About this podcast episode…

SUSTAINABILITY COPYWRITER RAYMOND MANZOR

Irish freelancer Raymond Manzor shares his journey from teaching English in Paris to becoming a sustainability copywriter. 

His freelance career began as a French to English translator, specialising in medical translation. Over time, he transitioned to editing, proofreading, and eventually copywriting.

Raymond discusses his start in freelancing, including cold calling and mailing potential clients. He emphasises the importance of positioning and messaging, sharing his recent efforts to rebrand himself as a sustainability copywriter. (How did he even land on that term?!)

Ray talks about the challenges of creating a website, defining his niche, and the importance of researching market needs before launching his services. All sounds very business like for someone who doesn’t call himself a business owner.

He highlights the value of building a community and networking, particularly on LinkedIn. Treading that balance between chatting to your peers and your potential clients.  He shares how most of his opportunities, including referrals and collaborations, have come through connections made on the platform. Virtual coworking has also played a huge part.

There's so much to learn from Raymond about evolving in our freelance careers. It's a really fun conversation. He's good at chatting - and who knew that would be a key skill when finding work as a freelancer too?

Read a full transcript & get Links in the tabs.

More from RaYMOND MANZOR

Raymond’s freelance website
Raymond on LinkedIn
Raymond coworking with his mum (LinkedIn Post)

More from Steve Folland

Steve on Instagram
Steve’s freelance podcast and video editor site
Steve on LinkedIn
Being Freelance Community
Steve’s regular emails for freelancers
Steve’s course for new freelancers
The Doing It For The Kids podcast

Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland and freelance sustainability copywriter Raymond Manzor

Steve Folland: As ever, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?

Raymond Manzor: I was in Paris. I was teaching English. I hated Paris. I hated teaching English. The trains and all the public transport was on strike. So I was walking in the freezing cold weather in the middle of winter to each lesson and between each lesson. So it was about six hours of walking every day. And one day I came home and I sat down at the table and took out a piece of paper and a pen.

I said, what do I want in my life? So I said, I want to be able to work from anywhere. Because I was thinking of getting out of Paris, but I didn't want to change job again. And I don't want to work with people. Yeah, I was sick of putting time into planning a lesson, and then someone comes in, they've had a bad weekend, and they decide, I'm just going to mess this up for this guy, he's annoying me.

So I said, right, no more people, I'm going to work with an object. So I thought of carpentry, plumbing, farming. I had a list. I can't remember what else was on it. Random stuff where you're just on your own. You don't have to deal with people. And then I went to look at my skills and I thought, well, I don't have any skills in any of it.

At the time, I had no skills in any of those areas. So I wrote down reading was my first skill, which was kind of useless. But then I thought as a connection from that, I had this vague idea that maybe I was good at writing. Someone had called my writing sharp once in my life. I thought, yeah, maybe, and I did like writing stuff.

So I put down writing and on a whim, I said French as well, because I was living in France. I didn't speak French, but I thought I'm going to take lessons. I plopped all that into Google and up came translator job description. So I read that and I said, that sounds amazing. So I decided to study French. Go back to uni, do a masters.

I finished in 2012. Moved home to my home village (in Ireland) , which is where we are now. There was no agencies, there's no town, there's no work basically for anyone who works in an office. So it was freelance or, or go bust, or start working for the post office, which wouldn't be that bad actually, but I didn't want to work for the post office.

So it was freelancing and I've been doing that ever since.

Steve Folland: So, so how did you get those first freelance clients as a translator?

Raymond Manzor: Cold calling. I just picked up the phone, like, shaking. I could barely hold the phone to my mouth. I had to hold the phone with two hands to stop it from shaking. Of course, I couldn't stop my voice from shaking. I started ringing agencies, saying, Hello, my name is, I do this. Do you have any work? After about three cold calls, one of the agencies said, Yeah, here, you can have a job.

And I did it. And they liked it. Well, they loved it. And that was the first big buzz of being paid. To do something I really liked. Because I had so many jobs I had done before where I hated it. Not as much as I hated school, but I hated going to work. And this is the first time I thought, I actually want to do this.

And people are going to give me money to do it. So that was back in July 2012.

Steve Folland: So how did that progress from there? Because obviously I didn't introduce you as a translator. You'd gone to a lot of trouble to study and become a translator.

Raymond Manzor: I had two years full time study, well and teaching on the side as well to pay my way. So how did I go from there? So 2012 translation 2013 I had started working with a medical communications agency, a lot. And I realised I was more comfortable with medical stuff than anything else, so I went into medical translation.

And from there I was thinking, there's other stuff I can do with this, there's skills I'm not selling, but that are going into my work. And one of those was, editing and proofreading. So I did a distance course in proofreading with a place called Publishing Training Centre and started telling people, by the way, I can proofread as well.

They said, okay, great. So they sent me stuff to copy edit, which wasn't my course at all, but it actually suits my skills more, but it wasn't what I was trained to do. So I started copy editing stuff that was directly written in English rather than translation from French to English.

Well, that paid better, actually. And I was able to do it faster. So I started going, well, I'm onto something here. So I started editing more and that continued all the way up to about 2019. With a kind of a break around about 2015, 16, my son was born. My wife went back to uni for a year. I stopped marketing my services completely.

I just started doing the work that was coming in. I just did the client work and then took care of my son and split my time with my wife and her studies and, and exams and stuff, and all was going well to 2020. And then it all went big crash because I had stopped marketing myself. 2019 was my best year ever, money wise, 2020 was supposed to be the year when I'd go after the premium clients.

I said, I have this really solid base now and I'm going to pick and choose who I want to work with. And then COVID hit and I had planned on going networking, going to events, conferences, that kind of stuff. That was all cancelled. And so that all had to be put on hold. But what happened was I discovered a video on LinkedIn, two translators talking about how they got their clients through networking and being present on LinkedIn.

I had an account since 2012, but I never did anything with it. So I did a mini course, two mornings of how do you use LinkedIn as a translator. I put up my first post. And I thought that was a lot of fun. Just the blank screen, I'm totally in charge, A to Z, because I'd been kind of dancing around writing for ages.

I was translating things, I was copy editing, I was proofreading, sometimes rewriting, suggesting things. I don't know if this paragraph is really relevant, given that you want to do this and that. To actually just write my own thing, and no one had told me what to do, and no one could tell me what to do, that was intoxicating the first time I did it.

And to get immediate feedback from people was also a bit of a hit. It's a bit of an addiction. So I started meeting lots of people on LinkedIn, but I felt that particularly the translation community was very uptight. It's very serious. And then at the same time I had never heard of content writers or copywriters or anything, even though I was translating their work.

I discovered two things that A, when I was being paid a certain sum to translate a piece of copy, the copywriter was being paid double, triple or quadruple what I was making. I discovered that by talking to clients and they said, obviously copywriters are on much more. But then. I thought, okay, the copy doesn't exist without the copywriter, but then the copy doesn't exist in another language without the translator.

So I found this really unfair. But at the same time, I just found that copywriters and content writers were a lot more laid back, a lot more welcoming, a lot more fun, a lot more, don't worry about being perfect, just do it. And every time you do it, you get a little bit better. And just laughing and having a good time.

And I just, I liked the community more. It suited my personality because deep down, I'm not a perfectionist. I'm not a grammar Nazi. I've been trained to do it, but that's, that's not who I am. I liked the writing and I wanted to make more money. You talk to other translators, they'll tell you everyone's leaving the industry because of the pay, because of AI.

I mean, AI has been around in translation for a lot longer than in writing. It's gone a lot further. It's a lot more powerful and people have been asked to do stuff they don't like doing. So like, if you go on LinkedIn, you see a lot of people say, Translator and something else. So I decided to make a switch towards something that I enjoyed more, which was writing copy, content, and sustainability is, I suppose, the last step in my switch.

And that was because I was doing medical still, but I came to a point where if I really wanted to go further with writing, I'd have to do some kind of training in biology or medicine or some medical technology. And I thought, I don't want to do that. I don't read the medical journals in my spare time.

It's really interesting. I learned a lot. Most of it scared me, to be honest. It's turned me into a hypochondriac. But it's not my passion. My passions are fiction. If it's going to be reading, it's fiction. Or sustainability. I read about sustainability. I watch webinars. I attend webinars. I watch documentaries.

Every time I talk to my wife, it's about, should we use this type of stove? Or that type of heating system. You know, where should we plant these things? Should we get goats or sheep? The pros and cons of each animal? The answer is goats. Sheep are a disaster.

Steve Folland: ha!

Raymond Manzor: Goats are a disaster, but they're lovable. Sheep are a disaster.

My whole life was sustainability. So I thought, well, if, if I'm going to lean into something I really know a lot about. Then it's a sustainable lifestyle, which is never perfect. It's always evolving. It's not that I've come to the end of my learning, but that's what I do all the time outside of work.

And also, I didn't want my work to be, because what you do as a job is really important for sustainability because you can be really sustainable in your life and then go and work for a bank that's investing their clients portfolios in fracking, in mining, in oil, in the arms industry or anything, you wouldn't know.

So I wanted my knowledge of sustainability to be a point of differentiation in my work, but I also wanted what I did as a job to be contributing to what I do in my life. So that's how I went all the way from medical translator in 2012 to sustainability copywriter in 2024.

Steve Folland: This started in Paris, then you went back to Ireland?

Raymond Manzor: No, I studied in Strassburg. Which is in France, , in case anyone doesn't know. I didn't even know Strassburg was in France. Then moved back to Ireland for five years, then moved back to France. Been there six years. And now we're back in Ireland for a year as well.

Steve Folland: Okay. Did you have to leave the goats in France when you came back to Ireland,

Raymond Manzor: We haven't got the goats

Steve Folland: Oh right, still arguing that one.

Raymond Manzor: No, we did have sheep. But no, we left the geese and the ducks in France. They've been literally farmed out to other people who already have geese and ducks. And the two cats came with us. And they're miserable. They're used to 40 degrees and they love it. And now it's 15 and it's raining.

Steve Folland: All right, do you know, I have to ask you about this. First, starting with the medical because it's, it sounds quite easy to go, Okay, so I became a medical translator or medical writer or whatever. But presumably there's more to it than that. Like, how did you start to position yourself as that?

Raymond Manzor: Well, I didn't start to position myself. I just landed work in that field, pure fluke. I mean, I remember when I finished the last day when I qualified as a translator, I was sitting with two Americans. And they said, in, in translation, niching is a really big thing. You can't just go into translation as a translator.

You have to be some kind of translator. They said, what niche are you going to go for? And I said, well, one thing's for sure. I'm never doing medical. It was my famous words. I had my prejudice and, and it turns out that it was as always baseless. Someone referred me to this lady who runs a medical communications agency and she said, would you like to translate research papers?

And so that's what I did for nine months. I think that's all I did - two or three of those papers a month. And then I was asked to do something else completely unrelated like plasterboard or aluminium cans or something really random, toilet seats or something. I remember thinking, ooh, I'm looking up a lot of stuff I wouldn't be looking up if this was another medical paper.

And I realised I was just more comfortable with the medical stuff.

Steve Folland: Hmm.

Raymond Manzor: So I thought, well. I've got a skill now. I might as well use it. So I went after other medical clients

Steve Folland: By cold calling?

Raymond Manzor: By cold calling and then cold mailing, literally mailing, not emailing.

Steve Folland: What, as in actually sending a letter?

Raymond Manzor: Typing up a letter, sending a letter, including a sample with the letter, a one page sample.

And then following up a week later with a phone call to say, just checking - I sent a letter to so and so. Because you have to, when you call, you have to get past the gatekeeper. The assistant or the PA or whoever, and they don't want you to talk to the person you want to talk to, so you say, no, they're expecting my call, and they say, oh, okay, so they put you through, and then the person answers, hello, the deep voice or the, the power voice, and you say, yeah, I sent you a letter about two weeks ago, I just want to make sure that you got it, and they say, yes, I got a letter, was that you?

And then you're away. Because no one sends letters.

Steve Folland: Right! This is what I'm thinking. So this was your technique, was the fact that nobody gets letters, who doesn't like to get a letter, especially if it's not from the government.

Raymond Manzor: Some people, a few people told me to get lost. They said, yeah, we're not interested. They didn't hang up. They allowed me to say, okay, goodbye. And then they hung up. But most people were very surprised. And they just thought it showed that you were putting a bit of effort into it. There's obviously an email, you just send it off.

If it's a letter, you know, you're taking time, you're going to print it, you make sure it comes out right and there's no spelling mistakes and there's no weird formatting issues or anything. So it was, yeah, it just stood out. And I got a good few, but I think back in those, 'back in the day', way back in 2012 to 2015, people were just open to... they didn't just give you work, but you could just contact people and they'd say, yeah, yeah, we have work. We'll try you on this small project and see how it goes.

I find that the world is very different now. People are much more reluctant to spend on things. I think they're more afraid of what's going to hit them next. So that was a golden age of coal pitching.

Steve Folland: So, eventually you decide, actually I don't want to keep doing this medical stuff. I'm going to follow what I'm interested in. And what might make a difference in the world in the form of sustainability.

Raymond Manzor: What I know, like, not 'what I know', I knew a lot about medical just from doing it. You have to do the research to do the work. The work was good. So I had learned a lot, but it was always kind of piecemeal. I knew everything about a very specific topic. And then a week later, I'd forgotten it all.

Whereas sustainability was this constant thread throughout my whole, the last, say, 15 years of my life, and even when something specific comes in that might be technical, I don't know much about 'carbon markets', but I can give you a deeper level, a deeper view of carbon markets because that's come to my knowledge and I've looked into it.

Yeah, it's, it was my interest, it was my passion, but it was also my knowledge. I knew I could go further and further with that knowledge. That would give me an edge over others.

Steve Folland: And how did you position yourself then? How did you make that change so that people knew that that was what you were doing and reaching out to clients then?

Raymond Manzor: I came out on LinkedIn. No, I started saying it to people. I think it's really important to say what you want. So my mom and my wife keep introducing me to people as a French to English medical translator and I keep saying, no, 'sustainability copywriter'. And they go, yeah, whatever, whatever. I say, no, no, what you put out into the world is what's going to come back.

So if you keep telling people that you're doing a thing that you don't want to do anymore, that's gonna keep coming back to you. So that was one thing, it was just to start saying it to people. With the Freelancer Magazine co working sessions, I started introducing myself as a 'climate writer' and no one raised an eyebrow.

I was expecting people to say, no, you not! you're lying! So there was plenty of imposter syndrome that came with introducing myself as something that I was new to. And then I did my coming out in LinkedIn, I think sometime in 2023, can't remember when, changed my LinkedIn profile, changed who I was connecting with, completely changed what I was writing about on LinkedIn.

I haven't posted about translation in a long, long time, but I've been posting consistently about climate, environment, copywriting for about a year and a bit now. So within say two months, I could see that the connection requests were different, different people, different profiles, different conversations.

And so that was another way of doing it. The big thing at the moment for me is a new website, which is taking a lot longer than expected because someone said, you need a website, you need to go somewhere that's just your own. People can see what you're about, what you get, how much it costs, how you get it.

So I said, okay. But the amount of introspection that it's taken to say, well, who am I? What do I do? How is it different from what other people do? So then that leads to competitor analysis, positioning. What are the people doing? It's going on, making a list of people going on their websites. Okay, they're good at this. They don't do so much of that. They do the same thing here, but they're focusing on a different aspect of this particular thing to what I do.

And then messaging. So then you buy a book about positioning. Then you buy a book about messaging. But it's all feeding my knowledge anyway. It's all useful, but it just, you kind of want to get the thing out and it's not as easy as that.

 One thing that someone said recently a positioning expert called April Dunford, I think, an American lady, she was talking about product launches and she said, we do a pre launch with a product. We get a hundred people to use it, we get their feedback, and then we do the real launch. When we go to market with the pre launch, it's always a hypothesis.

You have a landing page, but the landing page is a hypothesis of what people want. We don't really know what people want until you ask them. So that took a huge weight off my shoulders when I realised that I didn't have to have everything figured out, that I could just.. get the website to a point where I think, I'm happy with this, this is a strong offering.

And now I'm just gonna cold pitch a hundred climate organisations, sustainable brands, maybe climate tech companies, because a lot of people do that already, and tech isn't... it's not that I don't care, but... but I don't really care about tech. It's not my thing. I can see it's really interesting to talk about messaging because I don't get tech so I'd really like to work on bringing into just normal plain language. What does this thing do? And not using words like accelerate and leverage and all this rubbish.

So I'm just going to pitch to a lot of people and going to email followed up with a cold call. Tell the gatekeeper that my call is expected, get to the person, and even if they say no, try and make it not so much about, I want you to buy my thing, but, this is what I do, but what are you doing at the moment? What's difficult? What are you planning on doing in the next six months? What are you excited about? And just see what they say. And then hopefully they'll come back and say, well, you could fit in here, but I don't think what we're looking for is this, it's more of that. And you go, ohhh, and you note it down.

And then eventually I'll do my big launch on LinkedIn and say, this is it. But when I've got a clear feedback on what people need.

Steve Folland: So that's the process you're going through at the moment.

Raymond Manzor: Yeah, it's a painful process.

Steve Folland: I will say, I love your website.

Raymond Manzor: You haven't seen my website, have you?

Steve Folland: Well, I have seen a website, so if it's not your website...

Raymond Manzor: How do you even? You just typed 'Raymond Manzor', did you? Okay. Okay. This is slightly scary, but exciting at the same time.

Steve Folland: Do you not link to it anywhere?

Raymond Manzor: I have a link to it from LinkedIn. I haven't told anyone about it except for one person.

Steve Folland: Oh my god, Raymond!

Raymond Manzor: I've not finished it. Like it changes every day.

Steve Folland: But that's okay because what is already there is brilliant. It's so personable. I loved it, okay? And the funny thing is, so there will be a link to it from this episode, so be aware that obviously it's going to change over time, but already, frankly, it's a really great website and I look at a lot of them.

So I introduced you as a 'sustainability copywriter', but there was a point there where you said you were on Freelancer Magazine co working and introduced yourself as a 'climate writer'. So is that identity in itself something you've played with?

Raymond Manzor: It is. 'Climate writer', I find much easier to say. It's much shorter. Everyone talks about climate. Sustainability is a bit vague, I think. Environment is almost a bad word at this stage. People don't want to hear about it. But climate I think everyone can relate to. Even Donald Trump will use the word climate.

He won't use sustainability. And 'writer' I like because I had a big mental block about saying copywriter for a long time because I associated copywriting with just advertising and content writing with just content, with just blogs and articles and things like that.

And then I said, Oh, whatever. I just, I found writer useful because it was neither one nor the other. It was open. And as I said, I'm going through the pre launch phase. So I don't want to be vague. I do have two ideal clients, two groups I'm pitching to, and they're related, but I did, I especially didn't want to use the word copywriter. If no one understands what that means. You go to... I mean, Greenpeace do understand copywriting, they have a whole team, but another non profit, they might not naturally type the word copywriter into Google.

 I didn't know what a copywriter was until 2020. So that led me down then into the dark black hole of SEO, search marketing. And I thought, well, what are people going to type? And I went, I use SEMrush. I went on SEMrush and there was no search volume for climate writer, or very, very little.

And if it did come up, it was usually climate journalism, which is not what I want to do.

So I went looking in SEMrush which is an SEO tool and there is a 'sustainability copywriter'. So it's purely for SEO reasons. And when I typed it into Google and I went doing search there, I found a lot of people I knew and already respected who are doing very similar things to me. They're technically my competitors, but they're also my peers.

And some of them are. I don't know if they're friends yet. Some of them would be friends. Some of them I chat to. So I thought, this is where I belong. It's not that I'm hanging out with them, but if this is where they're all hanging out in Google, then I need to be in the same group. This is where people are going to find us.

So, sustainability copywriting became the word. I find it longer, harder to say. But, apparently, this is what people are saying. If that's what people are saying, then that's what I would say.

Steve Folland: Do you know though, some people would have just stuck with what it was rather than digging in and doing the research to find out..

Raymond Manzor: Yeah, I know, but I don't, I feel very uncomfortable. The same thing in, in copywriting. You hear a lot about persona, 'buyer persona' and stuff when we're in a brainstorm, who's the person who's going to buy our product. I think this is just a load of guessing. We don't know who this person is. And even when you put the persona together, you can give them a face and everything, but they're still not real.

So I just thought, I'm a recovering perfectionist. But I definitely do believe that Okay, let go of perfectionism, but that doesn't mean that you just go into 'whatever', 'let's just guess', 'I reckon it's this'. I'm going to have some fun with it. Let's have some fun, but let's still do our research. So that's why I'm now a sustainability copywriter.

Steve Folland: Throughout all of this, have you known what you're doing, like business wise?

Raymond Manzor: I don't even understand that question. Understanding what I'm doing business wise? I honestly don't know. I would say my gut instinct would be no, I don't. It's not that I don't have a clue what I'm doing. I know what I want. I don't always know how to get there, but I reckon that everything I learn about how to get there is also feeding the knowledge that I can then pass on to clients.

In my masters in translation, we had the core modules in translation. We had some theory stuff. And then we had tutorials in bookkeeping, pricing, working in house, working freelance, dealing with late payments, communicating with clients, educating clients. We had loads of stuff and it was all really useful until I left France, came back to Ireland, and I was in a little village, and I realised that no one knew who I was, and no one cared what I did.

At all. It was irrelevant. I was irrelevant. I was nobody. Now, at the time, I think the solution was go out there and meet people. That was something that we didn't quite learn in our Masters. They would have called it networking. We did stuff about networking, but I hated the word networking. It sounded so insincere and icky. But if people had said 'community', then I think it might have made more sense to me at the time. And that was definitely where I was really lost, was this realisation that this is a classic example of going to the market with a product thinking people already want your product and you just have to say, Hi, I'm a translator and they'll give you work.

They say, that's great. We need a translator. And then I realised, well, people don't know what a translator is. They do need it, but they don't know it. And so we had never done anything about positioning, never done anything about messaging. I knew how to set my rates. I knew how to defend them. Day one, I had people saying, that's a bit expensive for us.

Would you consider lowering your rates? And I said, That's the standard market rate and it was, in hindsight, it was dirt cheap because it was translation and in other fields having spoken to people even who trained as translators and immediately gave it up when they realised how badly paid people were so there were a lot like pricing, business, where to find clients.

I had, we had ideas, but definitely it was very superficial. I had an idea of where I might go and I would look at that and I would find three and I would cold call them and they would all say, no, no, we don't need anything like that. And I would say, well, that's that whole industry gone. I didn't know how to keep digging, how to get the, get to a potential client and just look at the CEO and contact them because I found that sometimes the CEO isn't interested in anything.

But if you can dig a little bit deeper, And you find the marketing manager, and then you dig a little bit deeper again, you find the marketing assistant, who isn't the decision maker, but is much more at your level. And then you connect with them, and you get to know them, and then through them you get to know the manager, and then you might start pitching.

All of these things were, yeah, I never heard of them. I had no idea it worked like that. I had no idea that just being sociable and going out and meeting people and not selling, but just getting to know them and asking them, not even about work, but do you own a goat? How is your goat? Do they make as much, as much noise as my goats?

All this kind of stuff is just, it's just, because I'm good at, as you can tell, I'm pretty good at chatting. I didn't think, I didn't think that would be a skill that would be useful. Yeah. And now I realize just how useful it can be.

Steve Folland: So where do you get to chat to these people about goats, or anything else?

Raymond Manzor: You mean now? It would be LinkedIn. A lot of people now I discover through the comment sections on the posts of people that we both admire, or at least be friends with. And then you go into the DMs and you realise you've got lots in common. And then you start seeing their posts and you comment and it becomes a friendship and then you bump into them at a webinar and you have the chat section, you know, a thousand comments as someone's talking about something.

And I say, hi, logging in from wherever. And then someone else would say, Hey Ray..., you go oh hey!. So there's things like that. Meeting people in person, which has been, I mean, COVID put a stop to a lot of stuff. Then I was really busy with something in my personal life for about two years after that, I had no time really to be meeting people. And then after that I've met, there was a group of translators near my home and they just said, 'why don't we meet and have a pizza?' And that was, it was just such a relief to sit down beside someone and chat to them and discover that they have a torso and legs and everything.

And shoes. I'm always fascinated by people's shoes. They're just not what I expected them to wear at all. And yeah. I know their voice. I know their face. That's about it. And then meeting other people, meeting people in person, as I said, I'm going to meet a lot of people in November when I go to CopyCon in London.

So I can't wait for that. Things like co working online has been a great way of meeting people. So yeah, like many people now, 99 percent of it is online, but I like to, maybe before I would have been shy about it, but now I really like to push it. Not just meet someone in a co working session and then say, well that's it.

I'll send the connection. I'll add a note. We'll start talking in the DM. Whenever I can, I really like to send people links to things. This might, you know, I know you're into this. Have a read of this thing I saw came up. Tagging them under a post. If I can refer them, that's amazing.

So that's how I meet people, mostly, I think, and that's the biggest difference. The number of people now who know me as a sustainability person, when my own wife and mother don't, even though I've told them a million times. And it's just, yeah, just being there, being out there and saying a thing again and again.

'Hello, I do this. What do you do?'

Has had an impact that I just would have laughed off when I started freelancing. I would have said, nah, that's all waffle. I was, in a way, I was just cold pitching. I was, I was in my corner doing my thing, being Mr. Independent. I don't need anyone. And anything good that's happened in the last, even this podcast has only come around because we met in a co working session, and that only happened because I was connected with the person who started those co working sessions, and I was connected on LinkedIn, and only because I was connected with other people she knew.

So, I have my accounts on a spreadsheet and I put a little blue colour, a little tab beside every single piece of work that's come from LinkedIn.

And I never, I don't just post and say, hi, I do this and then people come in, DM you and say, we'd love you to do this for us. That's never happened, but it's always been referrals, being tagged under a post that someone says we're looking for such and such a thing and someone says, I know Ray does this and they tag me and it's a thing.

So it's come in so many different ways, but every time I think not possible without LinkedIn, not possible without a community of people who know what you do. And more importantly, yes, they need to know what you do so they can refer you easily. But they need to like you. So you've just got to be a nice person.

Encourage people. Chat to people. Check in from time to time. This, I find it, at times, my wife says, what did you do this morning? And I haven't had any client work. Say like for a day or a week. And I feel like saying, Oh, you know, I made 10, 000 euros today. You can go and buy that yacht.

But then I say, no, no, I was on LinkedIn. She was like, what are you doing on LinkedIn? I was like, well, I was, I was just checking in with my community. And she's like, what a load of waffle. I say, no, really, this, this is possibly the most useful way of spending my time.

Not just that -you can't just have friends, you have to go out there and say, by the way, so everyone's clear, this is what I do, this is who I want to work for. So that people can still see you as a thing, and they put you in a box and they take you out when they need you.

But yeah, so I, I have a much better idea of, I wouldn't say I still even, I'm not a business person. Yes, that was when you asked me about business, when I started in 2012 and there was a power cut.

It was autumn. I was sitting beside the fire, staring into the flames. I said to myself out loud, I don't know anything about business. I know how to translate. I know where to go for people to pitch. I know how to set my rates. I know how to invoice. But I don't know how to sell myself. I don't even know where to start.

So. If someone said, are you an entrepreneur? I would say no, definitely not. Are you a business person? No, I'm not. And yet I own a business,

But that doesn't really bother me. I don't get imposter syndrome or anything. I like saying I'm a freelancer. Whenever I sign up for a webinar, they say, what's your... and I know that there's high power people going to the webinar and they're going to have these amazing job titles like Head Of Search at Microsoft or something.

I just type in freelancer.

Yeah. Because that's how I see myself. I like the word, I like this idea that I'm... I'm not mercenary, but you know, someone available for hire who comes in and helps you with something and then moves on and does something else.

Steve Folland: It does sound that there's a sweet spot of your peers, like getting to know your peers online and in person. But also, crucially, people at companies as well who might need you.

Raymond Manzor: Mm. It's, it's a fine balance, definitely. I think I've definitely fallen into the trap of, say, creating content for my peers. Because I know that clients are mostly watching in the background, but they're never going to like anything. I think some cases when it was blatantly obvious what I was doing and who I'm looking for, if a client came in and commented on your post.

They knew then I would go and send a connection request and then who knows I might follow up with a pitch and they say I don't, I don't, I don't need this person right now. So I know there's people out there looking, but what I found is that you get the best traction when you say something that's going to appeal to people in your community. Who are like minded and who share the same interests.

And so that often ends up being your peers. And I know a lot of people say, you're not selling to your peers, you're selling to your clients, you have to create stuff for your clients, which is true in a way, especially if it's a website. My website should not be for my peers. It shouldn't read like, I'm trying to impress other sustainability copywriters. It's supposed to be all about the person who's going to buy from me.

When it comes to content on LinkedIn. I don't see why you wouldn't write stuff for your, it doesn't have to be for your peers. I would hope with sustainability, I don't always write about copywriting. I definitely always write about sustainability. Is that it will appeal to people beyond the niche of copywriting. The idea is that these are people who will interact because they know that I'm not selling to them and they can just get in and chat and we can get to know each other and there's no stress. There's no pressure to do anything.

But they're the people who refer me and 99 percent of anything - not just work, work, yes, doing a podcast with you Steve writing an article for the European Medical Journal, these things just came from peers, practically always, and some of them have referred me for work without... they've never seen my work, but they just like me and they trust me.

They say, Hey Ray, I saw this, would you think you'd be interested?

So yes, this fine line between right, like talking to your peers and talking to your clients. I am going to do a lot of cold pitching in the next few weeks and over the next few months. And that will be all for my clients.

The pitch will be all about the client. The website's all about the client, but on LinkedIn, in co working, I don't see why it's not connecting with peers and building a huge network of people around you who can refer you, who can advise you, who can support you, and who are just there kind of looking out for you a bit.

I think it's much more important to be known by lots of people, and they're clear what you do, than only be known by people who are going to buy from you. Because it's a small number in the end and they won't do anything. They won't support you. They won't talk to you unless they need you.

That could be a year away, you know, in the meantime, you're there posting getting one like from your mum which is nice. Thanks mum. But the clients only see you if you get enough traction, you only get enough traction if you're connected with people who share your interests.

Steve Folland: Nice. Okay. If you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?

Raymond Manzor: Can I say three things? Because I have a lot of things I'd say to myself if I could do it all over again.

Number one, you're ready now. Don't wait.

Number two would be don't be someone else. Because I spent a lot of time, not wanting to be someone else, but thinking, I wish I could do that. I wish I could be like this. I wish I had their positioning, their messaging, their design, their brand, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, no, but I'm unique myself. Everyone's unique. So just be yourself.

And the last one is don't make decisions out of fear.

I've made too many of those. Luckily, I have a very brave wife. She just says, Ray, F it, just do it.

I'd say, okay, yes, let's go.

Steve Folland: Raymond, it's been so good to talk to you and all the best being freelance!

Raymond Manzor: Thank you, Steve.

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