Old Dog, New Tricks

In 1990, I took my first freelance writing job. It was a feature article for a regional newspaper. With my new certificate in hand, touting I had completed the Writer's Digest correspondence course, "How to Write Magazine Articles," I wrote. This was the days of the IBM computer complete with MS-DOS and an external modem that sounded like the background soundtrack of a B science fiction movie. This was the age of AOL and email in it's infancy. The editor of the paper and I continued to send copy back and forth by snail mail and editing over the phone for the next three years.

I learned the fine art of copywriting in 1991, when I joined a stable of freelance writers at a medical marketing firm. I learned the importance of the word, "you," and how to answer the question, "What's in it for me." I learned how to write short, without losing meaning and how to tell the difference between benefits and features.

I turned that gig into a three year stint at a full-service advertising agency, complete with client meetings, brainstorming sessions, strategy meetings, and full-page, copy-heavy print ads and collateral materials. It was the days of creative vs admin, we pitched and they either caught the ball or threw it back. Not quite Mad Men, but pretty close.

Now, twenty-some years later, after scaling back to take care of family stuff, I'm trying to get back in the game. Only things have changed. Not just a little, but a lot. The suit-clad creative director, who gave way to the pony-tailed creative director of my hay days, is now the tech-savvy, younger-than-my-own-son creative director. Now, it's not enough to know about the client's USP, I have to know about SEO. The words aren't just in print, they're in cyberspace and I better learn how to navigate it.

This blog is my journey into the brave, new world of freelance copywriting. If you're newly unemployed, if you're wondering if you're too old to compete, if you want to start over, this is the blog for you. I hope to bring my experienced outlook, my time-won patience, and all the lessons I have learned, along with a new playbook, to the game of building my freelance business again. Along the way, I'll offer resources I come across, challenges I face, and tips I hope will pay off for all of us.