Relentlessly helpful - Technical Copywriter John Espirian
John’s freelance career began in 2009 after he was made redundant from his role as a software tester. Struggling to get an interview, let alone a job, he embarked on a new adventure as a technical writer.
Work came via old contacts, family and friends for the first five years, and then John discovered the world of online marketing. He developed his website, began using his skills to create “Relentlessly Helpful” content, and got really good at LinkedIn. “It feels a bit like you’re shouting into the wind at first”, says John, but eventually the referrals and enquiries started coming in.
He chats to Steve about building an online presence, speaking at events, writing a book, working with clients, and being a bit rubbish at the whole work-life balance thing.
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Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with technical copywriter John Espirian and Steve Folland
Steve Folland: Let's get started hearing how you got started being freelance.
John Espirian: Yeah, sure. Well, I've been freelance technical copywriting for, it's just over 10 years now actually. I used to be a software tester for about 10 years. I was made redundant and couldn't get an interview much less a job. So I decided that I would try my hand in writing content for a living. I spent a lot of time reviewing content in-house and poking it and saying this is terrible, I could do a better job. And eventually, I just decided to test it out for six months to see whether I really could and thankfully I'm still here.
Steve Folland: So how did you do that though? You weren't a copywriter to start?
John Espirian: I wasn't, I wasn't.
Steve Folland: No.
John Espirian: No, I was a tester and a quality assurance person. I was the kind of guy who'd run a team that was listening to people's phone calls and reading their emails and making sure that the company said the right thing. That kind of quality assurance stuff. But also with the technical aspect of how does this software work? Is this hardware plugged in correctly? Are these instructions clear? And as I said, I was made redundant, couldn't get that job. And so I thought I'd use that skill of explanation to start creating content for other businesses. And so I used some early contacts from people I had worked with in-house and things spiralled from there. It was enough to sustain me for a few years before I got my website sorted. And yeah, as I say, here I am.
Steve Folland: Let's break that down though. So did you know that a technical copywriter was a thing then?
John Espirian: No, I didn't. I'd read up at the time about technical writing, which is what I initially started calling myself. And technical writing is, it's really the same as technical copywriting. It's the process of making things clear and explaining how things work. As opposed to pure copywriting, which is most often about sales, but it's really about the business of influence. So my skill is in educating people and showing thing how things work as opposed to pushing stuff on you to buy. So I called myself a technical writer for some time. But that lent itself to more heavy work, things like user manuals and massive sprawling website guides. These days I've included copywriter in my title because I'm moving more into the marketing realm of helping people promote their businesses. So technical copywriter was kind of halfway house and that seems to work for me.
Steve Folland: You mentioned that you had a few contacts that you've made food for years, but how did you get those first jobs when it actually came as being a freelance technical writer?
John Espirian: Yeah, so I mean the first jobs were referrals from friends and family and also one of the clients that was linked to my old employer. So that's what got me through probably the first year. That was enough to get the income coming in. And after that, by that time I'd set up what was a pretty basic website to be honest. And I placed a few ads. I didn't have social media for the first five years of my business. So it was a little bit of luck that it kind of worked out and I was able to sustain it long enough before I kind of woke up to the fact of needing to produce content to serve people through Google and use social media. But yeah, the early days, friends, family and old contacts from work.
Steve Folland: Where are you calling yourself a company name? Or were you calling yourself John Espirian?
John Espirian: Well I was registered and still am registered as a sole trader as myself, but I use Espirian because it sounds as though it could have been a made-up company name. It's such an unusual surname.
Steve Folland: It does.
John Espirian: Yes.
Steve Folland: Okay. So you use Espirian-
John Espirian: ... that's right.
Steve Folland: ... as like a company name.
John Espirian: Yeah. And it's easy for me to get usernames and stuff because no one else has got that surname, pretty much. And it's originally Armenian. And so the Armenian alphabet, it doesn't use Roman letters. It uses a completely different set of characters. So there's not even an approved way of writing it in the Roman alphabet. So yeah, it's quite unusual.
Steve Folland: When you were getting started, did you have any knowledge as running a business? Like how did you feel about that side?
John Espirian: Oh, no, none at all. It's just, as I said, it was that, or go on the dole queue. I couldn't get an interview here in South Wales and my daughter had just been born and yeah, I mean it was kind of make it work or have to go on the dole, really that's what we're talking about. And so I made it work.
Steve Folland: And this was 10 years ago. Were these all remote jobs I presume?
John Espirian: Yes. In the early days, we didn't really use, well I'd never even heard of Zoom at the time and was barely using Skype. So sometimes I'd have to go to someone's factory to learn about how a widget worked or something like that. But in the main, the actual writing work would be done at home. And of course that suited me as I had a young child to help look after. So, and it's been more and more that way ever since. And these days I don't really do any kind of client in-person meetings. Everything is done sort of remotely through Zoom now.
Steve Folland: So how did your business evolve? So those first few years it was barely a website, mostly referrals. Well, how did it grow from there?
John Espirian: Yeah, well, I mean the website developed, so I started to get more leads through there. I stopped advertising and I started creating my own content so that I could build something of a content footprint for Google to index. But that didn't really happen until about 2014 and it's been building since then. And that coincides with about the time that I started to get involved in social media. I'd set up a Twitter account in 2010 but it was private for the first four years. I wasn't really sharing any information with anyone. That seemed professional, but it wasn't effective in any way.
John Espirian: And it took until about probably sometime in 2016 when I'd been trying social media, but it hadn't really worked out for me, that I decided to loosen up a bit and show a bit more personality in my content. But also to invest in just one platform rather than trying to be everywhere. Because until then I'd tried Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter and probably a few others and none of them were really returning any results. But when I got serious about LinkedIn towards the end of 2016 start of 2017, that's when things started to work out for me. And then I could stop worrying about so many leads coming in per month. It started to build up from there.
Steve Folland: Ah, cool. When you say you got serious about LinkedIn, what did you start doing or do differently?
John Espirian: Getting serious for me means instead of trying to be in five or six places at once, I would just invest all of my social media time in learning how one platform worked. Learning its foibles and how I could be more visible and build a better network in one place. So that was what really what being serious meant.
John Espirian: And because the essential nature of my job is explaining how stuff works. And a lot of my clients want complete anonymity so I can't really talk about their widget or their credit card or whatever it is that I'm writing about. So what I decided to do was to show off my powers of explanation by explaining how LinkedIn work. So as I was learning the platform, I was sharing the stuff that I'd learned, here's a setting for this or did you know that you can do that? And that got me more views, again, it led to more connections. And of course a small proportion of those connections decided that yes, maybe I could explain how their stuff worked too. And that's what led to a lot more business.
Steve Folland: So you were writing on there, were you trying to connect with certain people or anything? Was there any-
John Espirian: Well I was, I mean in the early days I tried to look for people who ran things like engineering businesses, financial services, the kind of sort of typical B2B fare. But often it was difficult to find those people. I mean I connected with a few, but many of them didn't spend much time on social media. And if they did, they fell into the largest group of online users, which is lurkers. They're there, they're watching what's going on, but they don't really want to interact much. And if you've got someone who's like that, getting a routine to say hello to them and try and start a conversation, it can be difficult. It can be like talking to a blank wall sometimes. So I did try, but it was hard.
John Espirian: And what I found is because I'm a content creator at heart, it just made more sense to signal my presence to people by creating content on a consistent basis. And not very much happened when I started doing that, because not very many people knew who I was and I didn't have a big network. But after about, let's say nine months of doing it consistently, things started to pick up a lot.
Steve Folland: And during those nine months, did you think, "Oh, is this worth me doing it?" Or were you just enjoying it, or was that part of the experiment in itself?
John Espirian: Well, yeah, I mean pretty much on a daily basis I was thinking, "When is this stuff going to work?" But in the year before then, I'd invested in studying content marketing. I joined a couple of marketing membership groups. I'd read a few books and I found that people who had gone down the let's do things organically let's not pay for ads route, they all took time to establish themselves to be known for one thing in one space. And I'd been interviewed by Mark Schaefer for his book Known, which came out in 2017. And I think he interviewed something like 70 plus people for that book. And all of them told him that it took them on average about two and a half years to get known. So once I'd found that out and understood what content marketing was, it was just a case of having faith that these stories were true and then committing to it in the long term.
John Espirian: So my business was already established by then. I wasn't kind of on the bread line, so I could kind of afford to be patient and I knew that my business was going to be around for some years to come. So I thought, "Well, I don't really want to go back to scratching around and having to use ants to promote myself. So let's give this content marketing thing a go." And yeah, as I say, not very much happened to start with, but I kind of had that belief that it would eventually, and indeed it did. And each year since then, it's been snowballing.
Steve Folland: That's so good. If you think back to that, not so much today perhaps, but as you were building all of that, what would a week look like for you? Or a day? I'm just trying to think about how you fit in the work that you're doing on LinkedIn with the actual work. As well as having a family and so on. Like how did you manage your day and your week?
John Espirian: Well that was tough, yeah, really, really tough to be honest with you. And that there were long hours. There still are. But I mean there were particularly long hours back then because I never expected a client to be understanding if I said, "Look my daughter's had to go to the hospital for something." Or whatever. You just kind of knuckle down and do it. So in terms of work-life balance, I don't think I ever was particularly good at that, still am not now really. I do work hard but then I enjoy the work that I do.
John Espirian: But one interesting thing about this I found, is because I did certainly do a lot of volunteering back in the day. And there was one point where I was volunteering so much that I, and my business was busy enough as well at the time, that in 2015 I thought I'm busy with work, I've got my volunteering going on, I'm not going to do my marketing now because I've kind of got things sussed. What that meant was that in 2016 the year after, I had my worst year financially because of the result of having stopped my marketing. So at that point, I decided that that would never happen again. And since then I've been on a constant march to keep my name in people's minds. And keep marketing myself even when I'm busy, which I thankfully am now, because I don't want to go through what I went through in 2016 again.
Steve Folland: So how much time would you say you spend daily? Or I mean, do you do it each day or is it a certain more like a pot of time each week that you spend to the marketing side of things?
John Espirian: Well, I mean if you call the marketing writing blogs that can be found on Google and having a social media presence for example. Those are my main two routes. While I'm kind of thinking about and doing those things on a daily basis, it's not something I put into my calendar, it's just natural for me to be there doing those things. And with LinkedIn, I'm more of a snacker rather than a kind of hour-long block kind of person. So I'll have something that just stays open in a browser tab throughout the day and I'll just kind of check-in to see what's going on. So it's a bit hard to say how much time I spend on there. But I suppose it's sort of between one and two hours a day that I would class as marketing.
Steve Folland: That's so interesting that when you took your foot off the gas marketing-wise that you saw that difference, that lag.
John Espirian: Yeah. Yeah. And, and it lasted most of 2016 to be honest. It was a hard thing to recover from, but it was a great lesson and I'm glad I didn't wait too much further down the line before being stung by that. But yeah, it's one that I keep in mind very often and it's not a mistake I'll ever make again. And if I get a chance to advise people, I would say invest in your branding and your marketing early on and just stick with it and keep sticking with it. Even if it doesn't look like it's doing anything to start with it, it will pay off. And if you keep consistent then, I mean it will pay off in the long, long future as well.
Steve Folland: You mentioned being part of membership groups. How much of that is the done, investing in yourself in that way?
John Espirian: Yeah, I was a member of the Content Marketing Academy, which actually closed its doors last year. But it led me to going to conferences, meeting more people, getting opportunities to write on blogs that I wouldn't have otherwise, appearing in a book that I wouldn't have otherwise. And just taught me the basics of content marketing. So that kind of knowledge and those connections that I made and that stuff that I learned was really, really valuable. So I'm still in another marketing community now called Atomic, which you might have heard of, is run by Andrew and Pete. And it's good for keeping my hand in, giving me a chance to go to an annual conference and learn from others and see what other people are doing.
John Espirian: So these kinds of things aren't cheap. You could, I suppose just buy a load of books and, and do it all yourself, but having community to bounce ideas off, having people to support your content when you post something. It's kind of nice to have that there in the background. I suppose I'm at the stage now where I guess I know all of the basics and it's just a case of keep pushing myself to try and learn more and do better things.
Steve Folland: And obviously a lot of what you were creating on LinkedIn was about LinkedIn, as you say, it was a really smart way of showing that you could write and explain when you couldn't show the sort of stuff in your portfolio. But did that lead to quite a substantial audience then who weren't going to hire a technical copywriter?
John Espirian: Yeah, I suppose it did that, but then also it gave me opportunities to start developing LinkedIn services. So I do things like LinkedIn profile reviews and consultations now. And I mean this year I'm going to be doing a couple of onstage talks and even a LinkedIn in-person training session later in the year. So it has led to a different kind of revenue stream for me as well.
John Espirian: But what I found is that building the network the way I have, I don't really put sales into my process at all. It's meant that even if people who are benefiting from my LinkedIn knowledge don't hire me directly, they're very often the business I get is through referrals from people that they know who would say, that, oh, they're running a B2B. I'm sure they'd be interested in you. I know that you're a good guy, I'm happy to do a warm intro for you. So I've had loads of things like that.
John Espirian: And also in the last year in particular, I've had some business owners coming out of the ether and saying, "We've been following you for 18 months now and I think it's about time that we hired you." So that was always really heartening to hear because in those early months it just seems like you're just shouting into the wind. But those people are there, out there listening and watching. And eventually if you stick around in the conversation long enough, then a proportion of them will de-lurk and will be interested in what you've got to say and sell.
Steve Folland: So how did that feel when you started to consider creating products and services for the LinkedIn audience that you'd created?
John Espirian: Well, to be honest, if I wasn't being paid for being on LinkedIn, I think I probably would still want to do it anyway, it feels like a hobby. It's good fun, there's a good community. I'm interested in the way that things work. And LinkedIn is one of those weird places where things don't always work the way you expect them to. It's not as well invested in as Facebook is. So stuff doesn't always work properly. And that's an opportunity for a nerd to explain stuff. So it's good fun for me. And yeah, it just came naturally, people were asking for it, "I need help on so-and-so." And I was answering so many questions that it made sense that I could codify that into, "Well look, I'll review your profile and tell you the five things that you're doing wrong." Which are the same five things that most other people are doing wrong, for example. Yeah, just felt natural. And I'm still doing that now.
Steve Folland: That's great. And did you use a particular process when it came to managing your time and all that? Do you jump on a call with them if you're reviewing their thing for example?
John Espirian: Well I can do. I mean what I prefer to do is to review things in my own time. If I can do like a recorded video and then send them a password protected link to their own review. But if someone wants to do a live one-to-one consultation with me, then I can do that as well. And then very often I will just keep in touch via direct message or email with those people afterwards to kind of see what they're doing. Because I think a lot of of these things are just kind of once and done. And that's an often not good approach for someone who's learning. They'll get a load of knowledge from you and then try to apply it and then inevitably they'll come across some problems and want to have someone that they can lean on for help. And helping people is really the root of what I like to do. So those consultations often lead to longterm relationships and help after the fact as well.
Steve Folland: Yeah, I like that that so much of it comes from helping. Don't you have a, is it relentlessly helpful? Isn't that your...? I love that.
John Espirian: Yes. That that was a seminal moment in my business actually. I was on stage at one of these marketing events that I was talking about earlier. And there was the last question of the day was how are you going to remain superior and relevant? And they hadn't prepped me for that question at all and it just came out of my mouth. I said, "I'm going to produce relentlessly helpful content." And those words just stuck with me afterwards and I started using them in my marketing. And all of a sudden I noticed people echoing it back to me, which I had never expected and had never happened to me before. And it was almost like the line from a song that someone remembers and repeats back to you. And people say it to me on a daily now. So that's been fantastically good in helping people remember something about me.
John Espirian: If you can get a hook like that into your own business, something that's four or five words long, that is almost like a calling card, a hook from a song that someone could say about you. It has to be like a stock cube. Really. You've got to try and compress all of the good stuff about you into one short, neat phrase, it's not easy. But if you can do that, then it's enormously powerful as a calling card.
Steve Folland: Speaking of calling cards, you've created one of the ultimate ones. You've been writing a book, right?
John Espirian: Yes, that's right. Yeah. It's coming out in April. So that's Content DNA. That is based on the information that the help, the guidance that I give to my copywriting clients. Which is whenever they come to me, essentially they think we're paying for someone to put a load of words on our website. And actually I try and take a step back with those clients and say to them, "What is the DNA of your business? What four or five things do you really stand for? What one thing ties all of that together? What's your place in the world so that we can work out how to present this information."
John Espirian: And then it's a case of taking that shape that we define for the business and applying it consistently in every space, in every social media post and every blog post throughout the website. We put that stamp, that same shape everywhere. And then it's just a case of doing that on a consistent basis so that people come to recognize and remember who you are. So the whole book is based on this idea of congruence, the same shape and consistency, sticking at it for long enough. And that is the route I found over the last decade to being noticed and remembered and preferred.
Steve Folland: Ah, nice. How did you find the writing process? I mean I know you're a writer, but.
John Espirian: Yes, well everyone's who's written a book that I know said it's going to be harder work than you think. And they were right. I was only able to really make time for this on weekends because obviously I had the day job to get on with. So that took about 18 months of writing. I have finished writing now and I'm expecting, in fact, I'm getting the manuscript back from my editor in a few days time. So we'll see how good or otherwise it is. But my beta readers have been giving me some very good feedback. So that's encouraging. But yeah, it was, I would say 18 months with work being done on weekends. And most of those weekends were busy with me either thinking about something to write or editing something I'd already written. And yeah, so that's produced a manuscript that's a little bit over 50,000 words. So it's going to be about 200 pages.
Steve Folland: Wow. Congratulations.
John Espirian: Thank you.
Steve Folland: When you say you were writing on the weekend, like how much time would you be able to give it a weekend?
John Espirian: Oh probably, maybe four hours over the weekend. Something like that. I couldn't really, I'd be too tired to write any more than that. It does take some time. And then often sort of during idle moments during the week you're thinking about, "Oh, should I have said that? Or maybe here's a source I found that I could add to it." So it's never really very away from mind to be honest. But yeah, so it was a bit of a challenge. I'm sure it would have been much harder if I wasn't a professional writer. So the actual writing process wasn't always that difficult to stab the keys. But the constant need to think about it was, I guess was a bit of a drain, but I wouldn't change anything to be honest because I think I'm pretty proud of the result that it's produced.
Steve Folland: It feels to me like, so creating a piece of content is one thing and then promoting it is almost like another. I find that with a podcast. You've just created this massive book.
John Espirian: Yes. Yeah. Doing the marketing for the book, I think well won't be a challenge for me at all. I've tried to do as much of the writing of this in public. Every time I make a, or not every time, but most times that I make a LinkedIn post, it's related to some sort of idea that I've put in the book or I'm thinking about putting in the book. And so judging people's feedback means I know what's going to work, I know what snippets I can take back out and then share later on. I've been sharing the process of self-publishing that I've been going through, which I didn't really know anything about before. And later this month I'll be sharing a complete chapter of the book for free with my email subscribers. And I'm also recording the audiobook. So I'll be sharing a free chapter with that. So I'm trying to do it as transparently as I can and sharing snippets about the book in order to market it, hasn't been a problem at all. It's one of the most fun bits to be honest.
Steve Folland: And you mentioned that you did a talk about LinkedIn.
John Espirian: Yes.
Steve Folland: What intrigued me even more, quite a few people, they ended up giving us a talk, was what I saw you doing afterwards with that talk.
John Espirian: Yeah. So I was invited to speak at Cambridge Social Media Day and I prepped a LinkedIn talk for that session, which ended up being only 45 minutes long. But during my planning I had about three hours worth of content that I could have gone into. And so after the talk and because the talk wasn't video recorded, I thought, well I'd like to share this with more people. And so I came home and kind of did an extended version, if you like, and split it up into three chunks. And then I uploaded it as a private video on Vimeo and started selling it. So I thought there would be enough value to put out, we're talking about 79 minutes of content in total. It was not the kind of thing I wanted to dump on YouTube as a freebie and let people have at it. So yes, I planned it, extended it, recorded it in chunks, upload that and I'm now selling it. So people who don't want to shell out for a full consultation or a profile review can kind of educate themselves by buying the talk and getting up to speak themselves.
Steve Folland: I see. I don't know, maybe this is a thing which seen done plenty of times, but personally, I'd never seen it done before and when I know how much effort goes into creating a talk in the first place, that to, I know, I guess get the most out of all that work.
John Espirian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think I've seen it done before either, but I wanted to share that content somehow and this felt like a natural way to do it. So yeah, it's probably earned me about 2000 quid having done that. So it was worth... Yeah, it took me about a day to do the recordings and uploadings and stuff like that. So it was certainly worth the effort.
Steve Folland: That's so cool. And it was on like a private Vimeo.
John Espirian: Yeah. When you've got a Vimeo pro account, you've got public videos, private videos, but there's also a video on-demand option. So you just select that for your videos, create a free trailer to advertise it, set your price and off you go.
Steve Folland: And I know you did that because as you say, you learn in public, you wrote about doing that.
John Espirian: Yeah, I mean I think that's one of the most interesting kinds of content to be honest is when you don't know it yourself, the best way to get to know it is to try to explain it to others. And if you can do that as you're going along, there's kind of something, I don't know if it's exciting, but there's something real about doing that. I'm not trying to fool anyone, I'm saying, "I'm not sure how this works, but this is what I want to do and here look at me, I'm doing it, I'll fill in the gaps afterwards." Kind of thing. So yes, I like to do a lot of that kind of content and this one seems to have worked pretty well.
Steve Folland: Let's just go back to the actual freelance technical copywriting.
John Espirian: Okay.
Steve Folland: Because as you said, there's like two sides to your business now. Has that evolved at all over the past few years as you've grown in, I guess experience, confidence both in what you're doing, but also in terms of business? How has that changed?
John Espirian: Yeah, I mean I've certainly grown in confidence and experience with that, so I can now, when a customer comes to me, I can tell them, "Look, we're going to start with these 12 briefing questions. I'm going to need to speak to a subject matter expert via an online chat so we can get to the root of what you want to say. Here's what a draft post would look like. Here are my time scales." I can be confident about all of those things.
John Espirian: Also I publish my prices online so there's no hiding place for any of that. If you want to find out how much I charge, just look straight up my pricing page. So all of that stuff, all of my processes, they're pretty well nailed down. The only challenge I have really around that is because I've got so many NDAs for the bigger clients, it means I can't do that kind of classic strip of really high profile client names and logos on my website. I can do some of them. But most of the bigger boys don't want to be named. And that's frustrating because it means that I probably can't maybe grow as much as I could if I could name who they were. But that's what privacy gets you guess.
John Espirian: And my day to day work has shifted more towards the marketing end than towards the techie end. The techie end, even though that's where I started, I started with a computer science degree, it doesn't really appeal to me as much. I prefer the kind of marketing and branding side of things more these days. And that ties in well with promoting yourself on social media, particularly LinkedIn. So it kind of, it ties in that I would write more of that kind of stuff. And so I've started to be asked to write things like short social media updates and short LinkedIn articles as opposed to 300-page user manual for a remote control or whatever.
Steve Folland: It's interesting you said about having your prices on your website. Is that something that you'd always done or that you've added recently and what difference does it make if so.
John Espirian: No, no. Again, that came back to me studying content marketing in 2016 and learning that, which seems so obvious now, that the number one question that clients ask is around pricing. And to save myself replying to people one on one through email or potentially putting people off because if they can't see a price they might just move on. I thought, well let me just put my prices out there. And so I did and it led to a lot more business. So I'm very glad that I did that. I wish I'd done it sooner to be honest. I know there are various reasons why people are reticent to do that. Hesitant. They want to charge different prices to different people or they're worried that their competitors will find out, which that's definitely a phantom worry. But yeah, certainly in my case, I think just being transparent and telling people what I would have told them by email anyway, upfront means I get fewer time-wasters and I can get on with other more interesting things instead of answering such questions.
Steve Folland: And when it comes to price increases, I mean obviously we're recording this in January and there's a lot of chat about pricing at the moment around. How have you upped your rates over the years?
John Espirian: Well, I did something very, very stupid in the early years of my business, which is I held my rates steady for about five years and I have no idea why in retrospect I did that. Trying to be nice, I guess. It didn't really help anyone, certainly not me. So probably around 2017 was when I got serious about I'm going to do a price rise. In fact, I was going to do two price races a year from that point onwards and that's what I've been doing. I haven't done one at the start of 2020 but then I think I'm going to probably wait until my book comes out and fingers crossed there'll be an uptake in interest and then maybe I can be even more choosy with my clients and pricing after that.
Steve Folland: You eventually ended up putting them up twice a year?
John Espirian: Yeah. Yeah. I did do one early in the year and one later in the year.
Steve Folland: Do you have a lot of recurring clients?
John Espirian: No, I don't actually. And one of the reasons I think that is the case is because sometimes I'm commissioned to write a two or three blog posts, for example, for a techie business. I get to know them, I tell them my kind of content DNA formula, I write my content and then put loads of notes in the side so that they kind of learn the process. And after that they could fly alone. So maybe I'm doing myself a disservice. But often I find that clients either have a request for a one-off website write, we need eight pages for this new build and it's a discreet project and then you don't really hear from them again or we have got something ongoing, but we need a few blog posts to get us started. And then of course, once they've seen what I do, they kind of run off and try to mimic that.
John Espirian: So a lot of the work actually isn't recurring. I would like more of it to be, but it hasn't really worked out that way. And because I've been a generalist actually for a long time, it means that I've worked in such bizarre weird industries, from credit cards to luxury handbags and boiler installations. A lot of these people don't sort of mix in the same groups or talk to each other about who they use for what have you. And because it's all wrapped up in anonymity, it's often the case that you just wouldn't get mentioned at all. So a lot of it just tends to be new business. But that's fine cause I've still got interests coming in, so it's all good for now, thankfully.
Steve Folland: I guess it must also help when it comes to putting up rates though, because it's not like you have to have a conversation with a regular client. It's just, it's there on your page, it's gone up.
John Espirian: Yes. Yeah, that's true. And I know from the Professional Copywriters Network do an annual survey of what the average copywriting prices are. And I know, for example, that... I mean the 2020 survey hasn't come out yet, but for 2019 I think the average day rate for copywriters is about £350 a day. So I know that I'm about a hundred pounds a day more expensive than that. But then I know other copywriters who are more than double what I charge. So in the grand scale of things, my prices might be too rich for some people's blood, but I know that there must be money out there for people who are willing to pay a bit more for my decade plus of experience. So.
Steve Folland: Yeah, it's interesting as well. But you described yourself as a generalist, when from the very beginning it felt like by describing yourself as a technical writer, a technical copywriter, you had certainly a niche of writing.
John Espirian: Yes. I mean, yes, there's multiple categories aren't there? It's commercial writing at one extent. And then you drill down into technical writing. But then there are so many potential things you could do. And I could be a technical writer in aerospace, I could be a technical writer in financial services.
Steve Folland: Have you ever been tempted to narrow down?
John Espirian: Well, in fact, that's exactly what I tried to do when I first went freelance, which is to say that I would work in IT because I'd just been doing that for 10 years and it seemed to make sense. But weirdly, there didn't really seem to be any specific interest from the clients who were approaching me anyway. And so I just really took on what I could to pay the bills. And that meant I became more of a generalist. And that's never really gone away.
John Espirian: If I were to start now, given how saturated social media and Google search rankings are, then I'd very much want to have a niche. So now, thankfully, 10 years on, I've got a personal brand that's relentlessly helpful and people kind of know me on LinkedIn as being this helpful copywriter. And that's enough to sustain me. But if I were starting again, I'd definitely want to drill down a bit further than just technical copywriting.
Steve Folland: Before we go, if you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
John Espirian: Oh, invest in your personal brand much, much sooner. I think really that's a big mistake that I made. I took too long to get involved in the conversation and too long to define who I was and trying to be in the public sphere, so I would've just got my personal brand sorted and just got involved in building a better social presence, much more sooner.