#217: Cole Schafer on Going from Zero to Writing for Google in Less Than Three Years

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. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@bdb launcher.com Episode 2 17. Those notes always include a summary of our discussion here, as well as any links to resources we mentioned during the show. If I told you that I've written for clients such as Google, IBM, Oracle, ups, the Home Depot, you might be impressed, wouldn't you? Now, I haven't written for these companies, but I know that when I meet a writer who has that kind of client roster, I'm immediately impressed. And so are the prospective clients these writers talk to when they're doing their outreach or their marketing. The question, though, is, is working for these big names that important? Is that where the money really is? What does it get you? And should you focus on your efforts, your marketing efforts, your prospecting efforts on landing two or three of these marquee clients? The answer is, it depends on. My guest today is Cole Schaefer, and he's the founder of Honey Copy. Cole is going to pull back the curtain on how he landed clients such as Google, FreshBooks and other impressive names and how he did this in less than three years from launching his copywriting business. Whether you've worked for big names before, you're working for some of them now, or you're aspiring to land some of these marquee clients, I think you're going to find some interesting insights in Cole's story. Enjoy. Cole, welcome to the show, man. It's great to have you here.

Thanks, Ed. Yeah, I'm super stoked to be here.

Well, this is a conversation I've been really looking forward to having and really want to get into your story about how you've been able to build your business so quickly with some really impressive marquee clients. But before we do that, I always like to start by asking guests to share a little bit of their story, starting with maybe what you do today, what kind of clients, what kind of work, and a little bit of your backstory, which is, you know, we're going to expand on that for sure. But tell us just real quick, you know, how you got here.

Yeah, absolutely. So I graduated with a degree in marketing back in 2016, and I did what every recent Graduate does. I went and worked for a small advertising agency in my hometown and it definitely wasn't, it didn't operate like the big agencies that do some really cool stuff for big brands. I was mostly working as kind of an accounts person doing some social media stuff and it just wasn't for me. And I remember being at that job at around like 2pm after a big meal, sort of feeling the energy decline in the afternoon and I thought to myself, you know, if I have to spend another afternoon here, I just don't know what I'm going to do. So I walked out, which I don't recommend people to ever do to their employer. But I came in the next day and put in my two weeks. And yeah, we parted ways. But so from there I knew I wanted to write professionally. I just didn't know what that looked like. And since I sort of jumped the gun a little bit, I went and got a part time gig working construction at a construction company in my hometown. And it was a great gig just because it paid cash and it was super flexible. So it would allow me to work from 8am till 2pm and then from like 3 till 6, 7 and 8 o' clock at night. I was able to work on building up my freelance writing business. But I always tell this story because it, I think all freelancers can relate to that. Super low point. But a really low point for me in that entire process was about a month after quitting my job and getting this job at this construction company, my old agency wanted a renovation on their building. And so they hired my construction company to come in and do that renovation. So literally a month after quitting that job, I was back in there in work working alongside my ex colleagues. And that's a real gut check. That kind of makes you take a step back and say, am I really serious about this? So that's kind of a funny story. But it all ended up working out just fine.

That is cool. What are the chances, man? There's no such thing as coincidences. So it sounds like that really struck a nerve with you and got you thinking about this a little bit. Okay, so how do you go from you're working on your business in the afternoons, you're working this construction job. I guess a couple of things that come to mind is what were you doing there to work on your business? Like what exactly what you're doing to build it? Were you out there like prospecting like crazy? Were you offering to do work for free? Like what was it that ended up actually getting you some Traction, absolutely.

So what I did is I went out and found two brands that hired freelance writers to do articles, but did them for like were willing to pay, you know, obviously writers who were up and coming and save some money there. And surprisingly they're a big name. So they're Entrepreneur magazine and FreshBooks. And a lot of people don't realize this, but some of these larger companies have sort of media wings that are a great opportunity for young freelancers who are willing to maybe not make a ton of money up front, but are talented and can produce some good content and willing to go through rounds and rounds of edits. So early on, how did you realize.

That, by the way? How did you know that these companies did that?

So I just was cold emailing the crap out of a ton of different businesses. Looking back, it was a little spammy. I've since changed some of those tactics, but early on I would just force myself to try to cold email 30, 40 companies a day. And one day I was like, heck, I'm going to just try to reach out to Entrepreneur magazine just to see if I could even talk to someone. So I emailed three or four of their editors. They sort of joked with me. They're like, hey, next time just email one of us because we're all passing your email emails along right to each other. But it was really just trial and error until a few brands gave me the chance. And from there I was able to leverage the Entrepreneur Magazine name and freshbooks because most people know those brands and I was able to use those brands to kind of as stepping stones to work with some other clients. And one thing that I found with freelancing is my best paying clients and the easiest ones to work with. Our clients most people have never heard of and a lot of people don't realize that where sometimes it's better to work with the big brand names who probably are a little bit cheap at times for how they pay their freelancers, just to get your name out there and build that credibility and then go find the random niche SaaS companies or small sort of service businesses that nobody really knows about, but they make millions a year and have a ton of employees and care about good copy and you don't have to jump through 50 hoops just to get a project done. So that's kind of my niche is the small to medium sized business. And like I said, I used some of the bigger brands to leverage their names to get in the door with some of those smaller businesses.

Man, that's super interesting because you did it the opposite way that most people do it, which is so they start with a small and mid size thinking they need to climb their way up to the IBMs of the world. Right. But you figured out, you know what, if I could get these marquee names that gives me instant credibility that I can then use to go after the small to mid size companies. I love that.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And like I said, you know, you do have to take a pay cut. I mean the articles I was writing for FreshBooks, I make five to six times that on an article now. So you are taking a huge pay cut early on. But just the credibility in my opinion is so worth it.

Tell me a little bit about the work you were doing for these guys early on with Entrepreneur and FreshBooks. You said articles. So these are articles for a publication or was it their blog? What was it that you were helping them with?

So it was their blog. Now I can just speak to my story. I'm sure all writers sort of operate differently, but for me I found that early on in my career when I was working with these brands, it was a lot of heavy lifting with, with just pounding out articles, five, six, seven, eight articles a week for different brands, not getting paid a whole lot for those. But as my name grew, I was able to land higher paying gigs on landing pages, entire website copy rebuilds, email sequences, that type of stuff. So early on it was primarily articles. And yeah, I don't know if you remember the days when maybe you were doing that early on, but it's not sustainable forever. You can't.

Oh yeah, it's exhausting. First you're happy to do it, but you're right, you're thinking there's gotta be a better way. I don't know if I could do this for you. Start looking five years down the road. You say there's no way I'm going to have the energy.

Oh yeah, it's literally impossible. But it's a great place to start, you know, just to make a full time living writing. You just can't do it forever. But yeah, I was doing a lot of that sort of heavy lifting early on and I've tried to since work smarter.

So the opportunities you got to do some of the email sequences and landing pages and so forth, were those first clients or with some different clients?

So those were all with different clients.

Okay.

I don't want to. Some of them I can't like name names, but I can just give you an idea of sort of the niches. But one, I wrote a really Big landing page for Israeli luxury luggage company called Samsara. It was like a crowdfunding page and it did really well. I work with a health and fitness company based out of Austin, Texas, a sort of niche video game streaming company, Snack companies in like the plant based foods and keto space, and then also a bed in a box mattress company, a Canadian business school, and also a CRM system for loan officers. So that last one, a CRM system for loan officers. Nobody would ever think that that would be a business, but they have been an unbelievable client. They've been a blast to work with. I'm sure it's not as glamorous as maybe working with a FreshBooks as maybe a lead copywriter, but they pay just as well and they're super niche and they run a really successful business. So that's how I've made that transition where these smaller companies are needing landing pages, right? And they don't necessarily want to bring on a full time copywriter. So they're willing to pay a freelance senior copywriter to come in. They'll pay them a good amount of money to write a really solid landing page or sales sequence or whatever. So that's how that transition has kind of moved from writing articles to writing landing pages.

I've always. That resonates so much with me, Cole, because I've made a great living writing for no name clients who are awesome to work with. They have big budgets, fun projects. You know, like I joke around, there's this company, I think it's a German tech company called BASF B A S S And their whole tagline, I don't know if it's still around or if they still have this tagline. It's something along the lines if we make the things that make the things you use work. So it's like we're like no name. We're completely invisible in the process. But the things your everyday products at home, things you use all the time in your everyday life, wouldn't work without our technology, without our products. So unlike intel, who's of course made up, created a whole business based on a brand, but they're in everything. My clients have always been like the no name, you know, nobody, like no copywriters ever contacted them kind of thing, right?

Yeah, and I love that because one, you're not having to compete with dozens and dozens of other copywriters who would love to have them as a client. But like you said, you know, they're super easy to work with. One of my buddies who runs an agency, he Got a huge project for a really large national magazine. I congratulated him right when he got it. And we talked literally a couple months ago and I asked him how it was going. He goes, man, I cannot wait to be done working with him. I put in a ridiculous amount of hours. It actually hasn't been very profitable and they're a pain to work with. And so I think a lot of times the big brands, even though I'm not going to say no when I have a chance to work with a Google, just because that's really incredible opportunity. A lot of times I think these big brands are more vanity, sort of like hanging the bass on the wall sort of thing, where, hey, I really want to show my audience that I've worked with the A, B and C company. But a lot of times I found that I would say 80% of my revenue each year comes in from brands that 99.99% of the United States has never heard of. So I do think that that's the move. I couldn't agree more with you.

By the way, I found the old tagline colis. I had it, it was way off. It's more elegant. The one they have. It says we don't make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better.

Oh, I love that.

So, yeah, those are the kind of clients that you and I both like. Now I'm curious about one thing. It's like, okay, so you land FreshBooks in Entrepreneur magazine. How did you go from those guys to. To these like no name clients who ended up being like your sweet spot? I'm sure there's a lot to unpack there, but can you give us maybe a couple of general strategies that you use that work?

Yes, absolutely. So about at the year mark when I was cold emailing like crazy, which one thing I'll tell everybody is if you want to build your business, cold emailing is never a bad route. So I'm not, I'm about to essentially say I went in a different direction than cold emailing, but it's never a bad route. You can build a profitable freelance business doing that. But about a year in, I just was realizing, you know, every time I want a new client, I don't want to feel like I have to go do the work and go hunt for these clients. So I decided, is there a better way to go about landing clients without having to do cold outreach? Because in my mind, there's a cold client. There's warm and then there's hot And I really wanted to figure out how could I get the clients that are hot. And for me, what defines a hot client is someone who literally emails you and knows that they want to work with you before you ever jump on a sales call. And so I think part of this was bred from my frustrations with jumping up, like cold emailing, jumping on a sales call, having a tough conversation about prices. I was tired of that. So what I started doing is I decided I'm going to stop writing 10 articles a week for these other brands, and instead, I'm going to start writing really quality articles for Honey Copy, build my email list, start running two really strong newsletters, and make sure all of those articles are SEO friendly to where I'm gaining some organic traffic from them once they land on my site. Since 90% of people never come back to your site, making sure I'm getting their email addresses and sort of building up this pool of potential clients that I can market my services to on a regular basis. And so that has been my process. And that has literally been, you know, I want to say, from the year 2018 to 2019. I think I might have increased my income, you know, 80% by making that one transition where I just said, hey, I'm going to sacrifice maybe some income upfront and not write articles for other clients and move strictly to writing articles for myself. But it's just been a huge payoff as I've been able to build an audience of people that I can just continuously market to.

So basically, classic attraction marketing is putting great stuff out there, focusing on the SEO, maybe building some breadcrumb trails to your site that you also guest post in a few places. So you could also drive some traffic to your site outside of SEO.

Yes. Yeah, you nailed it. The other thing I do is I always tell people who are publishing content, make sure you're cross publishing because it's going to bolster SEO. So I cross published to Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter. So I'm trying to view Honey Copy as almost a publication in itself that's just trying to get as many of its articles out into the world because those sort of act as like, salesman network 247 for honey copy in my mind. So, yeah, it is. It is attraction marketing.

Yeah, yeah. And Honey Copy being, of course, your copywriting company, copywriting business. It's your brand. I love that. Now, one question before we shift gears here. What were the topics that you chose? Because this is an area that a lot of people get confused about. It's like, okay, if I'M going to adopt that strategy. What are going to be the best topics to focus on that will actually be interesting to my audience?

Yeah. So to kind of take you down the funnel, I want to pull in readers. I want to turn readers into subscribers. And then I run two weekly newsletters. And my goal with those newsletters is to give away so much valuable content that the subscribers are literally like, I don't know how. This is free. And sell a few products I have, and then also my services to that. So my newsletters are really focused in two areas. One is storytelling. So I run a newsletter called Stranger Than Fiction. And it is a weekly newsletter that. Where I go out and find a really fascinating kind of crazy marketing story that has made a brand a lot of money. I write a really short piece on that and I send it out to my list. And that has grown really quickly just because people love stories. And I think marketers, and I'm sure you can relate to this. We're tired of getting on medium and reading 7 Tactics to Increase Conversion Rates. You know, I think people tired of that stuff. Anyone who's at our level is smart enough, has enough experience and is creative enough to be able to figure out the tactics. Right. Really what they need are stories that can get them thinking. And so that's how I structure the Stranger Than Fiction newsletter. And then my other newsletter, which is sort of the flagship newsletter of Honey Copy, is called Sticky Notes. And in that, I literally just will share sort of my life, my pursuit for creativity, the things I'm learning in writing, advertising, marketing, psychology. And it's really a personal newsletter. And that has kind of turned into a way for my subscribers to feel really connected to me. Like this year, someone just sent me a bunch of random mail to my address and thanking me for Sticky Notes, which was really cool. So I found, like, what has been the most effective in writing articles and newsletters is going in the exact opposite direction of what Medium is currently doing. And that, like today I published an article titled Neil Gaiman on Imposter Syndrome and just discussed sort of what that looks like. And so I think it's going deeper with your articles and staying away from Listicles. And that has proved to be the most beneficial for me. And my audience seems to really love it too, which is cool.

So it sounds like there might be some serendipity involved here, Right? So maybe the initial objective was to turn some of these readers or visitors to subscribers and to keep them engaged until they're ready to hire you. But where are you seeing this going? Because I know you're developing some, actually several income streams. So tell us a bit about that.

Yeah, so I think my goal from the services side is one day I would love to become a highly sought after freelance creative copywriter in strictly like advertising. So I love working with taglines, I love writing, packaging, copy, all of that stuff. And one day I sort of want to be the go to name for that. If you're looking outside of an agency, I still have a ways to get there, but that's kind of my goal eventually. But with that, I want to continue building out a series of guides on like I just released a. I released a guide last year called how to Write Words that Sell Like a Florida Snow Cone Vendor on the Hottest Day of the Year. Which that's way too long of a headline, but it has worked really well and that was a huge eye opening moment for me because that now generates three to $5,000 a month in passive income just from people finding me online, buying it through my email list, buying it where I mention it in my articles. And so what I've realized is, hey, if I can continue to put out one of those guides each year and sell them for $97, $200, $300, eventually I'm really going to be able to take off the pressure from my services to where I only have to write for brands that I feel are super, super easy to work with and that I can do that, add the most value to. So I think for me it's all about flexibility and that's what the passive income stream is doing. Again, I think all that comes back to writing articles and building up that email list. So that's what I'm really bullish on right now.

That's impressive. And I think this is something that every writer should consider is you have skills and you have passions that you can now turn into income streams. So sometimes it happens like it happened to you, Cole. Right. It's more of an accidental insight. But you know, we have something that a lot of people wish they had, which is the ability to write, communicate, to organize ideas and to package and sell and promote these ideas. And I love that you're going in that direction. So before we disengage my friend, why don't you tell us where people can learn more about you, your work and of course, these copywriting guides.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the best place to go is just honeycopy.com on there. You can have easy access to the copywriting guide or you can, you'll see a button that says subscribe, and that'll lead you to some of my newsletters and stuff. So that's the best place to connect with me. And then I'm obviously on, you know, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Medium too. Granted, I'm not like, I'm fairly active on Medium, but I don't communicate with people on there, so. Yeah, or you can email me@coleoneycopy.com awesome.

Cole, it's been wonderful to have you, man. I appreciate you taking some time today to share these ideas with us and your story, of course.

Yeah, thank you for having me. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher.com.