One of the biggest benefits of developing your copywriting skills is that you can earn money in a variety of ways.
Open up your options by investing in yourself and developing your skills. These are two of the most beneficial things you can do for your career.
While it takes time to master a skill, the benefits are almost endless when you do.
Writing email copy and email marketing is no different.
As your skills improve, you can increase your income from multiple sources.
In fact, you can earn two types of revenue as an email copywriter and marketer — one method is linear income, and the other is residual income.
Let’s take a look at each of them.
Earn Linear Income as an Email Copywriter
The first method is linear income — when companies and organizations hire you to write email campaigns.
They pay you either per email campaign or you both agree to specific deliverables in exchange for a monthly retainer. Essentially, you are exchanging time for money.
With linear income, you can be paid very well for writing email campaigns for companies. Plus, the more email campaigns you write for a company, the easier and less time it takes to write them. You often don’t need to invest nearly as much time researching the audience after you have written several successful email campaigns.
Plus, it gets easier to match the company’s voice. Familiarity with both the list and the company speeds up the writing process. Often, the more campaigns you write for a company, the better the campaigns will be, and the faster you can write the emails.
If writing the campaign takes less time, and you earn a set amount, you are effectively increasing your hourly rate.
The repetition and list awareness speeds up the process and often yields better results for both the company and you as the copywriter.
Email campaigns are easier to write than other forms of copy, so you can work with more companies and write more campaigns.
The biggest challenge with linear income is time. You can only write so many email campaigns in a day. There are only 24 hours in each day!
But even with time as a limitation, you can still enjoy a rewarding career writing email campaigns for companies.
Residual Income as an Email Copywriter
Residual income is when you do the work once and are paid repeatedly for it.
With residual income, you can utilize a variety of ways to earn money with your skills. Mix and match what works for you!
Here are some examples of residual income you can create as an email copywriter.
Start Your Own Newsletter
Writing a weekly newsletter is one of my favorite ways to earn money. Newsletters can be free, or people can pay to subscribe to them.
There are several reasons why newsletters are one of my favorite types of writing.
For one, they maximize the value of your time and income. Writing a newsletter doesn’t require any more time, no matter if the list is 100, 1,000, or 100,000 subscribers.
Plus, as the list grows, revenue can be significant. With a newsletter, you can promote a variety of products and create additional revenue streams. This includes selling your own products, affiliate products, and paid sponsorships.
Newsletters are one of my favorite ways to connect and build trust with an audience.
The more trust you have with the list, the easier it is to convert subscribers into paying customers.
E-books and Guides
One of the easiest ways to earn residual income is with e-books.
You can write an e-book about writing email copy, creating landing pages, building an email list, etc. Then, you can write topic-specific supplementary guides to support the book. You can sell the guides individually or give them away as bonuses for purchasing the e-book.
Either way, you are diversifying how you earn money with your skills. You are creating more opportunities to earn more money. Once you create the book, you are not limited by time. You can sell the book on your website, Amazon, and other places.
Books will also build your credibility and authority as a copywriter. This can lead to raising your prices and increasing your fees.
Online Courses and Workshops
Online courses and workshops often sell for higher price points than e-books and guides — often making them more profitable.
Courses provide more in-depth experiences that can lead to faster transformation. They often include modules, lessons, worksheets, workbooks, and quizzes.
Workshops are often shorter and topic-focused.
Both courses and workshops are additional ways to share your knowledge and expertise to serve your audience and create extra revenue streams.
Teach Email Copywriting in a Membership Site
As you create more paid products, you can develop a membership site offering exclusive content, such as premium articles, templates, or in-depth tutorials, etc. Teaching what you know speeds up your learning process and develops your skills faster.
Just make sure you have already gotten results before teaching it. People will pay for your skills and experience, and then you transfer your knowledge to them to reduce their learning curve so they can get results faster.
You can charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee for access to your training.
Sell Pre-Written Templates
Create a collection of high-converting email templates and sell them to businesses. Essentially, you write the emails once, and then companies purchase the emails from your website.
They can modify the emails to fit the company’s needs.
Essentially, you write the campaign once and then sell it as a template. You can do this for newsletters, promotional emails, autoresponders, welcome emails, etc.
Develop high-converting email templates that companies can deploy and that you can sell repeatedly.
Subscription Fees For Swipe Files
This is similar to selling the pre-written templates, except with this revenue stream, people pay you monthly to access the templates.
As you write more Swipe Files, instead of selling each individually, people pay for access to the entire library as a subscription service. This is more of a Netflix approach to monetizing your skills.
Think Creatively and Brainstorm Ideas
The key to building a lucrative career as an email marketer and copywriter is, you don’t need to rely on only one method to generate revenue. Instead, create multiple ways to earn money.
Legendary copywriter Bob Bly suggests developing your copywriting business to include both linear and residual income. He recommends building your business so you earn $100K per year with both income types.
If you are earning $100K per year with both linear and residual income, this puts you in a very strong financial position. Even more so when you consider the compounding effect of earning these amounts year after year.
The key to residual income is to think about creating assets. Each revenue stream you create is an asset that can earn money for the foreseeable future.
Diversifying your income and creating both linear and residual opportunities is good.
Each stream of revenue combines to become a mighty river. If one stream dries up, you have several other streams to support you, until you can develop additional revenue streams.
So, think creatively and brainstorm ideas on how you can earn both linear and residual income as an email copywriter. Have fun and make some money!
