Can you really make money as a copywriter today?
With AI content writers, making money as a copywriter might seem unlikely – especially if you don’t have any experience.
But there are still plenty of copywriters making six and even seven figures.
Even a quick glance at platforms like Upwork proves that plenty of companies still pay over $100 per hour for expert-level copywriters.
The biggest difference today is that copywriters must be excellent at the ideation aspect of copywriting.
The highest paid copywriters aren’t just stringing words together.
First, they identify the problems readers face.
Then, they find and/or curate unique data, examples, and insights that illuminate exactly what readers need to do to overcome those challenges.
In this post, I’ll outline exactly how you can become a highly paid copywriter in a matter of weeks.
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How Much Money Can You Make As a Copywriter?
Most people think about how much you can make as a freelance copywriter.
Though freelancing is just the first step in the game.
After earning some money as a freelance copywriter, you can use your copywriting skills to build a personal brand and, eventually, a business.
Here’s a more detailed look at the different levels of scale you can achieve by becoming a copywriter.
Level 1: Freelance Copywriting
The first level of making money as a copywriter is freelancing, though the specific niche you select significantly impacts your earning potential.
I asked ChatGPT to summarize the average earning potential as a freelance copywriter for various niches, and here’s the data provided:
The good news about freelance copywriting is that you can start making money relatively quickly. If you follow the step by step instructions in this post, you should be able to start earning money within a matter of weeks.
Level 2: Influential Personal Brand
As you’re freelance writing, use your writing skills to start building your personal brand.
Growing a following on LinkedIn or X can take some time, but once you build momentum, there are plenty of ways to earn additional income from your writing by promoting products to your new audience.
First, you can earn money as an affiliate marketer by promoting other products to your growing audience and earning a commission on anything your audience purchases.
You can also become an influencer marketer, where brands pay you to promote their products or services.
It takes years to build a following where you’re earning a substantial amount from brand deals, but brands are often willing to pay the right creator anywhere from $500 to $2,000 per post:
Here’s a quote from Ahrefs’ influencer marketer regarding their typical budget for influencer marketing:
Level 3: Solopreneur
Promoting other products and services is a great way to make extra money for minimal additional effort, but a much higher leverage opportunity is offering your own products and services to your audience.
Here are just a few examples of solopreneurs who are earning over $1 million per year – and they all grew through their followings on LinkedIn and/or X:
My business partner, Charles Miller, built a following across LinkedIn and X and has made over seven figures providing courses, coaching, and LinkedIn content services to my audience.
You can learn more about the course and community we run together, Copyblogger Academy, that helps copy creators build and monetize an audience on LinkedIn.
I share this to show you that freelance copywriting isn’t the only way to make money. You can start with freelance writing to quickly earn cash and then use your copywriting skills to build your own audience and either scale it into a marketing agency or offer your own products.
How To Make Money As a Copywriter
I know plenty of companies still hiring freelance copywriters, and this is the step-by-step process you can use to land your first client in just a few weeks – even if you have no prior experience.
Step 1: Identify Your Niche
Great employers hire specialists. For example, if you’re a SaaS company hiring a SaaS content writer, which of these profiles would you choose?
If you’re like most SaaS content marketers, you’d probably choose the SaaS content writer over the generic freelance writer.
So pick one niche and make yourself the definitive expert in that particular niche.
Here are a few examples of niches you could select to establish yourself as a specialist in:
- LinkedIn ghostwriting
- Blog writing
- Sales page copywriting
- Email copywriting
Even within each category, you can niche down even further to specialize in creating content for a specific avatar or industry.
For example, you could specialize in writing for:
- DTC companies
- SaaS companies
- Coaches
- AI companies
If you’re having trouble choosing just one, remember that you can always expand and add services after you’ve built a customer base.
For example, you can start with blog writing for SaaS companies and then expand to also offer email marketing.
Yet if your initial positioning is too generic, you’ll likely find getting your first few clients difficult.
Step 2: Create A Piece of Content
Most people create a website or optimize their LinkedIn profile after selecting a niche.
I prefer to take action and just start creating content.
Using the process I’m about to lay out, you’ll be able to land your first client and then come back and optimize your LinkedIn profile and create a website.
But landing your first client will give you the momentum you need to stay motivated.
So, how do you get your first client?
Instead of building a writing portfolio, create content for your dream client.
Then, you’ll send that piece of content to your dream client and give it to them to publish. This content could be a series of emails, a blog post, or a LinkedIn post.
The key to making this approach work is to ensure that it’s so unique and helpful that it makes them look like a true thoughtleader.
And that can be hard.
Ideally, create a unique piece of content with data.
This data should answer a burning industry question.
For example, a friend of mine wanted a new content marketing client.
Her dream customer was an influencer marketing SaaS platform.
Instead of just writing a generic post about influencer marketing, she studied every LinkedIn post Anthropic sponsored and then created a blog post highlighting insights from that data.
For example, she identified that:
- Most of the sponsored posts underperformed the creator’s average by about 26%
- Most of their creators were macro rather than micro creators
- Most creators were only hired for two sponsored posts
These insights were previously unknown and are highly valuable to the influencer marketing community.
So, when she gifted the blog post to a SaaS company, the company immediately hired her on a monthly retainer.
She didn’t have a fancy website or writing portfolio.
The post was simply valuable enough to them and aligned with their goals, which made it a no-brainer to hire her on a monthly contract.
Even if that client had turned her down, she could have pitched it to other competitors with influencer marketing platforms.
The client also transformed the data into a LinkedIn post that performed very well:
As you can see, this same data could also be used if you’re trying to offer LinkedIn ghostwriting services. You could also use this data to offer email marketing services.
In short, this data works for any type of content marketing because the insights from the data are interesting regardless of the form of content.
So, how do you create a unique or interesting piece of data?
How To Gather Interesting Data
Many data studies exist, but most don’t answer burning questions.
For example, let’s say the topic you’re writing about is Linkedin influencer marketing.
Here are some examples of statistics that don’t help influencer marketers improve performance:
- 40% of consumers have a profile on LinkedIn
- More than half of LinkedIn’s members’ households earn over $100,000
- There are more than 234 million members in the US alone
On the other hand, these statistics from Anthropic’s influencer marketing program would help an influencer marketer improve performance:
- Sponsored posts underperformed the creator’s average by about 26%: The lesson is that you should underproject performance by about 26%.
- Most of their creators were macro rather than micro creators: The lesson here is that macro creators might be a better investment than micro creators if you have a B2C style product like Anthropic.
- Most creators were only hired for two sponsored posts: The lesson here is that the best deals aren’t always doing long term partnerships with creators.
To create interesting data studies that answer burning questions, use this prompt in a platform like ChatGPT:
“What are some hotly debated topics in (industry) where I could create a data study that would give (professionals) the insights they need to generate a better ROI from their (industry) efforts?“
Here’s an example:
ChatGPT also gives you some good ideas on how to collect the data.
Generally, you can get a VA to use free or low-cost tools to comb through and collect the data.
For example, in the LinkedIn influencer marketing data study, my friend used a free Chrome plugin called Creator Match to extract all of the data on the influencers they worked with:
If you don’t have time to manually collect the data, you can also use a VA on Upwork to gather the data for you.
You can also ask ChatGPT for some recommendations on how to collect the data:
Once you finish collecting the data, it’s important to extract insights from the data to help your dream client’s customers improve performance.
If you’re having trouble with this step, you can always ask ChatGPT to analyze the data and extract insights for you.
For example, here’s a prompt you could plug into a tool like Manus or Perplexity to extract influencer insights:
“Here’s the raw data for my influencer marketing case study. Can you please analyze the data and then extract insights that would help influencer marketers improve the performance of their campaigns?“
Sometimes this prompt works, but you might also have to do your own analysis.
Once you have the data and insights, all you need to do is optimize the insights into the content format you’re planning to use (e.g., LinkedIn posts, emails, blog posts, etc.).
Step 3: Pitching The Content
After you’ve created a piece of outstanding content, pitching brands is fairly easy.
The most important thing is to pitch the right person on the right platform.
If you’re doing any content writing (e.g., email marketing, blog content writing, etc.), the best person to contact is likely the content marketing manager. If it’s a smaller company and there isn’t a content manager, pitch the marketing decision maker (e.g., CMO, Head of Marketing, etc.).
If the person is active on LinkedIn or Twitter and you are also active on that platform, you can send them a message on that platform. However, if you never use social media, you might look like a bot, and you likely won’t receive a response.
As for the message itself, make it just a simple, personal note and include your content in the message.
For example, this is the exact message my friend sent to her dream client:
And, you can see that it was a successful pitch:
That single message turned into a great client. However, even if that brand hadn’t responded positively, my friend could have pitched this article to any other influencer marketing platform.
Step 4: Build a Personal Brand
Once you land your first client, how do you get more clients and ultimately scale your income?
The most basic option is to ask your existing clients for referrals.
However, referrals aren’t a scalable solution as it relies on your current clients to act.
Instead, start building your personal brand and discuss (and show!) the results you achieve for clients.
As you earn followers on a social platform, you’ll attract potential clients so that you never have to do any cold outreach again. Instead, people will know of you and reach out to you for services.
- Profile Optimization: Optimize your profile by stating who you help and what you offer. Upload a clean headshot and banner image with a screenshot of results/testimonials.
- Engage: Engage with your ideal prospects and other industry influencers (especially those who have large followings).
- Post Consistently: Post consistently (ideally every day) on the platform. However, make sure that the content you’re posting provides helpful insights.
If your clients have a following on LinkedIn, ask them to post some of your results or content on LinkedIn. This can give you a significant boost in visibility and credibility.
If you want more inspiration on what to post or how to engage with other accounts, check out our guide to personal branding.
Step 5: Scale
Once you start building your personal brand, you’ll earn more inbound leads and reach a point where you can’t keep up with demand.
At this point, you’ll have a few different options to scale.
The most obvious option is to simply increase your pricing. This is a great way to make more money without changing any of your systems or processes.
However, there is usually a cap to how much you can charge for copywriting, unless you work out a revenue share agreement (which is challenging for blog writing or LinkedIn ghostwriting).
Alternatively, you could scale it into a marketing agency, though keep in mind that:
- Hiring new people to do the work is an entirely different skill set from copywriting
- You’ll initially see a decline in profit as you hire new people.
Yet starting a marketing agency and simply raising your prices aren’t the only ways to scale your income.
If you’ve built a personal brand, you can create different income streams.
First, you can monetize your audience through affiliate deals (e.g., earning a commission on people who buy products you promote).
Another option is to reach out to brands you work with and offer to do influencer marketing deals.
Here’s an example of an influencer marketing deal:
Affiliate marketing is very passive, but doesn’t have very high returns.
Influencer marketing has a much higher return, but it isn’t very consistent income and requires more active effort.
Instead, most copywriters find the best return on investment from creating and selling their own products or services.
For example, my business partner Charles Miller and I offer Copyblogger Academy, a course and community for side hustlers and entrepreneurs building their businesses through digital marketing and personal branding.
You could easily offer a course or community for people who want a do-it-yourself version of your service.
Another excellent option to monetize your following is to start a business that solves a pain point your audience feels.
For example, Ankur Nagpal famously started his fintech business, Carry, with a single Tweet:
Creating a company from your following is probably the best monetization option once you’ve built a substantial (or at least loyal) audience.
Yet building a business requires a very different skill set from copywriting. If you don’t have this skill set, you can partner with a talented operator and have them run the business while you use your personal brand to drive the leads.
Get More Support From Other Copywriters Building Their Careers
This is the exact step by step process to make money as a copywriter in 2025, but it still requires hard work and is time consuming.
If it feels overwhelming or you have questions along the way, having a community of other likeminded individuals may be exactly what you need to push through the harder times.
This is why we created Copyblogger Academy.
It’s a course and community for copy creators building both their businesses and personal brands. Inside, you’ll have access to various courses on digital marketing, from SEO and content marketing to personal branding and email marketing.
Best of all, you’ll be able to ask the community for feedback and their input on ideas.
Sign up for Copyblogger Academy today and thank yourself later after you’ve built your personal brand and scaled your income as a copy creator.