Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

The copywriting market is booming right now. Online content has never been in higher demand and if you’ve spent any time in the corporate sphere in the last two or three years and find that hard to believe – just take a look at sites like Elance and see how many projects are currently available. When the economy suffers, low cost, easy to maintain business portals thrive and there is nothing lower cost or easier to maintain than a website. To get a better idea of just how much work you are going to have at your finger tips when you jump into the Online copywriting field, let’s take a look at the two major factors that are going to make you rich:

The Outsourcing Boom

Think for a minute about what the current economic status of the world has done to so many companies. Millions of people around the world have been laid off. And what kinds of jobs do you think were cut first? Anything and everything that could be done quicker and cheaper by an outside source. The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, things like programming, customer service, and web design, but another highly valuable (and often times underrated) service that every major company in the world needs is copywriting, especially for websites. This is the current market status.

Small Businesses – Big Needs

Let’s throw in another factor; that being that most people who need online copywriting are small businesses – people who are building a website to sell a product and need a small set of highly specialized copy written for their purposes. They absolutely need that copy – things like webpages, press releases, promotional articles, and eBook content – but they only need a week or two’s worth of work done.

The owner of that website may be an extraordinary entrepreneur but they probably don’t have as much of the vital talents needed to write effective copy, nor the time to do it. So, they outsource. With millions of new websites going up every year and hundreds of thousands of new businesses being created, there is a whole lot of copy out there that needs to be written by a professional. Trust me when I say that while there are a lot of pros out there, you can always get a foot in the door if you know where to look and how to approach the projects.

Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

Making money from online copywriting starts and ends with being in the right place at the right time. Right now is the right time. The market is riper than it is ever going to be and while it might seem like there are thousands of other writers out there vying for work, take heart in the fact that many of them (most of them) are not very good at what they do. That’s not me being condescending or pompous – that’s just an impartial perspective on the current state of copywriting.

While Google is improving its natural language filters and ensuring that the content they index is of increasingly higher quality, website owners are left with less and less options for writers, and while the folks in India and Thailand who could write 100 articles for $200 were once very popular options, they are just not that all viable any longer. To win projects, make money, and grow your business, you need to be good at what you do. You need to be good and you need to be able to adapt. This book is going to teach you how to do all of those things and more, but only after we get a few more nasty habits out of your mind.