it, right? We get hired to fill a role, and we're used to having a set of responsibilities, a set of tasks and deadlines that we have to meet. But we don't have to go searching for the work. It just comes to us. It just comes down the line, it comes downstream, and we just, we have responsibilities. You know, it's like having the food delivered to us. And now we find ourselves in a situation where there is no supermarket, the food's not coming to us. We have to go out and hunt and gather. And I find that when professionals go out on their own, this reality often hits them very hard. I mean, we understand that this is the nature of freelancing. But we don't understand it at a deep emotional level. Because even though we know we have to go get clients, many of us don't realize that this process will require more out of ourselves than we imagine in terms of both hard work and doing things that feel completely uncomfortable. Maybe not completely uncomfortable, but definitely outside of her comfort zone. Very often I find that new writers or new freelancers, I should say, even if you've been writing for a while, the belief is that if you have a skill, and especially if you've taken the time and put in the effort to get certifications, take courses, complete courses, get other credentials, that should be enough to have clients knocking on your door, or at least make it a lot easier to get clients. And that's not typically the case. I find that you have to get to a certain level of competence. But beyond that level, honestly, it's a fair game. Any, anybody and anything is really a fair game. You can do even better if you're really good at attracting, finding, and converting prospects to clients. Now, the good news is you don't have to have a background in sales or marketing or business in general to do this. A lot of people are under the impression that, well, if I'm introverted or if I come from a different background, nothing to do with business, I'm doomed. That's not the case at all. Some of the most successful freelance writers and copywriters I've coached did not come from a business background. But what you do need, though, is you need a plan, and you need a heavy dose of discipline and execution. In this episode, I'm going to share the six ways I teach my coaching clients who are new to freelancing how to prospect for clients when they're starting out. And let's start with number one. The first one is tap your network. Tapping your network is by far the most powerful and underutilized method of drumming up new business. Here's the thing. The people in your network already know you. They already like and trust you. And when you lack a track record or impressive samples and confidence, it's your relationships that will matter most. Because relationship trumps all those other factors that will be more important to prospects who don't know you. I recently published an article with four great stories and I'm linking to that in the Show Notes, and this article highlights different writers who built their freelance business by tapping their networks, and I encourage you to check it out. It's really fascinating how it all happened, how Serendipity played a role and, and how it just highlights the fact that you just never know. You got to put yourself out there. Even people who think they don't know anybody, know others, and you never know where some of your clients are going to come from. In fact, I find that tapping your network doesn't necessarily mean you're going to land clients directly from the people you know. 30 to 50% of the time, you're going to land clients from the people you know. That's statistically what I've seen in my groups. And I would say that in most cases, those clients are not people you know, but instead they're people whom the people you know referred you to. These are referrals directly from your network. But if you don't tap your network, if you don't tell other people you know what you're doing, you miss out on these great opportunities. I've told this story before, but just in case you haven't heard it, this is just really powerful. I speak from experience over and over again over the years. I've lear that this holds true in virtually every scenario. So when I was starting out, I was reaching out to my network, and one of the people on my list was somebody that my wife had worked with at one point. I think it had been a year since they had worked together. But I went ahead and sent her an email and told her what I was doing, that I was launching my a copywriting business. And I reached out to her because I knew she was in marketing, and specifically she was in technology marketing, which is the market that I was trying to go after. Now, I didn't know her extremely well. She worked with my wife, but I knew her. So I reached out to her and she was very nice. She responded. And we had a quick conversation on the phone and which we ended up taking to a lunch appointment sometime in the next few weeks. During lunch, she was just really excited for me and she was very encouraging. And she said, you know, I don't have anything right now. I'm on my own and I'm doing a little bit of consulting. I can't think of someone off the top of my head, but let me give this some thought, and if I think of someone you might be able to help or somebody I could refer you to, or if I hear of anyone looking, I will definitely let you know. Well, I didn't think much of it, but a few weeks later she reached out and she introduced me to a friend of hers who was leaving a job in a software company. And she Felt bad because she was doing a lot of the writing in the marketing department. She didn't want to leave her boss hanging, so she was looking for someone to help out with the writing. So my friend Noel immediately thought of me. She went ahead and through her friend, introduced me to her friend's boss, which was the VP of marketing for the software company. So if you start thinking about the degrees of connection here, my wife's friend, her name was Noelle, she is 2 degrees separated from me because technically she was my wife's connection. So second degree of separation. She introduced me to her friend Carrie, whom I knew but not that well. Third degree of separation, who introduced me to her boss, which is fourth degree of separation there, fourth level contact, who was the vice president of marketing for this company, who ended up hiring me to do two brochures. Now, that client grew over time and I had them for seven years, generated almost $200,000 in income over that seven year period. Again from a fourth level connection. Four degrees of separation, just from tapping my network. And it hasn't been just in my life. I've seen this over and over again. Now, I find that many new writers and copywriters don't want to do this or don't do this. And I've asked myself that many times, times, why would you not do this? I understand that many of us feel weird about approaching our friends, family, colleague, et cetera. But I find that many of us have also been conditioned to believe that it's impolite or a bad idea to do business with friends and family. So it's not just weird, it's just impolite. We have a negative association with selling to our friends. And many times it's an issue of confidence and low self confidence. But I want you to start thinking about this a little different because all those are stories that you're telling yourself. If that resonates with you, if you're nodding your head going, yeah, that's pretty much how I feel. That's a story you've decided to tell yourself. That's not reality. You have to remind yourself that you have a skill many people value. Many people don't have that skill. They lack that writing ability. And just because it comes easier to you doesn't mean it's not valuable to others. Think of it this way. I want you to think about an occasion when a friend recommended someone to you based on a need you were having. Let's just say that you needed an electrician or a contractor to do some remodeling or an auto mechanic, it doesn't matter who. And you said that to a friend or a group of people and somebody said, you know what, I know a great electrician or I know a great kitchen contractor, remodeling contractor, an auto mechanic, you know, let me tell you about him or her. Like what? That didn't feel awkward, did it? I mean, like you as a recipient didn't feel awkward. The other person probably felt very natural referring you to them. So it's the same thing. Nothing has changed. So nobody's trying to sell anything to someone who doesn't need it. The idea here is not to try to sell writing or copywriting to someone who, who would not benefit from that. The idea is to take your skill and apply it to someone who could really benefit from great copy, great writing. And of course, you don't want to start with people who are clueless about business or marketing. When you start tapping your network, I want you to start with higher probability contacts. And you want to prioritize your contact list first before you make your outreach based on whom you think is the most likely person to hire or refer you. In the show notes, I link to an article where I show you exactly how to prioritize your list so that you're able to get results sooner. I find that if you start getting results with your network a little bit sooner than you think, your confidence is going to go up and you're going to feel better about continuing down that list. And let me put it to you another way, and I know I'm harping on this quite a bit, but I feel so strongly about it that, that I need to present this idea to you in several different ways just so you have the motivation and the courage, whatever little courage you can muster up, just to actually tap your network. Because I'm such a strong believer in starting there. Many new writers have a distorted view of how their business is going to get off the ground and grow. I know I did. So here again, I'm speaking from experience. We tend to have visions of working with well known clients and that tends to create anxiety. I see it all the time, you know, because the questions that come to me are, oh my gosh, what if they hire me to do something that I don't know how to do? Well, that tells me right away that they're envisioning working with very sophisticated clients right out of the gate and then working your way from there. But the reality is very different. Your first few clients, and I would say the first six or so, are not going to be impressive. Now, that's not the case for some people, but for the most part, your first few clients are not going to be impressive. It's not going to feel like you thought it would at first. It's not going to feel glamorous. It's not going to match the vision you had when you're daydreaming about this and you are often going to wonder if this is the right path. It's almost like you've punched in this address you'd never been to in your gps and you start driving and you start following the gps and, man, this. You thought it was going to be the scenic route. This doesn't look right at all. I mean, it almost feels like you're going the wrong way. Wait a minute. Are we going south? I thought this was north. And, you know, you should be trusting the gps, but it feels weird. It doesn't look right. Hold on, let me stop. Because I think Waze is totally messed up. And then it takes you through a sketchy neighborhood. That's exactly what happens to most new writers and copywriters. We think it's going to take us down the scenic route. We think we're going to be on the freeway. In reality, it looks really strange, and we're going through the back roads and the sketchy neighborhoods. And fortunately, if you trust that you're doing the right thing, which is what I'm asking you to do, a few minutes later, you realize that you have arrived at your destination and that you took the right path because everything along the way was there for your own good and for your own knowledge and growth. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean that you might be trying to go after medical device companies, for instance, starting out of the gate, or financial services companies or whatever, but landing your real estate agent as your client or your cousin Rob's business because he needs help writing the copy for his small logistics company. Those are key steps to getting to where you want to go. They don't have to be right on that path you think will take you there. The path can have those twists and turns, and it often almost always does. Finally, one last thing about tapping your network. Don't underestimate the power of serendipity. By putting yourself out there, you really do open the door for unexpected, wonderful, and, can we say, miraculous things to actually happen. I've heard enough of these stories to believe that sometimes unrecognized forces come into play when you allow yourself to be vulnerable and when you step outside of your comfort zone. Consistently. So that's, number one, tapping your network. All right? Number two, send 100 warm emails in batches of five or 10. If you want to get going as quickly as possible, don't wait for prospects to find you. Instead, you need to go and find them. We talked about tapping your network in that's a great place to start. I find that again, 30 to 50% of the time your first client will come from your network, either directly or indirectly. But don't put all your eggs in that basket. As soon as you run through the bulk of your list, your higher priority contacts, you need to start prospecting with people who've never heard of you. In fact, you need to make prospecting your full time job until you land a client. Now, when I say full time job, I don't mean that literally. Although if you are completely self employed right now and you're able to dedicate 40 hours a week, 30 hours a week to your business, my suggestion here, my very strong suggestion is to think of prospecting as what you'll do 90% of that time. I think it's fine. If you want to spend 10% of the time, 15% of the time on administrative, maybe a little bit of learning, that's fine. It shouldn't be more than that. That is your job. And the best way to prospect for clients once you have exhausted your network is through warm email prospecting. Warm emails are essentially short, relevant and personalized prospecting emails that feel like they were written specifically for one person because that's exactly what you're doing. And 80 to 90% of the copy can still be reused from one email to the next for one prospect to the next. But you're putting enough relevance and personalization there that it's really making the difference. This is not about automation. This is not about mass broadcasting emails. This is about crafting an email for each individual person, even if the bulk of that copy can be reused. So in the show notes, I have an example for you on what that template could look like as well as an example of what that script could look like. I'm going to read you a sample email, warm email. And again, this email is in the show notes B2B Launcher.com Episode 149 as well as the template that you can follow, which this particular email script follows. So the subject line on this one reads, love what you're doing with Sparks. And then the body starts off, hi Belinda, I've been following the growth of your Sparks online learning initiative. I'm very impressed with what you're doing here and the impact it's having on high school students. I'm writing because I specialize in writing marketing content for training and online learning companies. I use my experience as a 22 year educator and an avid proponent of online learning to deliver persuasive writing that hits the mark. Here are some samples of my work and there's a link there to her samples page. I'm not sure how you're handling the writing of your marketing content, but I'd love to know what it would take to be considered for some of these needs should we connect? Okay, Very different from your traditional warm email. Notice what happened here. And I'm sorry. Very different from a traditional prospecting email, which is a mass produced broadcast that's the same for everybody. There's always a time and a place for that. But when it comes to prospecting for freelance writing copywriting clients, this method is way more effective. It doesn't feel like spam. This feels like I'm reaching out to you because I notice this and here's how that's tied to the services I provide. I think I might be able to help you. I don't know yet. Should we connect? Okay. Very personalized, very relevant. Notice how brief it is. One of the key requirements of an effective warm email is that it should be 125 words or less. This definitely meets that requirement. This is a proven strategy even when you're new. But just like with any direct response strategy, you have to send out a lot of emails in order to generate some positive activity. That's why I strongly recommend that you focus on sending out 100 emails when you're starting out. That big number, 100 emails emphasizes the fact that it's going to take a lot of at bats, if you will, to get a hit. However, to keep you from getting overwhelmed, you want to break these up into batches of five or ten emails. In fact, I'm a proponent of sending out one at a time, and there's a reason for that. If you've investigated a prospect, you think that'd be a good fit. You notice something about them, you craft it. You want to craft that email as quickly as possible possible because the prospect is the information is kind of fresh in your mind, so might as well go ahead and use it before you forget it. And if you spend way too much time putting together a list including contact information you would have forgotten maybe a couple of things that you could use in your email script that would have been effective. So I actually prefer to send them out in batches of one. But I can also understand if you're going to spend an hour or two, one day putting something together and you prefer to batch it out and slightly bigger group, then that's fine as well. Again, the reason I'm strongly recommending 100 is because the law of average says that you can make up for lack of results or lack of experience if you're new with increased effort, meaning more at bats or more tries. I've had coaching clients send out 150 or 200 or more warm emails before they finally landed their first client. Sometimes it takes that much and hopefully it won't take that much for you. But my advice is to go into this expecting to send out at least 100. I got an email earlier this week from a coaching client who said, I plan to do my hundred, but I think he said it was number 38. Number 38. I landed a client and sometimes it happens, sometimes it's more. So just be ready to keep at it until you succeed and understand that if you play the law of averages, you will eventually get that success. So that's number two. Send out 100 warm emails in batches of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or somewhere between 1 and 10. Number three. Strategy number three is to follow up with non respondents, non respondents, specifically to the warm emails you're sending out cold prospects. And you want to do this about two weeks after you sent your original warm email. And here's the best way to do this. I essentially just go to my sent folder in my email application and I find the warm email I sent that particular prospect. Let's say her name was Brenda. And once I find it, I click the forward button and then I add some new copy about another core differentiator. Core differentiator, meaning you remember in the original script sample I gave you, I said, well, I'm a 22 year educator or high school principal, right? That's what makes you different. For this example, that's what made this particular person different. But many times we have a couple other things that make us different, better than maybe your average writer. And we don't have that much room in the email. Remember what I said, you have 125 words or less to pique their interest. Well, I always have a couple of other differentiators in my back pocket that I could use as an excuse to follow up. And all I do is I say, hey, I forgot to mention when I sent this last week or two weeks ago, there's this other thing too. Should we connect and Then I just hit send. So here's what that looks like as a follow up to the warm email example that I showed you earlier. Hi Belinda, I forgot to mention something in my previous email. In my last teaching position, I helped lead an online education initiative in my school's math department. We deployed the XYZ curriculum from ABC University for our AP classes and we use the feedback loop approach that mirrors much of what you're doing. Anyway, please let me know if you'd like to connect in the next week or two. Regards. And then your name. And that by the way is also in the show notes. So go check that out. The idea with this follow up is to see if you can spark some interest on a better day and to do it in a more professional way as opposed to the traditional hey, did you get my email? Type of approach that so many people use. If you don't get a response after that point when you're starting out, my advice is just to move on. There's no need to do anything else with a prospect. We're just looking for low hanging fruit. Okay, so that's following up with prospects that you send warm emails to. Strategy number four is to nurture not yet ready prospects. So as I mentioned earlier, most prospects are simply not going to respond to your prospecting emails. I don't care how good they are. That's just the nature of prospecting. It's the nature of direct response. Don't get discouraged if that happens to you, because it will happen to you. Everyone struggles to find prospects who are ready and willing to engage when we send them a note. And that's not just in the world of creative services. It's also true in virtually every business to business market. Almost every sales situation. When you're marketing a considered purchase, meaning something that you just can't buy off the Internet with a credit card. Right? So we're talking about a professional service such as writing services. Only a certain percentage of the target market is actively looking for what you sell. I actually could say that about just about anything. When you're selling any product or service, even the consumer market, only a certain percentage of people are going to respond or actively interested. Maybe that connects to something they're concerned about right now in their lives. But here's what I've found. On average, only about 10 out of 100 qualified prospects are actively searching right now for someone who provides your services. That's not that many. 10 out of 100. So the question is, what about the other 90? Well, 40 out of those will probably have a need for your services sometime in the next three to 18 months. And these are not your, these are your not yet ready prospects. And by the way, that number is not made up. There've been several studies done on this and a large percentage of those who are not ready today will be ready within a few months and the rest after that. Honestly, they won't be looking anytime soon or it's going to be so far off that you can't really depend on those prospects right now. Of course, there's no way to separate them at this point. You don't know out of the 90 who didn't respond if they fall within the 40 or they fall in the other group. The key though is to stay in touch with that group who didn't respond, the not yet ready prospects. And that's the group that most freelancers ignore. I call this process of staying in touch and cultivating a conversation or staying top of mind. I call it lead nurturing. And once I saw the impact this kind of follow up had on my income, it quickly became a critical part of my marketing and sales process as a freelancer. In fact, I'll say even more as a business coach and a trainer. This is. My whole business is based on lead nurturing. My whole business is based on staying in touch with not yet ready prospects until hopefully someday a certain percentage of them will be ready. So why the delay? Why do so many prospects take this long to make decisions? Three to 18 months. Well, there are two key factors at play here. There's timing, which I've mentioned, and then there's trust. Landing a new client requires both the right timing and a certain level of trust. The timing for hiring you needs to be right. You can't create urgency inside the prospect's organization, no matter what. I mean, I've heard all kinds of stories. Look, if they're not motivated, there's some other things going on. Many things that you don't even know are going on behind the scenes. There's nothing you can do. Okay, you can't move that needle, but you can stay in touch until they are ready to hire someone. You also can't build trust overnight. Trust takes time. It takes patience and a sincere desire to add value to your prospects. And to do that effectively, you need a smart, methodical and sincere lead nurturing effort with your not yet ready leads. All right, so how do you do this? What should you send? Well, here's what you don't want to do. You don't want to email with the hey, are you ready yet? Is now a better time? Nothing like that. Anytime you get a prospect who says, I'll keep your information handy, we're all set up. Right now, we're good. We got somebody. We don't have any. But if they respond with that, in saying, and also adding something to the effect of maybe at some day, maybe at another time, maybe next quarter, I'll keep your information handy just in case things change in the future, that's still considered a positive response. That tells me that not now, but someday. So how do you stay in touch? You send valuable and relevant information. Nothing crazy, just a quick little tidbit here that you came across or report there, or some statistics that you found earlier this week. Useful and relevant articles and resources, helpful reports, statistics, information, tools you've come across, news stories or general announcements that have recently come out, even a handwritten card or other creative item. One of the things I did when I was back in sales is I sometimes had prospects in my not yet Ready column who I knew would make great clients. And I just knew that based on what I seen with the organization, these were people that would be at the top of my lead nurturing list. And they were worthy of a little bit more effort, a little bit more investment. And I occasionally would send books to these people. I mean, who sends a book anymore, right? If you got a book in the mail, it's not something you're going to miss. Books are not thrown away. People keep books. Books are memorable. It has nothing to do with whether the prospect reads it or not. It's really about making an impression. So what should you say in your nurturing message? And many times it could be email, but it could be, again, a letter, handwritten letter. It could be a card, it could be a quick voicemail, something as simple as hi John, Ed Gandia here. I'm the medical devices copywriter who contacted you back in December. I'm writing because I came across this article recently and I thought you'd find it interesting. Here's a link. I hope you're doing well, Ed. That simple notice, anyone can do this. As silly as it sounds, if you do this methodically and you keep adding people to your not yet ready bucket, a percentage of those people will eventually hire you. And guess what? When they do contact you because they're ready. They're mostly sold already. Because what you've done is you've built trust until the timing was right. I've seen it over and over again and at any point of your journey, but especially if you're new, it's important to start building that not yet ready bucket. All right, moving on to number five. Reach out to agencies that focus on your target market. As you start working on your 100 warm emails, you may want to consider sending some of these warm emails to marketing agencies and marketing firms. Marketing firms and agencies, and by the way, I use these terms interchangeably, already have clients, they already have projects, they already have assignments, they're already connected to dozens of clients and hot prospects. And much of their work involves copywriting. So when you land a marketing firm as a client, it's like getting ready made work. You know, the kind of just add water type of situation. In most cases they'll either have a go to freelance writer or copywriter, or they'll have an in house staff writer. But that shouldn't stop you because you never know what their needs are or how they'll change. That writer could quit their go to freelance writer, could go out on maternity leave. You never ever know. Positioning yourself as the backup is a proven strategy when it comes to agencies and marketing firms. Now, when you approach these agencies about helping them with some work, they're typically going to think about work they already have on their plates or work that's already booked. So that's great because you're stepping into the process after most of the pitching and selling has been done and the work is already secured. You don't have to spend days or weeks or months wooing the actual client. And as an added bonus, you might find yourself working with clients or on projects you wouldn't have landed on your own as a freelancer. The other nice thing is that agencies are used to hiring freelancers. So when you reach out to them with a warm email, you can rest assured that they're always on the lookout for writers and copywriters. Now here's the important part for you to remember and why the strategy can be so effective even when you are a new freelancer. And this is key. When agencies hire freelancers, they're looking to fill knowledge or expertise gaps within their firms. Maybe they've landed a new client in an industry where they have little experience, or maybe they have lots of experience in that industry, but they don't have a go to writer with a background in that industry or that target market or on that topic. Or maybe they have a client who needs a type of service they haven't offered before, such as white papers. So if you have that industry knowledge or writing project expertise in a specific area, you're a great candidate. I'll Give you an example. A few years ago, I landed an agency client who had a longtime client of theirs who needed. They came to the agency saying, you've been helping us all this stuff. Guess what? We had an idea. We want to write this white paper in. The agency said, yeah, sure, that'd be great. And they set out to find a white paper writer because they didn't have a white paper expert or writer in house. So they found me through a friend and we ended up doing that project together. I charged my full fee, by the way. They were extremely happy. Their client was extremely happy. Everybody won. So sometimes it's really a project expertise, but many times it's based on the background, your experience, your skill set, everything that you're coming into freelancing with that has nothing to do or very little to do with the writing. It's the knowledge that took you years to develop in a specific industry or sector or area of expertise. Whatever you do, focus on that. You want to avoid being just a hired hand or a warm body the moment you start pitching an agency with, hey, I can take over your overflow work, I can help you with your overflow work. That is a losing proposition because you're positioning yourself as just another warm body. It's just somebody else who can just take on some of this grunt work. There are millions of writers out there, but very few who already know the X industry or very few writers who already know the why industry or a specialized topic and who can also write a good case study or a great white paper or can do really good work in this specific area with this type of assignment. So bottom line, this is again so important, so I'm going to repeat it with agencies, leverage your background, leverage your career experience and or your core differentiators. That's the key to getting work from an agency when you're a new freelancer. So when searching for possible agencies to target, a smart way to do this is to search within the target market that you're going after. So a simple Google search is a good place to start. You could run a Google search for medical device marketing firms or educational technology marketing firms, something along those lines. And you'll see results for marketing firms, marketing agencies, and so forth that have a lot of clients in that particular sector or target market in terms of whom you should contact inside an agency. In smaller agencies, it's often going to be the owner, principal or president who's in charge of hiring freelancers. They're the ones you want to reach. But generally speaking, you can't go wrong sending your warm email to the creative director. That's always going to be a safe bet. All right, and moving on to the final strategy that I teach my new freelance writing clients. Reach out to graphic designers that focus on your target market. So very similar to the previous one, but this one is about going straight to freelance graphic designers. Now, this isn't something I've personally pursued. I've worked with designers on several projects, but I haven't used this partnering strategy deliberately. However, I know several writers who have and who have built their businesses around. In fact, one of them is my friend and colleague Peter Bowerman, the author of the well Fed Writer book series. He's actually built his business and grown it by partnering with designers. The idea is very simple. Just like many marketing agencies need to write copy as part of the work they do for clients, some designers also like to offer their clients a service package that includes both design and copy. So if you can become their go to writer, some of these designers can provide you with a fairly steady stream of work now. Not enough to make them your only client, but enough to add some diversity to your prospecting efforts and your income stream. Local networking events are a great place to meet these designers. Of course, you can also treat them as prospects and approach some of them with warm emails. Nothing wrong with that if this is something you're interested in pursuing Peter Bowerman has written the definitive field guide to how to do this right. It's a meaty PDF guide titled Profitable by Design Tapping the Writer Designer Partnership Goldmine, and I have a link to that in the Show Notes. That's an affiliate link, which means that if you end up picking up a copy, Peter might send me a couple of bucks to help me buy yet more books from Amazon. So there you have them. These are my six proven and effective ways to find and land clients quickly. When you're starting out as a freelance writer or copywriter, I hope you find them helpful. And again, just a quick reminder about my upcoming coaching group. If you're a new freelance writer or copywriter, we're going to focus on getting your business off the ground quickly and landing your first paying client. If you'd like to learn more, shoot me an email. Ed2b launcher.com put the word launch in the subject line and I'll reply with all the details. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you have an amazing rest of the day.

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