Featuring Elspeth Misiaszek
I am so excited to introduce you all to an incredibly inspiring entrepreneur who is living proof of the success you can achieve by investing in your own business. She believes that profits follow passions, so when you love what you do, and pour yourself into it, you’ll actually create a business that inspires and fulfills you – crazy awesome, right?
Meet Elspeth Misiaszek, a sassy modern creativepreneur and owner of eMarketingCopywriter.com. She’s out there blazing new trails in the wild wild west of the world wide web, and has recently added a dose of social media to her delicious magic potion. Connect with her on Facebook to see what I mean!
Based out of Philadelphia, she combines her superpowers in marketing strategy, SEO blogging, online marketing, and copywriting as she works hands-on, and up-close and personal with vegan businesses, coaches and entrepreneurs, helping them find success by bringing stronger creative clarity into their content copywriting campaigns and email marketing.
“I want you to profit from your passions. Copywriting is essentially how we talk about what we do. And when our brand messaging has depth, simplicity, and clarity, paired with a sparkly dose of the right marketing strategy aka selling, the results are more powerful than you have ever imagined. You build a community of well-connected clients.”
1. Elspeth, give us a little background into who you are and what you do? How did you get started with copywriting and what was your entrepreneurial journey into starting your own copywriting business?
Cue the violin, Julie! In 2008, I left my job in a law office and joined a start-up corporation. Suddenly, changing the toilet paper came with managing a team of contractors and employees. And if I didn’t sell, I didn’t eat.
In January 2011, after three years of stress, anxiety, late nights … and maybe one too many danish breakfasts… my business partner and I decided to split ways.
Despite all my fears, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I lost 228 pounds of deadweight. Ok, plus I had to do a lot of crying in the shower; I was suddenly jobless, homeless, and my boyfriend broke up with me a few weeks later.
Slowly, the clarity started to come to me. I was excellent at sales and I had always been a writer. Yet, I saw so many websites, blogs and emails that left me wondering, “What does this company do?”
I also had a lot of skills and expertise in the business networking arena that I could easily pull online to help businesses increase their lead conversions. I recently started teaching many of them how to better connect in the digital marketplace aka social scary media.
I landed my first huge contract for a beauty school in March (ironically, I wrote most of this website copy in my tie-dye and yoga pants), and then a start-up marketing agency asked me to consult with them, too.
By September, I wrote 45 blogs to launch an SEO blogging campaign for an Irish tourism company. When the VP of Sales increased her leads by 300% in just a few months, I knew I just had to keep on keepin’ on.
This September, just 4 years later, I have been invited to speak to over 200 people at a blogging convention. And here’s what I really think: the Universe has a way of giving you exactly what you need. Everything you seek is seeking you.
“The universe has a way of giving you exactly what you need in biz and in life.”
You just have to be open to the opportunities and work hard to make them realities. What I thought was the end of my road when I peaced-out from my business partner was actually the beginning of a powerful learning experience I twisted around … and turned into huge profits.
Now, I work with a lot of heart-centered businesses — people who have the drive and passion to make a difference in the world but need a little more help with the “how do I profit from this passion of mine.” It’s so fulfilling!
2. No matter how much we may do what we love and love what we do, allowing ourselves to get personal with our brand can be a real challenge, especially when we’re putting it out there into the world wide web for others to judge. How have you been able to fight past this and find the motivation to invest the social energy you need in order to help your brand grow?
Honestly? You need to have an “oh shit” moment or three before this clicks into place. The fear of failure has to be greater than the fear of success.
It’s also a great idea to always keep an eye on your competitors. Believe it or not, the most successful people aren’t better at marketing than you, they are just braver.
Once you see them flubbing up a few videos, or having technical difficulties in a webcast, you realize you have absolutely nothing to lose. Taking imperfect action is absolutely necessary so that you can practice getting great at enacting the marketing strategies that will bring ideal clients to you.
3. As a hugely successful entrepreneur and online marketing copywriter, what have been some of the biggest investments you’ve made into your brand in order to get it to the successful business it is today?
Just to name a few: Get a great website that tells people who you are, what you do, and how you do it ← Copywriting! Find a few techy people you can rely on for advice.
Participate in business networking; speaking your brand will give you clarity of vision. (You might hear this called an elevator pitch – I write a lot about them on my blog.) Then, spend money for targeted key events.
For personal brands, if you want to charge a premium, you have to invest in a strong visual presence. Get headshots taken and hire a classy designer to create a logo and social media headers for you.
One major investment a lot of us struggle with as we build and grow our brand is delegating the work that might not be our strongest skillset. And a lot of the time, that’s the writing.
Content Can Make or Break a Brand
It’s essential to be able to capture the attention of our clients and followers from the very first sentence they read. How does working with a copywriter help us invest in our brand’s success?
Here’s how Elspeth answered this dilemma:
Are you afraid to let anyone else do your copywriting? There are so many reasons we have fear in business. For creative professionals, and freelancers, it just feels more personal. We tend to feel that only we know our voice, and only we can be the official writer for our brand.
Not so fast.
It’s not that your voice isn’t awesome, it’s just that you probably aren’t an expert in sales copywriting, website user experience, and high-conversion headlines. In other words, if you want people to subscribe now, sign-up today, or grab your free resource, a copywriter can help. Here’s how:
1. Conversational Clarity
Sometimes, we get so driven to call ourselves one thing that we don’t even realize no one else understands what we do. Asking a copywriting and brand messaging professional to create some short-form copy can help. These quick and dirty messages get us accustomed to discussing what we do – these are the messages others will remember.
These Include:
- Website headers
- Taglines/headlines
- Social media profiles
- Categories (on blogs or portfolios)
2. Be Aware of How You Sell You
If you want to make money following your creative genius, you have to sell your products and services (not sell out, just sell!). In order for people to buy from you, I like to say that clients have to know what you are selling in order to buy from you – this is a huge piece a lots of small businesses seem to miss.
In all the fuss to get a website published, we sometimes forget the big picture strategy; making money. A copywriter will often add language into your website and promotional materials to increase the number of people you market to:
- Placement of buttons
- Logical progression of sales
- Email marketing flow
- Asking for the sale
- Communicating process
3. Even Editors Have Editors
For many innovators starting a business, having a copywriter edit their content is the perfect midway point between maintaining their authentic brand and creating copy that converts. Conversions mean the visitor to your website does what you want them to do; enters their name for email marketing lists, joins your social media network, etc. It’s a knock on the door of your brand so it’s uber-important to nail it.
After you write a long-form piece, send it over to a copywriter for review. This works best for:
- Blogs
- Website copy
- About me pages
- Guest posts/articles
Finally, I have an unusual piece of advice for working with a copywriter; make sure they have a strong background in sales and marketing. While there are any number of professionals that write extremely well, there is a higher-science that goes along with a mid to senior-level copywriter.
Believe it or not, right down to the color of the buttons you use for “Sign Up”, little changes can help you convert more users. And small tips and tricks for engagement add up big over time.
How do you know if your copywriter understands sales?
- Review their portfolio to see a list of their past clients.
- Listen for sales terms (i.e. sales funnels, conversions, etc.)
- Ask how they track their own progress (i.e. Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, etc.)
At the end of the day, you aren’t hiring a copywriter for their words, you’re hiring them for their expertise in how words help to sell your product and unleash your creative genius. These words are your brand messaging, it’s what the world hears when you speak – so they’ve got to be spot-on awesome. See the difference?
As business owners, especially small businesses and freelancers, finances are tight, but that should never limit the investments we make into our own future success. Often times that means financially investing into someone or something that will really help catalyst our brand to bigger and better places. For those of you wanting to really make your professional mark in this competitive ever-changing digital world of content media, consider investing in a professional copywriter and get your brand’s voice heard today!
Elspeth is a wealth of knowledge and resources when it comes to copywriting and content development support. Please, reach out to her on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
