Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Audio Recording

In Episode #1, I answer the question, “How do I know if my copywriting is good?”

Transcript: How Do I Know If My Copywriting Is Good?

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood. I want to thank Kevin Helmy for sending in the question that’ll be the catalyst for the discussion today. He asked, “How do you gauge the quality of your copywriting?”

And that’s obviously a super important question. Anyone who’s serious about improving as a copywriter and building a career around the skillset should be asking that. But the answer is a bit more complex than you might think initially, so I wanted to cover it today.

So when we ask the question, “How good is my copy?” the ultimate answer, the truest answer really just comes down to, “How does the audience respond to it?”

If I’m writing an email for an audience of software users—say we’re in the finance niche, and we have an audience built around people who are into FinTech and using software for their financial purposes—if I’m set to write an email to them, and I want to get them to click over to a page, the data for that is quite simple: Do they open the email? Do they click through the email to the landing page? For the email, that’s super straightforward. At the end of the day, the data on “How did this piece of copy perform?” is the only thing that matters.

I’ve been doing this for eight—nine years. I can look at a piece of copy that you write—say you were to write that email, were to send it to me and say, “Hey, can I get some feedback on this before sending it out?” I could look at it and evaluate it based on best practices, based on my experience—based on this, that and the other, and say, “Hey, I think you should do this,” or “I think you should change this,” or, “Hey, I think this is good to go,” but at the end of the day, that’s just the best guess. Until you actually put it in front of the end user and test it, there’s really no way to say how good it is.

And depending on the copywriting niche you’re in, whether or not that end user testing is taking place can vary wildly. So for example, if you’re focused on email copywriting, analytics for email copywriting are much more straightforward: open rates, click-through rates, maybe sales rates on the landing page behind that, but even that’s going to have more to do with the audience you’re sending it out to versus the email itself…all that to say straightforward stuff.

But what if you do a home page for a website?

How do you gauge that?

You’ll find that probably 90% of the clients that you work with don’t even track traffic info. They couldn’t even tell you how many people are visiting their home page or clicking through to what. Maybe with some digging, they might be able to find it, but they’re not actively evaluating that information. So with a lot of these projects, you don’t actually know.

Even when we talked about a landing page, unless someone is running thousands of visitors to that page and paying you for multiple versions to split test—and again, only a very small percentage of clients are engaging in that level of tracking and analytics—if you happen to have those clients come to you, or find those clients, or ideally you focus on pitching those types of clients where you can really evaluate the quality of your work, if you’re not doing that, you could be doing projects for hundreds of clients a year for years and years and never actually have a piece of copy tested with the end user.

And that brings us to the other side, the slightly more complex answer to the question of, “How do you gauge the quality of your copy?” And it brings us to this concept where as a service provider for most of your clients, not only are you never going to know how it performs with the end user, but it also doesn’t really matter for you because the true evaluator of your work is the person paying you. Do they like it? “Yes:” You get paid. Do they not like it? “No:” You gotta go through revisions or they decide to bail and not pay you, or they don’t bring you back for more work or they don’t refer you. Ultimately, the thing that’s going to affect you most is whether or not the client actually likes it.

One thing you’ll find—a bit ironically—is that for most clients, that’s literally all they care about. Because, like I said, they have no intention of tracking. They have no intention of split testing. They’re not even getting enough traffic in the first place to justify doing any of that. They’re just looking for messaging that they’re happy with. So when you have those clients, the only thing that really matters for you in gauging the quality of your work is: Is the client happy?

Ideally, you can be working with clients where when you write something that you think is going to work with the end user, they’re happy with it. But you’ll find a lot of times that’s actually not the case. You’ll have clients come back to you and say, “Hey, we want these changes,” and you look at those changes and go, “I really don’t think those are gonna work. We’re gonna violate best practices or That’s going to make things more confusing.

I would encourage you to voice those things to the client in terms of “Here’s why I don’t think that’s a good idea.” And explain exactly why you wouldn’t recommend that. You’ll get this kind of credibility a bit later in your career. The longer you go, the more people will approach you as the de facto expert versus simply the service provider. Early on in your career, you’ll probably have clients come and say, “Yeah, I don’t care about your recommendation; I want you to do this,” or “I just think this would be better.”

As the service provider whose being paid money to give them what they want, that’s your job. You don’t really need to worry about it, you don’t need to lose sleep about it. It’s not your job to make their business successful, it’s your job to deliver the service that they’re paying you to deliver. That’s something to keep in mind that when you ask yourself, “How good is my copy?”

If I were to look back over my own career, probably for the first three or four years, I was working with probably five or six clients a month, and didn’t have in that time period a single client that was testing or tracking things enough to where I could really get a bead on how good my copy actually was to the end user. But what I did notice is that, hey, if I did certain things, if I went through my process a certain way, for example, if I had them collaborate with me a bit on writing the value proposition, that drastically increased the buy-in from the client and made them much happier with the work.

Basically, I just focused on making them happy and building my income up to the amount that I wanted, and then at that point I was like, “Okay, I’m happy with my income, I want to start pushing myself to really improve my mastery,” and that’s where I started strategically going after certain types of projects and certain types of clients where I would have a bit of a chance to test my work more directly—test my chops.

At that point, I had started to drift more into the content marketing direction. Rather than try to find people who are split testing landing pages and had a $10k+ budget to work on a single page, I’m more focused on people who are ready to spend $5-10k per month on content marketing, where we could really track results and I could stretch myself that way.

That’s kind of what you want to be looking to do. At first, you probably aren’t going to know how good your copy is, and you really don’t need to worry about it. Just focus on making your client happy, and get feedback if you can. If you’re out there pitching—getting your 20 pitches out a week, like I recommend—then definitely look to send some of those pitches towards people who are operating with these bigger ad spends, bigger budgets where they could potentially be testing multiple page versions and you could get in and really test your chops that way.

But just understand that you may not be able to do that initially, and that’s okay.

Hit your income goals, focus on getting any sort of clients that come to you, and then once you’re at your goal—once you’re not having to worry about money, not having to worry about whether you can make this whole freelancing thing work—then start to focus on pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and tackling those projects where you can really see how good you can do.

Get to where you have a chance to fail again. That’s what it comes down to. If there’s no chance for you to fail, there’s no real chance for you to succeed either, when we talk about the end user. For the client, it’s really more of just a pass/fail grade: Are they happy? “Yes:” You did good.

That’s pretty much all for now. Hopefully, I answered more questions than I created.

See you back here soon with another one of these Write Bites.

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