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Copywriting: Not Just a Necessity, but Also a Business – 225

There are so many different business models in e-commerce. Most of them revolve around written content. In this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan speaks with an expert copywriter and content strategist about what it takes to be a good copywriter and why “good” might be all you really need to be. 

Jacob McMillen believes that most e-commerce sellers have what it takes to write good content. What’s holding them back? What Jacob thinks is that it comes down to valuing writing as a crucial skill then taking the steps necessary to create compelling copy that tells the right story.

In this conversation, Jacob tells us why this skill is important and how it can break down barriers to entry in e-commerce. A successful Amazon product requires both written content and cash. According to Jacob, with the right set of skills, you can do both! 

By building your own copywriting business you could also raise the start-up money to either get started in e-commerce or expand your brand. Wouldn’t it be nice to learn how to fully optimize your own marketing efforts AND make a little money on the side? 

Yep, me too. Listen to this episode and learn how to make that happen!

In episode 225 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Jacob discuss:

• 03:00 – Getting Started Writing Copy
• 05:45 – “Selling a Shovel During the Goldrush”
• 08:00 – Copywriting as a Core E-Commerce Skill
• 09:30 – What are the Components of a Good Copywriter?   
• 11:15 – Turning Writing Skills into a Business
• 14:45 – Adding to Your Revenue Stream
• 16:30 – Most Businesses Can Barely Afford an “Average” Writer 
• 18:00 – 5K in 48 Hours  
• 22:30 – Bankrolling Your E-Commerce with Writing  
• 23:45 – How to Get Started
• 29:00 – Growth Opportunities for Content Strategists
• 30:00 – Leveraging SEO Skills   
• 32:45 – How to Contact Jacob 

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “join” our Facebook Group and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on eCommerce and make more money? Follow these steps for helpful resources to get started:

1. Get the Ultimate Resource Guide from Tim Jordan for tools and services that he uses every day to dominate on Amazon!
2. New to Selling on Amazon? Freedom Ticket offers the best tips, tricks, and strategies for beginners just starting out! Sign up for Freedom Ticket.
3. Trying to Find a New Product? Get the most powerful Amazon product research tool in Black Box, available only at Helium 10! Start researching with Black Box.
4. Want to Verify Your Product Idea? Use Xray in our Chrome extension to check how lucrative your next product idea is with over a dozen metrics of data! Download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
5. The Ultimate Software Tool Suite for Amazon Sellers! Get more Helium 10 tools that can help you to optimize your listings and increase sales for a low price! Sign up today!
6. Protect Your Amazon Brand with a Trademark! Protecting your brand from hijackers is vital. SellerTradmarks.com provides a streamlined process for obtaining a trademark for your business and shielding your products from fraud!
7. Does Amazon Owe YOU Money? Find Out for FREE! If you have been selling for over a year on Amazon, you may be owed money for lost or damaged inventory and not even know it. Get a FREE refund report to see how much you’re owed!

Transcript

Tim Jordan: As entrepreneurs, we often give ourselves limits. We make excuses. We talk about the reason that we couldn’t get started. We didn’t have the cash to get started. We didn’t have the experience to get started. Today’s guest is talking about a topic which may on the surface seem a little bit boring. Why is this applicable to us? But as you listen to episode, you’ll understand why this skill is so valuable, why it’s so important and how it can break down any barrier to entry. And it can help you eliminate those excuses that you’re using of why you can’t get started on your entrepreneurial journey. This is going to be a great episode. Stay tuned.

Tim Jordan: Hi, I’m Tim Jordan. And in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Hey everybody, Tim Jordan here with another episode of the AMPM Podcast. And one thing that I have noticed in this entrepreneurial world is there are a lot of different business models. There are a lot of different ways to make money. There are a lot of ways to adapt and change and run down different rabbit trails of multiple streams of income and all that good stuff. But one thing that continues to be true is that no matter what re-advertising, how we’re advertising, how we’re selling, written media is exceptionally important. And I think back to like my college composition classes, writing in those stupid notebooks, ones like the black and white, blotchy covers that can no one’s ever going to use this. Like now, even in a high tech digital realm, almost every sales funnel involves written content. And today we have an expert in that this is Jacob McMillen, who is dubbed as a “copywriter,” a content strategist. So thank you Jacob, for being here and hope you’re doing well.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah, thanks for having me, Tim. Great to be here.

Tim Jordan: And one reason that I want to have Jacob on here is because, like I said, every marketing approach, every sales approach right now requires written content. And it’s a little bit like business agnostic like this, doesn’t just apply to one business model. It applies to all of them. So no matter what you do in this world for a job, for extra revenue, for extra income writing is important. And Jacob’s going to talk to us a lot about some different aspects of writing, including how to build a business just with writing or how to raise startup money just with writing. And I thought this is an exceptionally cool topic because a lot of people have great business ideas and don’t know how to get started. They don’t have just a little bit of capital to do that. So Jacob, before we get into all of that, tell us how you came to be an expert copywriter.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah, so I think ultimately I started in college. I ended up doing a door to door sales job, to pay my way through school and going into it. It was just like, it seemed like an opportunity to go in and make some money. I had no clue what to expect. But I ended up learning the sales process and I ended up learning how to sit down one-on-one with someone and close them on a product. And then after I got out of school and I got an accounting degree and by the time I graduated, the only thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to be an accountant. So, sort of exploring other options, like what do I really want to do? And I sort of started to come across the world of online marketing, and SEO, and online business. And I found it super intriguing. So I sort of started to dig into it. And I pretty quickly within about a year came across the idea of copywriting. And as I started to dive into it, I realized this is basically just sales, but instead of having a one-to-one conversation, instead of having that give and take, you sort of have to anticipate what the person you’re speaking to is thinking, you have to anticipate what they’re looking for, but other than that, it’s just sort of like asynchronous sales. You’re just– you’re going through the sales presentation. And that was kind of– I didn’t love direct sales, but there was aspects of it I loved. And when I came across copywriting was like, Hey, this is everything I love about sales minus everything I hate about sales. And I’d always been a relatively good writer. Like I wasn’t in love with writing, but I was a big reader and I would get good grades in writing class. So, I started, I was like, okay, I’ll kind of dive into this and quickly fell in love with it, and knew almost immediately, like, this is what I want to do. And then, yeah, did started discovering there was a freelance market for it. And that I could literally just go write something and someone would pay me like, literally that simple. It just blew my mind. So, I ended up doing that for– I’m still doing it to this day, but I did it pretty much exclusively for about six years. And then at a certain point, I was like, Hey, if someone’s paying me for this, it means they’re making more off of it than I am. So, why don’t I look to sell my own products, build my own business using this writing. And so I started doing that and have been doing that as well over the last two years.

Tim Jordan: So, it sounds like this one skill you’re using in a lot of different ways. So, I know that you have an agency. I know that you do consulting. I know that you write content for your own product sales for all of this stuff, right? So, because you’re doing so many things, you have this cool bird’s eye view of like different ways to make money. And you talk a lot about this concept of selling a shovel during the gold rush, right. And I’d like to kind of dive into that. And the first time I heard this was actually from the original host of this podcast, Manny Coats. We were talking about how and why he built up Helium 10. He’s like, man, I was selling a lot of products, but I also knew there was a lot of ways to succeed by selling the shovels essentially. So, talk to me here and our listeners a little bit about what that means and why you think that’s applicable to us.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So I grew up in California, obviously we had the California gold rush. That’s sort of what founded the state back in the day. And one of the things that– when people think of the gold rush, they think of people striking it rich by discovering gold. And there were absolutely examples of that. But the vast majority of people who moved out to California to panhandle for gold did not strike it rich. And the people who really made it on average, the people who reliably made the most money were the merchants, the people who are selling all the equipment, selling the shovels, selling the things that these prospectors used to go mine. So, they basically didn’t have any of the risks and ensure they missed out on maybe the max end of the reward, but they were the ones reliably making money because they had something that everyone needed. And so to me, that’s very similar to sort of the current e-commerce landscape. I would say e-commerce, and online sales probably is a little more reliable than panhandling for gold was back in the day, but it’s kind of a similar model of you have some massive winners and then the vast majority of people aren’t making nearly as much. And you have a lot of people who try and fail, who failed many times before they ultimately succeed or give up. But the scale that all of them are building their businesses on the sort of core piece that all of online business runs on is this copywriting. And so, to me, it’s like, that’s the shovel. That’s the thing that maybe you’re not going to strike it crazy rich by offering it, but if you can get in there, and do this writing portion, even just delivering it to people who are using it to prospect and on any commerce, you can reliably make more money than a lot of people building e-commerce businesses are making. And so to me, that’s just what makes it really intriguing. It’s kind of it’s that shovel on which the e-commerce landscape has been built. And so, if you can be the one in there you can, you can do well for yourself and very reliably. And so that’s kind of what I like to talk about.

Tim Jordan: I know that when it comes to writing, a lot of people are intimidated because we think that, or when I say we, a lot of people think that to be a professional writer, you have to have exceptionally high levels of education and you had to have studied this for a long time and be like the perfect writer. Is that the case, or is it more important to be able to just understand how to convey a feeling, or convey a thought, or convey an idea? What’s what makes you a valuable copywriter?

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So, it’s sort of two pieces from just to kind of a conceptual, if you can sell, you can be a copywriter. It’s the same process. It’s the process of having a conversation with someone and being clear, making a clear offer, being persuasive has nothing to do with your literary abilities. In fact, I find that a lot of my students who come in with a lot of education, in terms of writing a lot of time spent in academic writing, they often struggle to write in the way you need to write copy, because it’s a much lower level of literary prowess, so to speak. And then the second thing, it’s sales, but then it’s also, it’s just written communication. And I will say, not everyone, can communicate through writing. Well, it’s something that like, either, you struggle to put your thoughts into words or you doubt. And so, there’s sort of that aspect of someone who comes in who really struggles to communicate through writing, copywriting may not be for them. They may want to use other strengths. But a lot of people– there’s tons of readers out there. People who tend to read a lot, typically don’t struggle with written communication. So it’s a pretty widely held skill, different people excel more than others, but I would say, a fairly good chunk of the population can reasonably communicate clearly through writing. And if you can do that and you can go through, and you can learn the sales process and anyone can learn to sell. You can combine those two things. That’s literally all you need to be a copywriter.

Tim Jordan: And if someone has those very basic skills, how can they create a business model from this? Right. We know that there’s the traditional freelancer, Upwork and Fiverr, and things like that. But I suspect it’s more broad than that. And you’ve made statements before, like anybody that has any writing skills can turn it into a business. So give us like the high level, how does that work? And prove that statement to me.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So, on the one hand, when we talk about the lowest score, the easiest business model to build in 2020, 2021, in my opinion is a freelance writing business. So, just on that level alone, we’re talking about a zero overhead business, offering a service that every business in the world needs right now. So right there, it’s basically just, if you can get that offer in front of a high enough volume of people, you’re going to find people that need it. Guaranteed. I typically find that people who come in with like no traction, no experience just starting from scratch. If they pitch 50 people on hiring them to do freelance writing, they’re going to land one, at least one client. And you just, you don’t find that anywhere, you can hustle your way and brute force your way to a lot of types of success. But for it to be that reliable, that consistent, even just 50 pitches to land a client. So, that’s the first way is to build, to just sell it as a service, as super attainable. I see people literally every month who are starting have only been doing it for a few months, build 2000 per month, 3000 per month, 8,000 per month businesses just selling writing as a service. That said, there’s also other ways. So, you see a lot with people who maybe they’re looking to become thought leaders in their career, or maybe they have already started another business. And they’re looking to attract people to the business. Marketing is a baked in part of every business these days. And you see a lot too in sort of where e-commerce, where entrepreneurship is heading. You see a lot of, kind of the product led the growing public, the Hey, we’re going to– we build the audience first and then create the product for the audience. And that all comes down to some sort of content. And for some people, it can be visual content for some people, it can be audio content, but for a lot of people it’s written content. And whether we’re talking short form written content on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or social media, or long form via blog posts. If you want to build an audience, writing is one of the most consistent ways to do it. In that model, it’s less of, Hey writing is the product and more writing is the hook that brings people to your product. But it’s just, it’s so widely applicable to so many people with such a wide variety of goals.

Tim Jordan: And this is important because in the entrepreneurial world, there’s a lot of people that are just looking for a way to make money, right? There’s a lot of side hustles. There’s a lot of ways that we can adapt that we can change. I know people that started off selling on Amazon and now have fulfillment businesses. I know people that started off trying to do affiliate marketing, and now they’re doing freelance website building. And someone who’s interested in starting a business or making money, whether it’s a side hustle or their full-time hustle, they’re usually interested in multiple ways to do that. Multiple streams of income. I think that’s super important. And what’s interesting about copywriting is a lot of people do it. A lot of people are learning about it. A lot of people are getting better at it as a necessity for their other business or for whatever else they’re doing. And a lot of times we’re not thinking about, Hey, this is a value that we can, or a valuable commodity. This is a valuable skill that we can also monetize. And there are so many people out there that are bad at it. But you don’t actually have to be an exceptionally good one to be valuable, right. There are people that are dying. The example I use is like name selection for Chinese people that want a Western name. Okay. And in China, if you’re studying business or you’re studying anything international, usually give yourself a Western name. And I feel like there should be a business for that. Right. So when I had my kids, me and my wife deliberated constantly, like, what are we going to name our kids? What are we going to name our kids? What are we going to name our kids? And it was like this huge discussion we had to pick the perfect name. But in China, they’re picking these terrible names. Right? So, in one context in the US, you better be really creative with a great name to really stand in the crowd. But anybody that can figure out just a basic name would be valuable to these students in China. Right? So my point is as an analogy, even if you’re not one of the best writers in the US, in the digital marketing space, even if you’re average, you’re super valuable to people that English isn’t your first language, right? There are a million people out there that are in different countries that are trying to put websites together, or marketing content together in English language, that you are light years ahead of them, right? So don’t compare apples to apples. There is value in what you’re doing.

Jacob McMillen: Just to expand on that too, even businesses in the US, 95% of businesses can’t afford me, and I’m not, I’m probably not even in like the top 5% of rates that people charge. The reality is that for a lot of businesses, they can’t afford someone better than you whoever’s listening to this right now, if you were to spend a little time practicing writing, there’s a huge chunk of businesses and startups where people just aren’t competent writers. And even at a low rate, you’re going to do a massive service for their business by coming in and helping them communicate clearly, even if you can’t get into the persuasive side of things, just helping a business owner that can afford to pay 5k, to have their website rewritten, you can come in and do it for few hundred bucks, and that’s the best they’re going to get. And it’s going to be a huge improvement on what they have now.

Tim Jordan: We’re not saying go out and sell yourself. It’s okay if you suck. What we’re saying is you may not suck as much as you think you do, right? A lot of times we place this burden on ourselves in this pressure of being the absolute best that we see. And we forget that like, Hey, we may actually be pretty good at this. So, we’re saying all this to be encouraging, like don’t devalue yourself because you’re not as good as so-and-so YouTube expert who talks about copywriting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a restaurant and seen misspellings on the menu. I can’t tell you how many websites I’ve gone to that just don’t make any sense. And I think I’m not a great copywriter, man. I do 10 times better than this. So it’s supposed to be encouraging. It’s supposed to be empowering. You have more value potentially than you think you do. Right. And as far as being able to make money this way, I know Jacob that you’re “pro”, and you’ve got a lot of experience and you’ve got a lot of credibility in this area, but I know that at one point on a dare, I think it was after, look at my notes. There’s a Twitter dare you made $5,000 in 48 hours. Tell us about that. And let’s take some value from that little story.

Jacob McMillen: So this was– I talk a lot about pitching to my subscribers and readers, and pitching is one of those things that until you get out and experience it, it’s just really hard to believe that it works as well as people say it does. Because it’s just like most of us haven’t had the experience of buying something off of a cold pitch, or even a warm pitch. So it’s like– so people kind of– I’m always looking for ways to like reinforce the viability of some of these things I teach with real case studies. And anyway, so I had one of the guys that I follow on Twitter. He likes to do these little thought experiments. And so one time he did this thought experiment, Hey, you have 48 hours to make 5k online. And you can’t use a existing audience that you’ve built, what do you do? And so for me, I was thinking, Hey, I charge a minimum of about 1500 bucks for a blog post. So I was thinking, I bet I could go out and do like a package of four blog posts for 5K. I bet I could get someone to buy them because sort of like a minor discount. And so, I wrote that and most of the, you know, most of the answers to this dare were like, kind of making fun of that. You need to cheat or you’d need to spend 500K in ads, or all these things kind of sarcastic responses. And so I put that one in and then I was looking at, I was like, well, shoot, why don’t I just go do that and see if I can make this into a cool case study. So I went out and in the specifications of, I said I’d pitched 10 people. And this was into my career to where, like this wasn’t at the very beginning, there was the very beginning. I would be like, Hey, I’m going to go pitch 50 people. But this was at the point. I was like, I think I could do this in 10 pitches. So I went out, I pitched 10 people, 30 or 47 hours and 30 minutes later, I had 5k in the bank, basically I got only four people responded, six people never responded. Three said, no, one paid. That’s simple, 48 hours just reaching out. In this case it was a little bit more, it was kind of a mixture of warm and cold pitches. I was messaging some people that no one who had ever hired me before, a few people I thought, might be in the market for it and see people, I didn’t know. One out of 10, that’s simple 48 hours off of just sort of a, Hey, this would be fine. And just kind of to demonstrate what’s possible when you’re willing to get out there and put yourself in front, create opportunities for yourself.

Tim Jordan: And this is important because I hear a lot of people make excuses. Now I’ve got a great product idea. I’ve got this great business idea, but I don’t have the money to start. Right. And `I see a lot of people even say, Hey, if I just had $5,000, if I had X amount of money, I could get this thing started and rolling, we make those excuses. And when it comes to selling a physical product, a lot of times it is true. Unless you look at like drop shipping and things like that. And you’re like, you have to make money or you have to have money to make money. You have to spend some upfront, but when it comes to a service like this, that everybody needs, and everybody uses, I think this starts to break down the barriers that we put in front of ourselves telling ourselves we can’t do this. We can’t make this happen. We can’t get this off the ground because it literally takes nothing. It takes just reaching out to people and doing this. And it doesn’t take long to charge two or $300 for a blog post before you can start raking up some pretty serious money pretty quickly. And you can use that to reinvest in this new business model that you’ve now found, or to bank roll other businesses in which your copywriting skills, your just ability to communicate. I don’t want to call them copywriting skills. I want to say your ability to communicate via or written medium, because that’s what it is. Sometimes we mystify this whole concept of writing by calling it copywriting. Let’s just talk about communicating. Right. So, have you seen other examples of where people have used some freelance copywriting or something like this to bankroll the start of another business?

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So a good friend of mine, he just got his affiliate blog up to 60K per month. The first three years of that blog made him zero money and he was probably working on that thing like 20 plus hours a week. And so to pay the bills, he was doing freelance writing the whole time. Didn’t really consider himself a freelance writer. That wasn’t his goal. His goal was to build these affiliate blogs, but they didn’t– when you’re looking at some of these longer term business models, they don’t pay anything upfront and you got bills to pay. And so he paid him basically just by selling, writing, wherever he could. And then that bought him the time to continue working on these affiliate blogs and build them into a pretty successful business. So, I mean that right there, but it’s kind of like any business model you’re working on that takes time to build. And you need cashflow. We see a lot in the space of people, kind of focusing more on the bootstrap model and getting away from the VC model, which I love. But in that, like sometimes you need cash and that’s the beauty of freelance writing is that you can go deliver a writing asset in a relatively short amount of time, get paid for it and sink that money into whatever else it is you’re building.

Tim Jordan: So, if someone is going to get started and just try to make a little extra money doing this. What do you recommend they do as their first step? Do they start just pinging Facebook friends, cold calling people local businesses, or do they actually get on a platform like Fiverr or Upwork and start going about it that way?

Jacob McMillen: So, this is where we get into sort of the idea from like the personal training space of a perfect plan that you aren’t going to follow through on, is worthless. Right. So I would say, in kind of going through, I’m going to kind of mention what I think is the ideal approach. But what I find is that a lot of people find– I’ll try to caveat in there things that some people find easier than others. But my personal or personal view is that you want to go through the process of creating an actual writing asset that you want to sell. One, two times max as a practice run. So say you want to deliver blog posts as your writing service. Go through the process of writing two blog posts, start to finish, that no one’s paying me for just– go through the process of writing or do you want to do website copy, go through the process of writing a website page. Do that once or twice, just so you kind of know exactly if this is my process to go through it. It’s not going to be optimal. You’re probably going to be slow. Your copy is probably not going to be that great. And that’s okay, because then what we’re going to do is we’re going to go start pitching. As soon as we kind of have our internal process, then you go out and start pitching and you’re going to learn 10 times more working in real client situations than you would just practicing or reading about writing or researching, which is what a lot of people do when they think about this process. They spend months and months reading and trying to feel like they have mastered writing. When it’s kind of like anything you write in the lab has very little, translation to what you’re going to actually write in the field. And so I recommend one to practice projects immediately again, and to start pitching warm network first, like you said, friends, family, anyone you know with the business, you don’t need to make them pay X amount and you could say, Hey, can I rewrite your website homepage? And if you like it, use it. Or if you like it and you can pay me for it, if not, it’s just great practice and I appreciate you letting me do it. It can be as simple as that. And then again, as you’re pitching, you can start pitching real paying clients too, but again, we’re not talking about people who can afford to drop five to 10K on an experienced copywriter. We’re talking about people who– their alternative is just to leave their own writing that they did themselves on the site. And they’re just not very comfortable writers. It’s awkward, it’s confusing. It’s not communicating their value. So you come in and even as a new copywriter, who’s not that great yet you can do a better job. And for a few hundred bucks, that’s worth like, that’s a very good value to these business owners. And so it’s literally, it can be as simple as that. And if some people just for whatever reason, they feel a lot more comfortable pitching gigs on Fiverr, gigs on job boards. I did a lot of that too earlier or early in my career. If you want to go that route, if it allows you to take action, great. I feel like pitching really comes into its own when you’re doing that one-to-one reach out to a business. If you’re willing to play the numbers game, knowing that, Hey, 30 out of 31 might not even read or respond to my pitch, but all I need is one. If you’re willing to embrace that mentality, then you’re– as a new copywriter, you’re in a one-to-one, they’re not comparing you against 30 other writers who are all trying to underbid you. They’re just talking with you. And so if they need writing, and everyone needs writing at some point, so your odds are good at finding someone. So, that’s what I mean, it’s really that simple. I just recommend do one or two practice projects, start pitching, start trying to work with real clients. And you’ll be shocked at how fast you grow.

Tim Jordan: And a lot of people also make excuses about, Oh, I don’t have the experience. I can’t pin something. I haven’t done it. There’s people who accept free writing projects. And it’s not like you’re investing a mountain of money or a mountain of time to start getting that portfolio up and get that practice. I mean, there’s people that want writing constantly, and you could spend a few hours do some practice stuff and start building that portfolio to try it out. So, where do you think the future lies, Jacob, for copywriters? Right. And I don’t mean necessarily on like the global timeline, but on the individual timeline, let’s say, I find I have a knack for writing is my framework, my roadmap, continuing just to increase my value, start automating, start getting bigger ticket clients. Or do you think that there is a future business model for experienced copywriters that’s different than that?

Jacob McMillen: So, I think it comes down to your goals. For me, I always had relatively modest income goals. And so to me, once I hit those pretty quickly, within two years of going full-time as a freelancer, I had hit what my kind of high-end personal income goal was. And so then for me, it was kind of like, okay, what next? And I was like, well, I’m selling my time for money. It’d be really cool if I could make the same amount, not selling my time for money, building something else. And so for me, that then became the next step that became the future model was what can I sell using my writing, using my writing skills, my web, all of the copywriting, the content writing, all of that. At that point I had developed some SEO skills as part of my writing services. And so it was like, what can I build here to allow me to not have to trade my time for money? And so, that’s one option. You can kind of– one of the things I realized over time, just being kind of in a sales mentality, was that a lot of people who hire a lot of small businesses or even businesses who hire copywriters, they really have no framework for marketing. They almost look to the freelancer as more of a consultant. And so, if you can kind of position yourself that way and look for the problems that they’re dealing with, that’s one route that I see a lot of writers go is like, they kind of turn themselves into more marketing consultant slash copywriters. You can scale up. Once you get the– one of the things I did after using pitching to build my career the first few years as I started kind of leveraging those SEO skills to build an inbound channel of leads. And once you build more leads than you can handle personally, then you have the option to start building an agency, which I did as well. And then you start looking to tackle broader writing and marketing services. Then you could handle individually, work with bigger budgets. And the bigger the budget, the more convenience, the more responsibility you’re taking off the client’s hand, the bigger margins you can charge. You can go the route my friend did of using his writing to build an affiliate marketing business or affiliate business. There’s just so many options and kind of, as we alluded to earlier in sort of the cashflow mentality, any business out there is going to depend on some level of writing, some level of copywriting. So whatever your business dream is, if you learn the copywriting skill and you learn it good enough to sell it to someone, there’s a very good chance that you can leverage it into whatever business model you want to take. And if you just love writing and you just want to write forever, you can do that too.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. Well, and I do think this is important and you’ve given me a lot of ideas that I wasn’t aware of before for this. And I think that for me, the biggest takeaway as we kind of wrap up is this is one of those things that a lot of us do. And we don’t realize that it’s monetizable or it’s things that we can do to a moderate skill level. And we assume that isn’t valuable enough, which isn’t true. And it’s one of those things that is probably worth investing in practice and learning, because whether we do it for a side hustle, for a separate monetizable business stream, or we just have to be good at it to do the other things better, our affiliate marketing or digital marketing, or e-commerce selling, right. It’s all like a backbone to all of this, right. So I think that’s one of the big takeaways is we need to invest in this personally, because it is so valuable in so many different ways. So, I appreciate you sharing this. I think that there are a lot of people that probably started listening to this and were like, Oh man, how boring we’re talking about copywriting. But then when we think about it as a separate business venue, or as a monetizable skill, not just a skill that we should outsource and get away from it, I think that it becomes more valuable things. So those of you that are still listening, I hope that you found some value in this episode, and we’d love to hear about it. Leave a review or leave a comment if you’re watching on YouTube. That would be excellent. So Jacob, if someone wanted to find out some more content about how to become a better copywriter, how to get started, make a little money as a copywriter, what resource would you send them to start reaching and get started? Or start researching and get started? Sorry.

Jacob McMillen: Totally. If you head over to my website, jacobmcmillan.com, I have over 175,000 words of free content. I do a podcast every Monday where I just do a 10 minute quick hit on something related to improving your writing, freelancing or marketing. Basically, I’ll take you from zero to wherever you want to go. And it’s all right there.

Tim Jordan: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for being on. I know that you’re a busy guy and you have a lot of writing to get to. So, appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing those wisdom and guys make sure to check them out, jacobmcmillan.com and based on his writing capabilities and SEO, like he said, he’s ranked highly on Google just for copywriting. So, I think it’s pretty impressive, pretty cool, knowing what to do about Google SEO. So, thank you all for listening to another episode. We’ll see you guys on the next one.