The “APPETIZER” Series: The original version of this piece first appeared as an Appetizer course in The Well-Fed E-PUB in October 2016, and was one I wanted to run as a blog post (with minor alterations) in order to get input from many voices.
A few weeks back, I got this email:
Hey, Peter! As a career copywriter/creative director, I think the biggest problem facing the commercial writing profession is that the kind of award-winning work I used to do is not in much demand these days. Instead, the Internet has taught clients that what they need is “content” and lots of it. It doesn’t have to be great or even good, just cheap and preferably also fast.
Clearly, that’s her experience, but it’s by no means all I’m seeing. No question, content is big—driven by an evolution not only in how people buy things (i.e., through research and educating themselves—not being sold), but in search engines as well.
A Different World, But Much the Same
I agree the fruits of the traditional advertising world are definitely in less demand than they once were, but I’m still getting plenty of freelance copywriting work doing website messaging, brochures of all stripes (companies still do plenty of trade shows and need “leave-behinds”), ads, postcard direct mail, email marketing, landing pages, and plenty more.
Simply put, business does not live by “content” alone.
And let’s look at the content needs: case studies, white papers, blog posts, and the like. As I address in this blog post from 2016, there is a trend toward companies hiring cheap writers for their content needs. But, for a little perspective, let’s look at the development of web copy 15-20 years ago.
Back then, no one thought much about the quality of writing on their web sites. You just needed some copy there. But, in time, of course, companies realized writing DID matter.
Raising the Bar
And when your competition invested in more creative, strategically written and “SEO’d” copy (that said, crappily written copy with good SEO wasn’t enough)—and ended up selling more than your lousy writing, you needed to step up. No newsflash there.
Same thing will happen here. Competition will have companies investing in better “content” writers, and just because it’s SEO’d well, if it doesn’t read well or is boring, the market will dictate better writing (no offense to those lower-priced writers who do deliver good “content,” but I say you’re not the norm).
More Writers, Fewer Skills
So, sure, things change and evolve, and we evolve as well. And as I point out in the blog post above, while there are lots more writers in the market now (thanks to the implosion of journalism in the past few decades), solid marketing-copywriting skills are NOT in abundance in their ranks. And the need for those skills will never go away.
A lot of it’s about what you’re focusing on: If you’re relatively new to the field, and you’re seeking content work, that IS all you’ll see.
As such, you could get the idea that there isn’t much else out there being written, when, in fact, there’s a huge pile of other projects (listed above) that need to get done. AND, because many of those projects demand stronger marketing-writing skills than most writers have, they pay better.
Are you still doing a good bit of marketing copywriting projects other than “content”?
Are you finding that writing fees for content are slipping as standards slip, or will clients still pay well for superior content writing?
Any other thoughts or comments on the subject?
P.S. Speaking of “solid marketing-copywriting skills,” if you’re not sure yours are up to snuff (OR are coming from the journalism world, and you’re just unfamiliar with our world, I invite you to check out Well-Fed Craft, my new self-paced course on how to actually write the most common and high-paying commercial-writing projects.
