As a professional writer,
There is a truck load of stuff that needs go into your business besides the act of writing..
For starters,
You need to do consistent outreach, put out valuable content for your personal brand or agency, and still deliver cutting edge results for your current clients..
From writer to writer,
In a perfect world we would probably just be content sitting silently and handling our affairs by typing out whatever needed to be said or done..
Writers are by nature introverted,
Which gives us an inherent advantage over extroverts as it lets us collect our thoughts and compose them in a more structured and coherent manner..
Yet the world is large,
And the meyers-briggs personality types are many (16) so in order to succeed we must learn to conquer all of them with ‘vim and vigor’..
The challenge that most of you should understand when dealing with prospective clients,
Is that people who are not writers will not have the faintest clue of the art that it is..
This comes from the fact that,
Good writing is an art, not a science or set of mindless tasks that most ‘jobs’ involve.
Therefore the 3 annoying questions you must avoid from prospective clients are as follows:
- What is your expected content output?
Any questions that deal with quantity whether word count, number or articles, or frequency automatically put you in a category as a commodity.
From a business perspective,
Management will simply discuss among themselves how Jill is able to write 5 articles a week at 1,000 words at $100 per article,
While Jack can only do 3 at 500 words at $200 per article..
If you are not able to disarm their idiotic logic by explaining to them more quality-related means like writing style, comprehension, and rapport-based engagement,
Then the cheapest commodity will ultimately win..
- How can you measure what a good piece of writing is?
This one is a truly stupid question that can be reversed back to them,
By asking who their favorite influencer is on social media, a blogger they like, and/or their most beloved book or movie of all time and why they think each of them are good..
Chances are,
They won’t mention any obscure stats about the number of post likes, blog comments, or gross book/movie sales,
Rather it is likely to be something about the particular story or narrative that has captivated their mind and heart..
- What is your strategy for getting people to read your writing?
If a client asks you a boneheaded question like this,
Then you either need to do some kung-fu re-framing or continue on your search..
Strategy should NEVER be the job of the writer,
But of the marketing team..
Now if your clients want you to wear a number of hats,
That’s fine but the compensation and title should match as well..
I hope this post helps you go out and control the conversation with your clients,
While also avoiding any of their annoying questions..
If you’d like to learn more about how writing is evolving on Web 3.0,
Then you can download a free Ebook from my website linked in the description.