How to become a copywriter from scratch?

A copywriter in the minds of an ordinary person is a person who does not part with a computer, types text at a reactive speed and can work even in a snow-covered Siberian town, even in a relaxed Bali. And there are no big mistakes in such a view: all this is really possible, but the professional path can be more thorny, and serious success comes to the most creative and ready to learn a lot and work on themselves.

Becoming a copywriter from scratch is a very popular request on the Internet, because so many people would like to work remotely, from home, without the tedious trips to the office across the city. And this is an indisputable plus of the profession. One more - you can work without special education. Although this point requires reservations: not always. Some companies, and individual customers too, are interested in a copywriter diploma and require compliance. It is possible to say that journalists and philologists have higher chances, but not always. For example, medical copywriting rarely hires people without medical education.

Entering a profession includes the following factors.

• Professional courses. They can help, but they do not give guarantees. If a person needs a base, he is used to performing study tasks and this helps him to understand the profession, courses will help (depending on which, of course). If he is a pure practitioner and does not like theory, but learns right in the process, the courses are unlikely to justify expectations. Perhaps it is better to study the latter type after entering the profession, when he finds himself in it and decides to gain a foothold.
• Willingness to build a portfolio for a long time, a lot and with some risks. Not everything will get paid.Not everything will be paid as the copywriter himself estimates his work. He will definitely meet with scammers at least once. For once, may it be defeated by a critic or a customer. Perhaps, in order to declare himself on a large resource with a good reputation, he will send there a dozen articles, and only the tenth will shoot and become his business card.
• Understanding that you will have to write not only articles, but also make landing pages, advertising descriptions of goods, work on email newsletters, write briefs. Such professional competencies can scare a beginner, but if so, it is better not to get involved in copywriting. He is flexible, he changes, as the agenda of the information environment changes, and he loves those who are ready to learn their entire professional life.

If a person understands these three important points, accepts, chooses some kind of development in their relation, he can start working without any experience. Straight from Monday, from scratch, sitting down at the desk at home.

No training at all. If expensive courses are too expensive, but a beginner considers it necessary to understand how and with what he will work, you can build an individual training scheme for yourself.

An example of such a scheme.

1. The experience of others. There is a huge number of articles and posts on the Internet on the topic “How I became a copywriter”. They are good at introducing into the profession and helping to avoid mistakes from someone else's experience. After reading 5-10 such articles, a general picture of the prospects is already emerging.
2. Attempt at writing. The number of resources that a beginner will publish for free is enormous. In this case, it is not a crime: the person writes, sends, posts work and looks to see if he succeeded. He can submit this article to the judgment of colleagues in professional public social networks and receive the first reviews. They're also great for learning the basics.
3. Free lectures. If there is no extra money for paid trainings and courses to enter the profession, you can turn on Rutube and find several large, high-quality lectures there, which also give a broad understanding of the work of a copywriter.
4. Watch episodes of popular bloggers talking about copywriting. It's also free and very educational.
5. Read literature that teaches you to write texts. Among such books, for example, Denis Kaplunov "Business copywriting", Ilyakhov and Sarycheva "Write, cut", Sasha Karepina "We write convincingly. My own copywriter ", Roy Peter Clarke" 50 ways of writing ", Nora Gal" The word alive and dead ". It is always useful to read to a copywriter, and not only at a professional start.
6. Learn from the best. There are so many good sites on the net for which talented authors work that it will not be a problem for anyone to compile their own selection. And then everything is simple: we find their work, read it carefully, write out especially cool moments. No, you probably won't have to use them, because these are the author's findings. But all the talents were copied at first, so the style was perfected.

The main principle of the training period is that theory and practice always go together. During the day you can listen to lectures one after another, it may take another half a day to study other people's masterpieces, but in the evening you need to sit down at the computer and write something yourself. Even one page.

To master the profession of a copywriter, you need to know the market. This is freelance, which means that no one will give the job, you need to take it yourself.

To find your first job, you need to immediately lower the level of exactingness. Expensive orders - there is already a queue of the best authors for them, who also started with penny articles. But you can't create a portfolio without them.

The best option is exchanges. There you need to register, read the working conditions, understand them and start quickly.There are exchanges with high price tags, but the editors check the work slowly, and the articles are snapped up by competitors at the moment. There are exchanges where they pay not so much, but there is a lot of work and the whole team is working promptly.

Attention! For those who work remotely, the principle of payment is important. Some exchanges settle with authors no more than once every 2 weeks, which is not very convenient. There is a principle of line-by-line payment, when money for work is withdrawn once, or even twice a day. Read the payment terms even before you take the article into work.

There is a prejudice that one cannot earn much on the exchanges and that one should not linger on them. But a huge number of copywriters will say "you can't put your eggs in one basket." Therefore, even very experienced authors can work on modest exchanges, where they understand everything, and the requirements, payment, topics of articles are more than satisfied. But this is only a part of their professional workload: they also fill websites with content, conduct social networks (they write it as "the voice of the brand") and so on.

Many exchanges offer to display their own articles, that is, not the ones that the customer asks for and gives the terms of reference, but their own. They are not bought so quickly, sometimes they hang on the stock exchange for a month, but you can try. Especially if the author knows about SEO, understands semantics and keywords, and understands what topics will be in demand and how to write an article so that people want to buy it.

You can sell an article only once: after the sale, the rights to it pass to the buyer. This is a very important point, at which beginners often pierce.

A generalist is a specialist who can have a wide range of functions. This is a text guru who knows how a longread will differ from an advertising mailing (not only in the form, but also in the way of text presentation).

What a universal copywriter does:

• creates slogans;
• is engaged in naming;
• writes scripts for videos (video and audio);
• organizes information support for a variety of resources;
• makes bright and meaningful presentations;
• prepares press releases;
• can work as a speechwriter;
• has experience in editing and proofreading.

Today, copywriters can also find themselves in the creation of scripts for corporate films, commercials, and other media products of the brand. This is a very wide field of activity, therefore, a copywriter is not always a person who cannot be torn from the computer. The idea of ​​the same script for a film for the company will be born in his head, he will think it over to the smallest detail and only then write it down. And the author makes good money on such orders.

A very important point, because a portfolio is an author's business card, which affects his professional success.

What should be in a portfolio.

• Links to the best works. Yes, it’s the links that matter. A potential customer follows them to the site and sees the work in action.
• Brief summary. You just need to write about yourself in a simple, interesting, concise and meaningful way. Less clericalism and officialdom, the text should be lively, literate, so that the customer can only see the author's potential from it.
• Nice decoration. You can create your own website, a page on a social network - today it is much more appropriate than sending a document to a customer.

It is advisable not to be limited to one customer. You need to constantly update your database, agreeing to a new partnership, take one-time projects. And include all this in your portfolio, in its extended version. There are copywriters' publics on social networks, where customers regularly search for performers. Word of mouth also works, colleagues share work, customers, old connections work.

Each author can "write". Even the most talented, experienced and efficient. Therefore, a professional reboot is needed at least every six months. It's great when the author has his own territory, where he writes only what he wants himself. It can be your own channel, website, blog, social network group. And sometimes the author needs to go only to this niche for 3-4 days, to deal with his texts. So he runs away from tasks of the same type, step-by-step instructions, strict requirements.

Expecting total fairness from copywriting pricing is hopeless. Often the author is worth as much as he claims. And you can be modest, not cross a certain price line for many years, or you can feel free to ask for a raise. This is a delicate moment, it depends only on the author's professional self-esteem, his willingness to take risks, declare himself, set new standards.

But often the author writes at different rates: on the stock exchanges he is content with modest prices (but everything is stable there and money is on hand almost every day), and he leads social networks and writes scripts for high fees.

The list below contains errors that more than one copywriter has pierced:

• take by quantity - you can write 50 kilos per day (50,000 characters), but the quality is lost, and the author will very soon understand that he is not made of iron;
• work without weekends and vacations - weekends and vacations are a necessity, you need to immediately understand this;
• "Dive" into the profession without an idea of ​​it - if a person has not figured out what rewriting is and what copyright is, it is too early for him to take orders;
• doing voluminous test tasks for free - it's cool for scammers, for the author - a huge disappointment;
• ignore popular text checking services - firstly, the customer will not approve of this, and secondly, this is a working tool, period.

There are few universal secrets, but there are tips that rarely turn out to be useless.

1. Work is separated from everyday life. To write with one hand and cook soup with the other is a magic that not everyone can master. No, you should take your work seriously, turning off the sound of messengers and asking your family not to disturb. And so - from the first day.
2. A copywriter usually receives money more than once a month, but much more often, and there is a temptation to spend it as it comes in. It is also better to think over the scheme for storing money and distributing expenses right away.
3. Working on a text can take longer than writing: find experts, study statistics, read a sea of ​​sources, decide on the form and design. But all this is the guarantee of a good text that many people will read.
4. Working at a computer requires regular switching to warm-up, exercise and rest of the body from such sedentary work. Walking a lot, airing the room more often - these rules are unshakable for a copywriter.
5. Reading the best, following trends, not getting tired of developing - this is the key to success.

And, of course, a lot to write. Without this, in no way, even the coolest copywriters know that their strength lies in the fact that they are hardworking and love the text very much as a phenomenon, as a tool, as a way to influence the reader and the consumer.