If you’re looking to start selling copywriting services to your customers, or if you’re starting out and you want to increase the number of clients that you’re attracting, or maybe you’ve been going for a while now, and you just want to scale out the number of clients that you work with.
In this blog post, I’m going to share with you my super simple system for attracting clients to your marketing funnel business. It’s a very high-level overview but I think you’re going to get a lot from this.
Where do you find customers?
The problem is where do you find clients to start with?
If you’re starting from scratch or if you feel you’ve exhausted the majority of your streams for lead generation and client acquisition, where do you find new customers?
Cold calling and Fiverr
I think a lot of copywriters make the mistake of doing cold calling, cold email or going on something like Fiverr and Upwork which is a huge waste of time. The truth is it can work but I think that there’s a time and a place for it.
What I want to do is share with you my process for attracting clients. It doesn’t even cost a huge amount of money. In fact, in some cases it can be for free.
I want to show you how to attract those clients. You are, at some point, going to have to change your mindset around what it is that you do or how you work.
Are you ready to attract clients?
The first thing I need to ask you is, are you even ready to attract clients?
The number one thing, 12% of the responses I get through all of the surveys and the data collection that I do, is people asking to attract clients. It’s actually probably more than that but specifically, they just say help me get clients or getting clients.
If I said to you, “Okay, I’ve got a hundred people here ready to buy. They’ve got their credit cards out and they’re ready to buy. Could you service all of them?”
Most copywriters would say, “Absolutely not. There’s no way that I’d be able to service that.”
By the way really quickly, here’s a proposal template that I use for writing out like copywriting services and closing the customer which is going to become useful later on in this process:
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But in the meantime, let’s talk about removing friction so that you can get more clients.
When people say there’s no way I’d be able to handle a hundred clients. That’s the problem, right? You’re not even ready or willing to be able to capture that many clients.
We’re going to start with your website and your website needs to have three specific things.
1. Create a free download or training page to capture leads
We need some kind of free training. We need some kind of free 15 minute call and discovery page which is paid for. If you don’t have any of those in your website, that’s ultimately what we’re going to be building out today.
I’m also going to talk a little bit about traffic attraction through Facebook ads but I want you to do, is think about “Does your website offer outside of the boring bullshit “contact us” page?”
Is there a method for you to be able to direct people face-to-face and say, “Oh, if you want to work with me, just head over to website.com/strategy and we can actually do a quick paid strategy session.”
Or if you just want their phone number and their email address so you can follow up with them later, which kind of spoiler alert is my favorite way of generating leads.
The first question you need to ask is are you even ready and willing and able to capture more leads and clients for your business because it’s not all about the one-to-one stuff.
You have to be able to scale this out and that’s where you need to start.
Most people have got that kind of, as I talked about earlier, that bullshit like “contact us” page. Those are actually useful.
They are used quite commonly, however, they’re most visited but they don’t have a very high conversion rate. The reason for that is it asks for the customer to do the work.
They have to get in contact with you and say something like, “Hey, we’re looking to work with a copywriter. I’ve heard that you’re good. We got a recommendation through, or we’ve seen your YouTube video or whatever.”
Instead, I want to flip this and offer three methods for us to be able to capture leads and clients from any traffic that comes to your site.
The first thing that we’re going to do on your website you’re going to have a button or some kind of link that basically says “free training”. What you’re going to do is offer some kind of content or video or instructional course on how to do the thing that you do.
If you have a specific niche that you’d go after, maybe you specifically help people like Facebook ads for Kickstarter launch products. Then you need to say, “I’ve got some free training here on the ultimate guide to launching a product on Kickstarter using Facebook ads.”
You need to have some kind of ultimate guide or training. It can just be a video. It can be a few slides. It can be a download. It can be a case study. It doesn’t matter.
You need to have a page here that basically captures their information because that’s what you will become best known for. This was something that we did. When I ran the agencies, we had ours on specifically was how to grow an email list by a thousand people.
We had a free piece of content. We had blog posts. We also had a free piece of content. And I said, “If you just had to media.com/1000, it will show you how to generate a thousand email addresses.”
That was a really good way for us to be able to start attracting leads into our website.
But because we had it on our website, just saying “free training”, people clicked on it because they would like something for free. That takes them through to that page.
Then what we had is we had a strategy call. Now the strategy call was a 15-minute call. We used something called Calendly, but we actually just booked embedded the Calendly form.
There’s loads of other options available. I think Book like a Boss is another one and we had Calendly, a form where someone could basically book via a calendar, a 15 minute free call.
What we asked for is their name, email address, and importantly their phone number. Now you might think, but people don’t want to give a phone number.
If they’re looking for a 15 minutes call they’re going to expect a phone number. You may ask, “What if we do it via zoom”?” That’s not the point.
The point is you are collecting contact information with which to communicate with them and follow up with them later. That’s my favorite method and I don’t know why it’s become so over complicated now.
I build funnels up. I teach you guys how to sell funnels but it’s become so overly complicated now. Contact forms, launch funnels and sideways sales letters and all this kind of shit.
The actual fight is getting someone’s phone number, calling them up and close them faster than anyone.
So, we want their name, phone number, and email and then they can book a 15-minute call. All that is a qualification call.
Again, what you’re able to do is with any of your communication or follow-up or cold emails, if you produce content, whatever it is, you can start directing people because then on your home page, you actually have a button.
You could even embed this inside the homepage saying, “Look, this is our 15 minute call.” Now you all get few, if any, cold to 15 minute calls, very unlikely to get cold to 15 minute calls.
However, if we start driving traffic to your homepage after they have taken the free training or whatever, we can either redirect them to the free call or after they have watched it follow up with them later via email marketing.
You could even try and get their phone number or email them to get a free call, a 15-minute call later. This is how you start automating and booking up that Calendly system and booking up your calendar with call.
At one point, Mark and I, our problem was not lead generation. We were qualifying and closing people too quickly.
Our problem was finding reliable supplies to deliver the work that we had sold. That was our main problem. That was our biggest kind of joke, we had no problem with doing client attraction because we could scale the process.
Whereby, even the low levels of organic traffic that we were getting to the site with no paid advertising or anything, they were coming through clicking the free training.
If Mark and I had met someone out there out and about, we could say, “Oh, by the way, just head to media.com/call and we’ll get a quick free 15-minute call.”
What it means is that we could then continue networking and not having to do it there and then, collecting business cards and all this kind of bullshit.
We would even have it on our phone ready to go on and say, “Hey I can book you in now. What’s your email address? What’s your phone number and I’ll send you a time and a link for you to be able to go to.”
That’s how you start scaling out this lead generation process.
The final thing is you want to have an area that basically says something like strategy. This is going to be a paid page whereby you are again, some through Calendly, through Book like a Boss, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
You have a paid session which is let’s say $497. Whether you get to book a time and a place, they put in their name and their email address and this means that anyone who has gone through that call, that process, that system, and they’ve said, “Yeah, this is interesting. I want to continue working with these guys.”
You need to be able to say, “If you actually just head over to website.com/strategy you can actually book a call and a time to work with us and we’ll go through one of our two-hour strategy sessions in order to build out a plan, find out what it is that you need within your business.”
Again, we’re just trying to continually reduce the friction that your customers are having to experience in order to buy.
Other copywriters have backward and forwards. They send proposals, templates, send emails and they have to do bank transfers.
The number one rule of sales is to make it as easy as possible to take the customer’s money. The more barriers you put up, of course, the less likely they are to buy. Make sure that you have a paid page as well.
2. Facebook lead ads
Now, I want to talk really briefly on the kind of the traffic attraction strategy that we used on Facebook.
What we would do is create cold audiences and we would just target a bunch of different interests. Now, let’s say that you work with people who want to do Facebook advertising for their Kickstarter business.
3. Draw up a list of ideal clients
You’re going to look at interests like Kickstarter, startup, paid ads, launches, and you’re going to try and create a list of these.
What I have been using, which seems to be working at the moment is a lead campaign, which basically shows the form inside Facebook.
And I say, I want to only show this to people who are interested in Kickstarter and they’re between 25 and 55. I actually don’t go too specific.
I just have the interest that they’re interested in and I’ll have that under one campaign and then I’ll show the exact same lead form ad.
This basically offers “free training”. Now it could either be a lead form ad that collects their information and via Zapier, I send them via active campaign or it’s a traffic-driving ad that drives traffic to that page.
You’re gonna have to test which one do you want.
The other one might be exactly the same, but instead of Kickstarter, in this particular time, we’re going to look at people who are interested in startups.
The next one is going to be people who are business managers or business owners. Some of these are going to generate leads, some of them aren’t.
If you start generating leads, let’s say you started generating leads at $5. Your paid consultation is $500.
If you got a hundred leads and you paid 500 bucks for those leads and you’ve got one of them to convert that’s one out of a hundred or 1% conversion rate to buy a page strategy session, you’ve essentially paid for all your leads.
You’ve got someone who’s a customer. You’ve also got a hundred leads who can continue to market to in the future because they’ve given you their contacts information via this page or maybe even by the free call.
Don’t over-complicate this. Make it as easy as possible to capture information from customers.
That is my very basic process for how I would capture clients for my brand new copywriting business.
If you’re looking for clients, this is how you want to do it. A really simple process of setting up those three pages and then starting to drive traffic to either the free training page or even a lead form page and following up with them later.
99% of the time when I work with funnel builders and when I work with other businesses, even big businesses, follow up is the reason they don’t have clients.
They actually don’t have a problem with leads. They don’t have a problem with traffic. What they have a problem with is following up with customers.
If you’re looking for a process for attracting them, make sure you have an easy page to capture leads and an easy page to capture sales as well.
If you’re looking to write killer proposals for customers who actually do want to go all the way that’s won something like $93 million worth of business for different funnel builders, check this out: