Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Kayla, Local, my class on how to get a high paying, freelance writing clients. I'm a freelance writer myself, making over six figures a year from freelance writer. In this class, you learn how to write and send a killer pitch. That's the number one waiting in high paying clients. This class is great for freelance writers getting their first client. It's also great for writers who are looking to expand their business or get higher paying clients. Okay, let's get started.
2. Why Write a Pitch: Now, at this point, you're probably wondering what is a bitch? The pitch is just an email that you send a long editor block manager, letting them know that you want to write for publication. You're probably also asking yourself, why write a pitch? Well, there are two big reasons. First, job boards are notorious for low paying work. I've heard of writers making $10 for article teach writers to make $200 for article and up . Second of all, when someone posted job to a job board everywhere in the world can apply. When you reach upto a company directly, there's a lot less competition because you're likely the only rider reaching out. Now. A good pitch has three different parts. First, an introduction. The interest should be friendly, and it should talk about the results that your work generates. Second, you need relevant examples of your work, and third, you need a cold. Now called The Action is just a statement or a question that gets the recipient of your email to respond or take some sort of action. We're really looking for a response to the email. Now let's break down these three different parts the first part of your pitches. The intro. Now the interviews just the first sentence or two, and it should be really friendly and conversational. We're gonna use the blob editor or managers first name to give it a friendly vibe. And don't use stuffy words like do sir or madam and keep Giordano. Now you're interested. Also include the results that your work generates. For example, if your blog's received thousands of views per month where they wrecked first and search engine results, or if they get lots of shares on social media, These are all really great things to put in the intro, and you want these results to be numbers so, like the percentage is the number of shares, the number of use, that thing.
3. Results Without Clients: now a lot. Folks are probably thinking, Well, I'm new to this. I don't have any results. What I write my So let me walk you through an example of what I did to get results to share in my intro before I had any freelance writing clients. So the first thing that you could do is publish an article within the industry that you want to write about. So if you want to write about software, write a lot about software, and what you could do is publish it on medium or WordPress or squarespace or any other free blow hosting platform. Next, you can do two different things. Join as many groups on LinkedIn and Facebook as you confined related to that industry. So if you wrote about software, go only then it by software groups or groups go on Facebook and do the same thing. Then take your article and share it within those groups. You're gonna notice that your article will get views, and you'll also get some maybe shares and likes that will give you some results to share in the interest of your pitch. Another thing you can do if you want to spend like 25 bucks is Lincoln gives a free ad credit to any new business, and I took advantage of this. So what you have to do is Lincoln gives you a $25 credit if you spend $25 So basically $50 add credit for 20 bucks. So what? I did waas. I took my article and I put it in a Lincoln ad, and I advertised it to my industry, which was software. So I ever cost it specifically to folks in the software industry. I ended up driving a ton of traffic to my post. It got like, I think, 1000 years or something. So that was really helpful for generating those results that I needed in my intro. And I, you know until then hadn't had any clients. So you could do that. And I'll put the link to that free linked Anak credit in the Information section
4. Pitch Samples: now, the second part of your pitch is your right. Examples, and you're writing. Samples need to be relevant some way to the blogger publication that you're pigeon. So there are two ways that your samples can be relevant. First, your samples can be relevant by industry. So if you're pitching to a software companies blob that you include examples of your writing about software the other way that your constant could be relevant is if it's by type. So if you don't have something that's industry related, like if you're pitching to a software company but you have never written about software, you might include something that's content type relevant. What I mean by that is, if there blow features a lot of long form content, then you could pitch along for articles that you've written. They might be about other things with their local content. So I want to take a second and show you all a couple examples of the types of content we're talking about. So first I want to talk about long form content, and to do that, I'm just gonna go to my medium profile cause I publish a lot of long form content in various medium publications. Ah, highly recommend that you joined medium. It's a great place to publish your own content for free and generate a decent amount of followers. So let's just click on the 1st 1 Okay, so when we look at this piece, you can tell it's long form. First of all, because there are lots of words, so long form generally means, you know, around the 1500 word mark. For most folks, that's what most folks consider long form these days. At least that's what I find. And I just want to give you a couple of pointers for when you're writing a long form content, you know that the title is important. You need people to want to click on your article in the first place or your clients article in the first place. I love to use sort of results in my title. So remember we talked about, you know, generating the results for your own pitch. If you can write results into the titles of your articles, you'll see a lot more click through. And then when we when we look over you know the paragraphs here, you can tell that I've used lots of subheadings, which is something you need to do in a long form piece. It keeps it readable. It makes it, you know, easy to scan. And that's what people like these days. You also want to make sure that your paragraphs aren't too long. If you scroll through this, you can see that I really don't have any paragraphs over four lines. And I really don't like writing a paragraph that's more than three lines. I do it occasionally. It just it depends on the audience to again. But, you know, for the most part, people like short paragraphs. They like lots of white space, use lots of lists. People love lists. People of bullet points here isn't here again. I've got some lists going on. Just think about you know how the peace could be easily read. Another example might be if they feature a lot of list of calls on her block. You could show examples of list of ALS in your pitch and now over to the list. Ical example. This is what you know, A list ical title would look like. It's usually got you know, the idea that it is a list built into the title. So 33 lessons. This is what the content looks like inside. Once you click through on this article and you know, again there are lots of subheadings, but the subheadings air generally, you know, with numbered lessons or whatever the list is about. By the way, this is an article, a great article from the Bear Metrics, blawg bear metrics dot com And finally, the last part of your pitch is to call the action. You want to call the action to be a question because we want the prospect to take some sort of action in response to receiving your email they actually want them to take is that they respond to the email. You might ask a question like, When is a good time to talk this week about my right examples. Now the other part of your call of action is the guarantee. Now I like to highlight that prospect can order an article risk free. They can order it. They can review it. If they don't like it, they're not obligated to buy. Ah, highly recommend that you put something similar into your pitch
5. Sending Your Pitch: now, in this part of the class, I'm gonna walk you through step by step of how to get the contact info for the blog's and publication editors that you need. After we get that contact info, I'm gonna walk you through step by step of how to send out an email to all of those contacts. Now the first step is to create a Google account. If you don't have one, just go to google dot com. Click, sign in and create an account. Now make sure that you create an account that you're comfortable sending your business emails from, so just know that your prospects are going to see this email. If you already have an email account that you're comfortable sending your business emails from, go ahead and log into that account. Now, once your son, then you can see my picture here. But if you've just created a new account, you'll see like your first initial. So if your first your first name's Kayla, then you'd see a K here. Once you're signed in, we need to create a Google sheet where we'll keep all the prospect info. So the first step is you click on this menu. And if you don't see Google Sheets here in this first top section, just click on drive, then click new and Google sheets, and it will open a new tab with a new sheet in the tab. So once you have your Google sheet open, the first thing you're going to do is give it a name. And I like to call my sheets like writing prospects. But you can call your sheet anything that you want. Like, for example, if you wanna have multiple sheets, like if you're gonna pitch to software clients and also to lifestyle clients, you might write lifestyle writing prospects or software writing prospects. Now that we've got this thing titled, The next step is to get our columns ready for the information that we're gonna grab. So the first thing we need is the company. You are ill. Then we're gonna need the contact first name, contact email and I like to put industry in there. You can resize these columns so that you can see all the information in them, and the last column that we want to add to our prospects sheet is mail merge status. Make sure it's capitalized just like this. This column is actually gonna work with the mail merge tool once we get the mail merge running and that we're ready for the next step now, the next thing we need to do is search for the company you RL's that we want to write for. So if we want to write for, let's say, Hub Spot, we do a Google search and we'd copy that you, Earl. Once we have that girl, we go back over to our spreadsheet and put the URL into the URL column. So if you don't want to do things wanted to Tom like that. Another thing that you can do is do a Google search for a list. So, like Best software Blog's 2018 and you could look through the results and choose Talk. 50 Software Development Blog's software amount logs 2018. Here's one that's interesting. 40 Software Blog's Every developer should know, So I could basically just go down this list and grab all these girls and put them into my neural column. If I was finding it hard to come up with, you know, a decent amount of companies that I want to write for like it's It's not something that you come up with off the top of your head so easily. So once you've got a decent list of girls, maybe like 50 to 100 of them, the next thing you want to do is sign in tow, linked in because we want toe. Find a person to contact at that specific company. If you have an account, just sign in now. Once you're logged into linked in, you can use the search tool at the top toe. Look for companies that you've listed in your URL column and the titles of the people at those companies that you want to reach out to. Now remember, large companies have a lot of resource is they have a lot of employees, so you're gonna want to look for you know, the company and blawg, editor or big company and blawg manager or big company and content manager. And also remember that small companies don't have those. Resource is so for a smaller company, you know, you'd might search small company marketing manager or small company director of marketing, because oftentimes it's smaller companies. Those are the people that are in charge of blog's Let's use my company is an example. My company's name is fit leads. So if you visit my companies profile, you'll see that we only have one employee. Now if you visit the profile and you see that there are thousands of employees or even hundreds, you need to narrow that search down. Like I said and say Fit leads marketing manager or fit leads Blawg manager. But since there's only one employee we know, that's the person we want. So we click through on that, and there I am, And at this point you need to open a new tab and go to hunter dot io. And once you're on hunter that I owe click sign up. And the easiest thing to do is just click this sign up with Google, cause it'll just automatically log you in based on the email that you're using for this sheet. So once you're signed in, you're going to see some options up at the top. We just want the finder. So for my name daily and my company fit leads, we type in the URL here. I don't have my email attached to this published anywhere on the Internet, so that's why it's not showing up here. But if it were showing up here, it would just say, You know, here's the email address. So once you've got that email here, you're just gonna copy of the email and go back over to your sheet, paste it in and make sure you paste that person's first name as well. So now you should have a Google sheet with girls. Ah, bunch of contact first names and their emails. So the next step is we need to get the sheet ready to run the mail. Merge now a mail merge is just the automated sending oven email too many contacts at once using a database. Now it's usually a spreadsheet, but it could be another application that holds contact data, so we're just going to use add ons to do this. So if you click on add ons at the top of your screen and go to get add ons now, you won't see all this here because you probably don't have any add ons yet you're just gonna add them. So if you go to get add ons and you're going to search for mail, merge with attachments now, mind says manage, but yours will actually look like this one and say free here. So just click on that button and it will install the extension in your Google sheets. After you've got that extension installed, you're gonna go down toe members with attachments and enable mail merge. Once you've done that, you go to mail, merge with attachments, and the first step is to create emerged template. Each time you're setting up a new mail merge from a new sheet, you've got to create emerged template. So click on that. All right, so that gave us two extra sheets. Here at the bottom one is mail merge and you'll see that the other is mill. Merge logs sheet. One is just your sheet that you've created. So if you go to the mill merge, you'll see that there are columns, first name, last name, email address and all these other ones. But we really just need the first name in the email address column. You don't have to delete these other ones or anything. We're just gonna pay stuff into these two columns. So if you go back to your sheet and you highlight everything that's in the first name, column. So just copy it and go over to the mail, merge and paste it into the corresponding column, and then you can delete that first road and then the same thing with the email addresses. You are the first sheet you highlight all your email addresses. You go back to the mill, merge and you paste those in. Now, remember that I pasted these in right on this top row. So this originally said, First name here and there is contact email here. This is really important because you have to have the right names matched up to the right email addresses. So just remember, like you could either pace it from the top or from the 1st 1 Always placed it in the 1st 1 cause I don't want to mess up these column titles here because those actually come through in the placeholders that we're gonna learn about a second so always placed them here and then just delete those top column names. So once you've got all this paste it here, you need to make sure that you didn't copy or paste that more than once. So it's really easy to copy and paste things into a spreadsheet multiple times. And if you do that, then your contacts are going to get your email as many times as you paste their names in. So what you need to do is just refer back to your sheet, and if I look here, I can see that I soft at Rose 18. So I know that when I go to my mail merge, it should be stopped on Road 19. Remember, because I deleted that first throat, so there should be 18 corresponding names and email addresses here, and there are So I'm safe. Uh, now it's time to go back to the add ons and configure the mill merch. So add ons members with attachments, and then we're going to configure the mill merge. That's going to give us a little pop up over here on the right, so no merge? Yes, Sender's email. Yes, this is the one that I would want to use. Sender's name type in your first and last night. You don't need to copy it an address or BCC an address if you want the reply to address to be different from the sender's address, you can specify that here, but you don't need to do that if you want people to just respond to the email that you send it from. If you want to track the emails like, for example, you can remove this tags that says Sent via mail. Merge within the email. You can track email opens or link clicks. You can upgrade. If you don't want to upgrade, you don't need to. You can just click Continue now here's where we want toe paste our pitch in. So once you've got your pitch ready, this is where we're actually gonna type it in. So at this point, you'd go to wherever you wrote your pitch and you copy it and you go back to your mail, merge and you just paste it right into this visual editor. Now I like to clean it up a little bit. You can see that there's some extra spaces. You can just sort of clean this up, and now it looks the way it should look. You can choose a subject line. One of my favorite ones is question about writing for your blawg or just question about writing. Both of those have gotten pretty decent response rates for me once you've got your pitch in here and you make sure your placeholders or correct a place holder is a word or phrase inside a set of brackets that tells email software to pull that information from another source. It's usually a spreadsheet or could be an email software platform. So here's an example of placeholder. This is what the placeholders look like in the spreadsheet columns. First name, last name. These could be different placeholders. Here's what the placeholder looks like in your pitch. You can see that it's in those brackets, but here's what it looks like when the recipient receives the email. So it would take that first name in this case, Michael, and put it into this place holder so that when the recipient sees it, it shows up. Just like that and my pitch. I'm using industry placeholder, which means I need to have the industry column filled out in my spreadsheet, so just double check your place orders and save it. Once you've saved it, click continue, and now we're at the point where we want to run a test email. So this is great cause it gives you a chance to check over your grammar to make sure your placeholders worked all that kind of stuff. So select. Send a test email, click go. And you're going to receive that test email in the Gmail account that you're using to send it. So if you just go and open your Gmail, you can see there. So if I go and open my email, I can see that everything looks right. The first name in the first column is the one that will populate where you had your placeholder. So if you left that row blank like we had originally had that row blank, there won't be a name here, so it would just say, Hi, comma. If you decided to move everything up like I did, I just moved everything up a row. And now there's Kayla in the first row, and there's email. So that first name is what's gonna populate in the test email that you send yourself. That's a good way to double check your placeholders, and the final step is to run the mail merge. So if you've checked that your place holders are where they should be there working right, your grammar is good. Everything checks out. Just click over to run mail, merge and click Go
6. Tips and Tricks: Now I want to go over a few tips and tricks that I've learned from my own experience. First, I found the best to send email pitches in the morning Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday in the Prospects Thompson. So, for example, if we're in New York and your prospects are in L. A. You want to send that pitch on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday morning? L. A. Now, my second tip is that you can operate your account with mail, merge with attachments at any time for, I think, 30 bucks a year now. The benefit of this is that you get to send more than 50 emails per day. You get 50 emails per day with free account. I find that the 50 works, but if you wanted to expand quicker, you can always operate. My 32 is that you make sure you follow up with prospects that don't respond. So every time you send the campaign, you're gonna notice that most people don't respond. Take the people that do respond or that respond negatively and delete them from the list and keep following up with the rest of folks on the list. In fact, I find that most of my clients come the second or third time. Another thing that I started to do with my business is I hire a freelancer to create these email lists and send these pictures out for me. Now that frees up a lot of Tom. And if you go on up work, you confined really great freelancers who are experts at building these lists on my last trip is that you need to grow a thick skin. You're gonna get a lot more nos and yeses. You're gonna get a lot more negative responses, that positive responses. You're probably gonna receive some crazy responses. Don't be put off that. Keep trying. Keep when your emails out there every day. And like Winston, Churchill said, successes stumbling from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.
7. Conclusion: this writing pitch has been the most successful road strategy for my business. It's landed me tons of clients, and I've even moved from her article work to retainers. Let's recap the top three things that you need to remember from this class. First, your pitch has to be about the results your work generates. That's the most oppressive part. Prospect. Next, you need relevant samples of your work. If you don't have a relevant sample, just make one. And lastly, don't forget to follow up with the prospects who don't respond to your bitches. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you've learned a ton. I hope that you share your projects here and leave comments and questions. Thanks again. And I hope you come back to taking classes with me.
Kayla Lee, I teach writers how to make money!
