How to Become a Copywriter
How to Become a Copywriter
For those who work wonders with words, becoming a copywriter can be an interesting and creative career choice. One of the best things about copywriting is that people from a variety of educational backgrounds whether you have a formal education and no experience, or significant experience but less formal education. Check out our guide and get started today!
What Qualifications Do You Need to Be a Copywriter?
Copywriting is one of those rare gems that not only can be the career of your dreams but also doesn’t strictly require you to obtain a degree. Even so, some employers (especially high-profile ones) will expect you to have some type of qualifications that demonstrates your ability to use language effectively, e.g. a creative writing course.
For copywriting, you may also want to consider some marketing courses to ensure that you are familiar with the many components of successful copy. After all, copywriting isn’t simply writing for writing’s sake or writing because you can. You need to be able to use words in a way that drives business results and helps your employer rank well in both Google search results as well as whatever market they’re part of.
As a Beginner, Where Should I Start in Copywriting?
You can take the steps to embark on this career; provided you have the passion, motivation and skills to make it happen. Becoming a good copywriter heavily relies on practice and building a portfolio of work, and once you have built up a portfolio you can enjoy the benefits of writing copy and learning about a range of topics, helping businesses to increase their profits and having the freedom to get creative with your writing.
Steps to Become a Copywriter
Copywriting may be thought of as a job anyone can do; I mean, it’s just putting a few sales buzzwords together to help sell a product, right? Well, there are actually many vital skills you need to have and a range of steps you should take before embarking on your copywriting career:
Learn About Copywriting and SEO
The first step to becoming getting a copywriting job and becoming a successful copywriter is learning about what it is and the background skills you need. Getting the copywriter’s toolbox and learning how to write well is essential, and you can do it from the comfort of your own home. At CoursesOnline, you can take the IDM Advanced Certificate in Digital Copywriting and learn how to write expert digital copy for businesses.
Gain Writing Experience
The best way to develop your copywriting skills is by gaining experience as an in-house writer before (if you wish to) going on to becoming a freelance copywriter. Your background knowledge of SEO and copywriting will put you in good stead to securing a writing job, where you can gain valuable insight and develop your writing skills in person.
Practise and Put Together an Online Portfolio
Once you’ve developed your writing skills and have done some in-house copywriting, you will likely have built up a portfolio of work. Create your own website, blog or online platform with all of your professional copywriting work and writing samples to send to potential clients. Having up-to-date, professional social media pages is also a great way to build up your online presence.
What Does a Copywriter Do?
Companies hire copywriters to write interesting, high quality and search engine optimised (SEO) content for their websites, advertisements, press releases, sales letters and business materials. This content serves many purposes including boosting the pages ranking on search engines, engaging potential customers, selling the product/service and enhancing the appearance of the website. Copywriters can be either in house (working in an office or work building) or freelance (working remotely) and many copywriters switch between these two options throughout their career.
Benefits of Being a Copywriter
Once you have a diverse online portfolio, you can cater your CV to any writing roles you find. There are a number of advantages to becoming a copywriter such as flexibility and the ability to have a significant say in the type of copywriting you do. In-house writers often have a degree of flexibility with regards to what they write; for example, although you might be writing for one business, most businesses have a variety of web pages and copywriting that needs to be done. Larger businesses which have many writers may give their writers the opportunity to choose which tasks they take on or might be assigned copywriting tasks which align with their interests.
As a freelance copywriter, you can enjoy even more flexibility as you can choose when and where you work. However, this option doesn’t always guarantee full-time work and requires a high degree of self-motivation, hard work and some knowledge of digital marketing. But once you are a professional copywriter, you can enjoy the benefits of being able to take on the jobs you want and work remotely so that you can work around current commitments and take on as much or as little work as you need.
