Jumpstart your writing skills - in only 30 days

So, you've decided to embark on the wonderful journey that is freelance writing. Now, as I'm sure you're aware, there's all kinds of different writing that people get paid relatively well for. 

Everything from blogs and website copy to whitepapers and sales letters can fall under the realm of copywriting. Me, I've got a soft spot for direct response copy (go ahead, judge me). 

Now, I recently had a conversation with a woman who has had a VERY successful marketing career. I'm talking VP of marketing at a 10k+ person company in both the corporate and government divisions for over ten years. 

The number one piece of advice she gave? Finding her niche, her style, and what she was TRULY good at took YEARS of trial and error. 

And, she said that the biggest mistake she made earlier in her career was not exposing herself enough to different forms of writing. Instead of getting comfortable with technical whitepapers and long-form sales letters, she wished she'd spent more time writing blogs and email marketing campaigns so she could have gotten closer to what her true strengths were even quicker. 

I took that as inspiration. I'm still a pretty damn green writer and I want to start landing clients and getting paid to write as soon as possible. That said, I also want to make sure I'm getting enough reps in across a number of different content forms. 

So, I had an idea to make a month long project of exposing myself to different pieces of copy across 4 different industries and 7 different topics to fill out the week. The challenge becomes: Write every single day in a new medium on a new topic within a new industry.

Basically, the project looks like this: 

1 industry per week and write about 7 different topics. Every day needs to have 500-1000 words written about that given topic. 

Next, brainstorm what industries you want to focus on. I went with topics that I know I'm already interested in - another piece of advice from our guru mentioned above. Here's my list:

Real Estate

Tech/Software

Food/CPG's

Health and Wellness

Productivity/coaching

Now, on topics inside of these, a two minute brainstorm on each industry should do the trick:

Software - AI, Productivity Apps, Coding&Low-code, crm's/business automation, 

Real Estate - Property Descriptions, Agent Descriptions, Property Investing, Buying a home, Improving credit score, Selling a home

Food/CPG's - Advertising your product, How to communicate your messaging/brand value on packaging, blog, etc. , Trade Shows, etc. 

Health and Wellness - Diet/Recomposition. Different diet options and what they entail, pro's, cons, etc. Exercise/Lifting, Mental Aspect, On supplements

Productivity/Coaching - Sunk cost fallacy/paying for tools or services, Coaching/mentors and the value that they can provide, Results and differences you can see, How to measure success on these things

For each of these, there needs to be hard requirements for the samples that you'll be writing up. And, they need to have a pretty good variety of length, tone and desired outcome. After taking an inventory of some of the most common items requested, I went with: 

2-3 Facebook/Instagram Ads, 1 Blog Post, 1 Sales Email, 1 Landing Page, 2 pieces of website copy

Also, since none of us can't be trusted alone, here's a breakdown of what needs to be done on each day of the week:

- 2 Facebook/Insta Ads = Monday

- Blog Post (1k+) = Tuesday

- 2 pieces website copy = Wednesday

- Sales Email = Thursday

- Landing Page = Friday

Naturally, each week will be dedicated to one topic to allow for familiarity to build. I chose: 

Week 1: April 6 - April 10 - Real Estate

Week 2: April 13 - April 17 - Tech/Software

Week 3: April 20 - April 24 - Health/Wellness

Week 4: April 27 - April 31 - Productivity/Coaching

Here's where the fun begins. you'll have to find one topic per each of these industries for each day of the week. I'll be clipping a few articles into Evernote for each one. This project should get its own notebook/folder to nab all of the results in one spot. 

As far as the drafts themselves (these are ALL first drafts and get NO major edition), they'll be written up in whatever program you've got. My word processor/text editor of choice is Byword. It allows for minimal distractions, side by side writing with research, and can export to Evernote (where I'll be keeping all of the results of this project).

The important thing here is that no matter what the required piece is for that given day (ad, article, etc) there must STILL be 500-1000 words of copy minimum written for that day. Supplements will be done through ad re-writes, rogue ideas you might have, etc. And the hope is, after all of this, your writing skills will have improved drastically, I'll have found my first few clients, and we'll both be a little bit closer to getting back to a normal lifestyle.

God Speed!

P.S. If you're eager to take this on yourself, I'm considering starting a slack or Whatsapp group for accountability and feedback. PM me!