Every business owner who hires a professional copywriter dreams of walking away with stellar copy that makes a meaningful connection with her Right People, but unfortunately, not every copywriting project goes smoothly or gets the desired results.

What can you, as the client, do to make sure you’re making a wise investment and starting off on the right foot with your copywriter?

In the spirit of education, here are are 13 things to know and do before you hire a copywriter.

1. Know what business you’re in. I can not stress enough how critical this is to the copywriting process going well.

2. Know what business you’re not in. Figure out which of your ideas are better off left for another business concept down the road.

3. Understand your Right People — the ideal clients you want coming to your site because they’re likely to hire you or buy from you.

4. Know why you’d rather work with a copywriter than write your copy yourself. Communicate this to your copywriter during the vetting process, before signing a contract. This helps establish mutual expectations for the working relationship and helps ensure that the process will go well and you’ll get the end result you want.

5. Know what pages you want to have written. Do you need or want a traditional Home page, like this, or do you want your blog to be your site’s landing page? Do you want a separate About page and Contact page, or do you want to roll your contact info on to your About page? Do you want to sell all of your products and services from one page, or will you have a separate products landing page and services landing page, with text links leading to longer and more in-depth sales pages for each specific offer? Get your Pages Needed list down on paper. Draw it out like a map if you’re a visual thinker. Don’t expect the copywriter to be able to ‘diagnose’ your business and tell you what pages you need.

6. Know what you want your site visitor to do on each page of your site. Think: one page, one goal. For example, on your About page, your Call To Action (i.e. what you’re asking the site visitor to do) might be to have people click through to your Services page. On your Services page, your Call To Action might be to have people click the Book a Session button, or send you a contact form. Note: It’s your job, not your copywriter’s job or your web designer’s job, to figure out what you want people to do on each page of your site. If you’re not sure what you want people to do on your website, you’re not ready to invest in a web design or web copy.

7. Ask your network for referrals to good copywriters. Use social media to ask who people you already know, like, and trust have worked with. Look for recommendations on other business owner’s websites (occasionally, you’ll find a copywriting credit in the site footer, along with the web designer’s credit). Check out many different copywriters’ sites to get a feel for how people work, the ‘default’ voice they write in (as many times, this voice will bleed into the copy they write for you), and check to see if they have samples of past work on their site.

8. When you find a few copywriters you like the looks (and the vibe and the voice of), Google their name to see what other people have said or written about them. Check out their testimonials closely and email their past clients to get a fresh take on the work they had done for them, and the results they got. Read interviews they’ve given to learn more about their philosophy on writing, business, branding, and marketing (all important components of a copywriter’s point of view and level of expertise).

9. Familiarize yourself with rates for good, professional, experienced copywriters. These days, it’s tough to find a copywriter in a competitive market who bases her project rates on less than $100/hour. Some copywriters in my circle of colleagues charge up to $200/hour for their work. That might translate to $500 for a home page, or $1000 for an About page, or $5000 for a sales page, if a writer is highly experienced with proven results. Note: It doesn’t matter whether it takes your copywriter an average of 2 hours or 4 hours to write a page of web copy. The work of copywriting is about delivering value, and rates are based on the value the copy adds to your online presence, not the writer’s word count or her speed. For this reason, most experienced pro copywriters charge by the project, at a project rate, not by the hour.

10. If you’re having your web copy written while your site design is in-progress (as opposed to finishing the copy before you start your web design), make sure your web designer knows you’re reaching out to copywriters and that the copywriter’s start and finish date may impact the site launch date. Don’t assume a writer can whip up copy for you in a week. Most active pro copywriters can start a client in anywhere from a week to a few months’ out. Always plan ahead and allow way more time for your project than you assume a copywriter would need. And always, always ask and clarify timeframes and turnaround times.

11. Be prepared to invest time in the copywriter’s intake process. If you’re getting ready to leave on a big family vacation during which you won’t be working, or you’re in a really heavy season with your own business and have little flex time in your schedule, this is probably not the best season for you to start working with a copywriter. Some copywriters prefer to do intake over the phone, and others prefer to work via written intake questionnaire. (Note: The copywriter’s preference trumps yours here, because she’s the one collecting the info and needs to do it in a way that makes sense to her brain and her creative process.) Make sure you know what you’re getting into with your copywriter in terms of an intake process, and make yourself available.

12. Understand what the copywriter’s revision process is like. The revision process can be one of the stickiest spots in a client’s relationship with her copywriter, due to misunderstandings about how the process will work. While there are working copywriters who welcome written collaboration with clients — I’ll write some, then you write some, then I’ll edit what you wrote and send it back to you — but most pro copywriters I know prefer their clients to leave the wordsmithing to them. After all, that’s why you’ve hired a pro writer, right?

13. Understand what great copy can and can not do. Great copy can make your site visitors say anything from, “Hey! That’s great copy! Who’s your copywriter?” to “Ohmygosh, I want copy just like hers for my site,” to “Dude, THIS is the guy I want to hire to help me with X, Y, or Z.” (In the case of your Right People, it’ll be the last one.) Great copy can help your Right People site visitors feel seen, witnessed, and understood. Great copy can lay the foundation for the relationship you want with your Right People readers and clients. Great copy can help you stand out in the marketplace and appear relevant in search engines. Here are some things great copy can not do (because these results depend on other factors, not solely the copy): make you an online superstar, guarantee you’ll rank on the first page of Google for your desired search terms, guarantee that you’ll sell as many of your products and services as you’d like to. Don’t get me wrong: great copy can help you do all of those things, but great copy doesn’t work in a vacuum, and it’s not a magic bullet.

So there you have it: 13 things to know and do before hiring a copywriter.

The goal of your web copy is to move your Right People from chemistry — that initial spark of emotional and intellectual resonance — into conversation, toward conversion. Great copy CAN help you do that. Approach the process prepared and your project will go smoothly and help you create the results you want.

In the comments, we’d love to know:

What’s been your biggest question about working with a copywriter? What would you still like to know?

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