Three ideas that can smash up your career before it even gets started
Sonia Simone, Co-founder and chief content officer, Copyblogger and Rainmaker Digital
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There are three terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ideas that I see all the time — and they’re absolute career killers.
They put your head in the wrong place. They make you insecure when you should be confident. And they undermine your professionalism and your effectiveness.
And even though these three ideas consistently bear lousy results, I see them repeated nearly every day on Facebook, Medium, or Twitter.
We’ll be posting the three terrible ideas here each day after our email goes out. 🙂
Toxic ideas that can wreck your writing career — the 1st of 3
The first one gets repeated by everyone from GaryVee to Shark Tank to probably your bitter Uncle Vernon whose dry cleaning business didn’t make it:
“You have to be a certain kind of person to run a business.”
This is the idea that there’s some sort of “business gene” — and you either have it or you don’t.
So maybe you’ve been trying to get your writing business to a stable place, and you’ve just spent all week trying to get your website together, bidding for depressing-looking projects on Upwork, and taking the better part of a whole day fiddling with Word on how your business stationery is going to look.
At the end of all those fruitless hours, Uncle Vernon’s voice might seem awfully seductive.
“Some people have it and some people don’t. And you’re one of the people who don’t.”
A lot of new writers spend huge amounts of time on all the wrong things — because they’re worried that they’re just “not cut out” for the important stuff.
What might that be?
- Learning how to market yourself as a writer
- Mastering the specific skills that clients want from well-paid writers
- Practicing the art of communicating confidently with prospects and clients
In other words, thinking (and acting) like a business.
I’m going to give you a magical success secret:
The only way anyone learns business is by doing it.
Just like you can’t read books about playing the piano and then sit down and play, you won’t really learn how to run your writing business until you start … running your writing business.
But: Sitting down without any instruction and banging away doesn’t usually work, either.
You need a teacher, and you need practice. That’s how you get good.
It’s how GaryVee and all those people on Shark Tank got good at business, and it’s how you’re going to do it, too.
So quit changing up the fonts on your invoice form (that you never send, because you don’t have clients), and start thinking about those elements you might have been avoiding because they’re not quite how you see yourself yet.
Success is a skill, and it’s one you can pick up.
Misguided Idea #2
Yesterday we talked about the toxicity of believing that there’s a “business gene” (and that you don’t have it).
Today, let’s talk about a double-headed wrong idea.
“You have to be incredibly talented to make a living as a writer.”
I heard this so often when I was starting out as a freelancer. (Yep, that’s what I did before I joined Brian Clark at Copyblogger.)
I guess the idea was that if I wasn’t the second coming of Stephen King, there wasn’t much point in trying to get anyone to pay me to put words together.
That whole idea of “talent” is still very ingrained in our culture — even though it’s pretty bogus.
People “get talented” with lots and lots of deliberate practice. (Huh, that sounds a lot like the answer to the “business gene” myth.)
And writing comes more easily to some than to others, yeah … but that doesn’t really determine who gets excellent.
The funny thing about this one is that the exact opposite of this idea is also terrible. And that’s the statement that:
“Marketing writing has nothing to do with being a good writer.”
(I know that sounds bizarre, but I’ve heard it at least 100 times from copywriting “experts.”)
Apparently, marketing writers are supposed to just learn to write like robots and then “assemble” copy.
So here’s another one of my super magical business secrets:
Crappy marketing writing doesn’t work in 2018.
Here’s what does:
- Solid content strategy. Not ultra exotic “ninja” stuff, but an informed understanding of the structure of persuasion, …
- Combined with interesting, engaging writing that sounds like a human and not Skynet
You don’t need staggering talent to write with an engaging, appealing voice. And you don’t need a business degree to understand the structure of persuasive content.
If you write well (not Stephen King well, just well), you can learn the strategic stuff, and you can succeed.
Now, there is one thing you have to figure out that might be waaaaay out of your comfort zone. And we’re going to talk about that — and how to chill out about it — tomorrow. See you then. 🙂
Terrible Idea #3
It’s time for our third terrible, no good, horrible idea that can screw up your writing business!
This one is seductive. It makes you feel good today, at the expense of how you’ll feel about your identity and your choices tomorrow.
Basically, it’s the professional writer’s version of eating an entire bag of marshmallows in one sitting.
And that idea is:
“If I’m a good enough writer, clients will magically find me.”
Now, there’s a grain of truth to this, because as you gain a reputation, particularly if you have a fantastic blog or site that highlights your brilliance, then a lot of clients will find you.
But you don’t have to wait around like a lonely 7th grader hoping you’ll get an invitation to the dance.
You can reach out with confidence to the exact clients you’re interested in … and you do that with a scary-sounding tool called PROSPECTING.
(Are you freaking out? It’s ok. Deep breaths. We got this.)
Now, as powerful as Certification has been for hundreds of writers, here’s the reality:
Most writers need to prospect in order to get the kinds of clients they want.
And here’s my third super magical business secret:
Prospecting doesn’t have to be as hard as you’re making it out to be.
No, you don’t have to be that weirdo that sends off-the-wall irrelevant sales emails, or relentlessly harasses people on LinkedIn.
At no point will we ask you to transform yourself into a used car sales professional. 🙂
The keys to painless prospecting are:
- To make it a regular, easy habit,
- To know how to handle client conversations (minus the awkward), and
- To approach the thing from a position of confidence (perhaps even … badassery)
The way that most people prospect is a horrible waste of time, not to mention being just … awful.
This year, we’re adding some brand-new resources to Certification to help you master this important task without the Ugh factor.
We’ll let you know more when we open up enrollment to this year’s class of students. But let me assure you — as someone who gets the heebie jeebies myself when I think about reaching out to potential clients — we’re making this *very* doable for every personality type.
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