How a Government Employee Turned Her Love For Writing Into A Profitable Business

Jasmine Love

6 min readMay 17, 2023

Smiling Freelance Copywriter Janelle Cook

This month’s guest ditched doing finance work for the federal government, joined the world of freelance copywriting and never looked back.

Copywriter Janelle Cook is the owner of Scary Good Copy, and she’s going to share what being a freelance copywriter is really like and how you can get started on your own copywriting journey.

Tune in to the Business Models for Creators interview to hear how Janelle:

Got her first freelance copywriting client
Has a productive work day without fancy morning routines
Gets a steady stream of clients without cold pitching

Watch the full episode here!

Getting Into Freelance Copywriting

Back in 2020, Janelle was married to an active duty service member so she was no stranger to moving around the country. But getting the call that they were going to be moving to Hawaii triggered a series of events that led to one of the biggest transitions of her life.

At the time, she was working for the federal government and planned on getting a new job in her field once she moved. But when she arrived in Hawaii everything was locked down during the global pandemic. And the job market was in total chaos during this time. Like many others, Janelle applied to countless government jobs and landed nothing.

Then one day her friend told her about something called “copywriting” which was a field she had never heard of. Armed with the intel her friend had given her she dove down the Google rabbit hole to learn more and struck gold. She was like, “Holy cow — You mean I can get paid to write! I don’t have to be a starving artist.”

With this realization she ditched her job search and dove head first into copywriting. As she began to learn the craft she felt like she had finally found her calling.

She spent hours and hours over the course of many weeks reading and studying everything she could get her hands on about copywriting, sales and marketing including Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and Hey Whipple Squeeze this by Luke Sullivan and Edward Boches.

One of the resources that best prepared her to start doing paid work as a copywriter was Copy School by Copy Hackers. She says she learned about her craft including how to do market research to how to do the actual writing from their comprehensive trainings on a variety of different copy deliverables.

Janelle also benefited a lot from a program called The Copywriter Accelerator run by The Copywriter’s Club which is headed up by Rob Marsh and Kira Hug. Janelle says The Accelerator helped her build her freelance copywriting business on a solid foundation including helping her to choose the right niche, develop clear business processes and service packages.

And one of the most valuable things she got from joining The Accelerator was access to a community of like minded copywriters who’ve been super generous in offering emotional support on the journey and referring business to her. Some of the copywriters she’s met in The Accelerator have become some of her best friends.

What a day in the life of a freelance copywriter is really like — Janelle’s POV

As a business owner that works from home, Janelle has heard all of the hype from other business owners and marketers about morning routines but she hasn’t adopted any of the routines she’s heard about. Instead, she keeps it simple.

She wakes up any time between 6AM and 7AM and grabs her laptop which is always in arms reach and gets straight to work.

She checks her to-do list for the day and knocks out her easiest tasks first to get momentum. She works until she gets hungry, then she puts her work aside, eats breakfast and enjoys a 30–60 min break.

By mid afternoon she’s ready to hit the gym. After she gets a good workout in and has some lunch she’s fired up to work all afternoon.

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The afternoon is when she dives into her most important and challenging tasks like doing client work and managing her own business.

Her favorite part of the work day as a freelance copywriter is doing the client work. The research, the writing, learning about new topics, she loves ALL of it. She’s always had a penchant for learning and copywriting is a field that allows her to study, learn and create everyday. So she’s grateful she chose this path.

At the end of each work day she closes her laptop takes a deep breath and mentally congratulates herself for everythings she’s accomplished for the day. She puts away her foldable desk and the rest of her work stuff, has dinner with her loved ones, then unwinds with a show or a movie, reads her scary bedtime stories and goes to sleep.

Landing her first freelance copywriting client

Janelle followed the conventional wisdom everyone shares with new business owners and it worked! “When you first start a business, reach out to your existing network and see if anyone needs your services.”

She reached out to the owner of a Chinese restaurant she used to waitress at back when she was in college. She prepared a pitch that she sent via email that explained that she was starting a business that helped other businesses get more customers and she asked if he was interested in working together.

And he replied, “That sounds absolutely amazing. I think that I could benefit from that. Let’s talk.”

That’s how she got her first client — reaching out to someone who already knew, liked, and trusted her and asking if he had a need for what she had to offer. Spoiler alert: Most businesses want and need more customers which is why copywriting services are such a great thing to offer.

Janelle's first assignment with her new client was to draft copy for print flyers to boost awareness, redo the website and increase restaurant visitors and redo the menu to make it more appealing and encourage more sales. She said it was a lot of fun.

How Janelle makes money as a freelance copywriter

As a purely service based business, Janelle makes 100% of her income through client work. She writes the copy for websites, emails, social media captions and product descriptions. She has some contracts where she charges by deliverable, others are by the hour where appropriate and she has some clients on a monthly retainer. She gets the majority of her clients from networking, building relationships and getting referrals from other marketers.

What I learned from Janelle about how to succeed as a freelance copywriter and creator

Join a community of people on the same journey as you. Build meaningful connections with people in your copywriter community and stay in touch with the people you click with. These are the people who will come through for you with client referrals, educational resources and emotional support when you need it.
You don’t need a fancy morning routine or dedicated office space to succeed, you can just grab your laptop, set it up on a foldable desk and get to work. Keep it simple.
Don’t just sit behind your laptop all day. Get out into the world and have life experiences. It will make you a better writer and a better business owner.
Contrary to what all the copy gurus teach about charging clients the highest rate possible, never budging and never charging by the hour, it’s okay to be flexible about price and fee structure if you’re really excited about the project. You don’t always have to be a hard a$$ about pricing.