How do you start making money as a writer, and if you’re already making money as a writer, how do you double and triple or quadruple that income that you’re making? 

My name is Joshua Boswell, and I’m the founder of Copywriter Marketer, and I’m the author of the number one best-selling program that helps writers like you take your writing skills and turn them into an amazing, incredible lifestyle and I want to show you over the next few minutes a four-part formula. 

This formula right here, that has literally transformed the income and the money-making power of hundreds, possibly thousands, of my writing students over the last couple of decades, and I think that it can do the same thing for you. 

So I want to give you this formula, so stick with me, but before we get to that formula, I want to give you these three actions that you can take right now, today, and you’ll see these actions lead into utilizing this formula. 

In fact, several of these actions right here are contingent upon using the formula. So, we’ll talk specifically about what those are in just a minute. Now, before I dive into this, let me tell you about Bert. 

I’ve got my headline up here about how Bert doubled his freelance writing income using this formula right here, and I want to tell you how that happened, and you see if you can discern what the formula actually is as I go through the story. 

So, Bert came to me and he was a working writer and he was like, “Well, I’m getting an article here, and a social media post project there, and maybe a sales letter here. I’m doing some stuff but like… it’s not enough to get me free from my job, so that I can live a lifestyle that I really want to live.” So, how do we change this up? 

And so, we looked at all the stuff that he was doing and I realized that he was doing a lot of the right stuff, but the challenge was he wasn’t doing it in a high leverage way. 

You’ve heard that expression that says, ‘a rising tide raises all ships’, or what about an expression that ‘big boats are controlled by a small helm and a little rudder’, or there’s my favorite expression that says, ‘big doors swing on tiny little hinges’. 

So, what we see is that in the world around us, we see that there are high leverage points that one little thing here can make a huge difference over here, and that’s what this is.

I said to Bert, “Bert, the challenge is that you’re not utilizing all the leverage you could with all the actions that you’re doing”, and I told him the story that I mentioned so many times it makes it so clear in my mind, I was like, “If you want to go out and mow the lawn, I’ve got 5 acres of lawn, and if you want to mow all 5 acres, well… I’ve got 2.5 acres and I’ve got a 2.5 acres of forest. Anyway, if you want to mow the 2.5 acres of lawn, then you can do that using a push mower, or you can do a motorized mower, or you can use a great big huge zero turn mower with a 72-inch deck on it, and it zips along turbo-speed and that’s really, really fast.” 

So you have your options of what you do. The end result is going to be the same – you’re going to get the lawn mowed, it’s just how fast do you do it and how efficient does the whole process work. So, I said, “Bert, you need to change this up, and you need to utilize this high leverage thing.” 

So what we did was we looked at the kinds of clients that he was dealing with. When I first got started I was like, “Oh”, I didn’t really feel that confidence my writing ability and I was unsure: “is my writing good enough, is not good enough, I don’t know… but I know the nonprofit world and those guys really need writers so, I’m going to go help them”, and that was my attitude in the beginning. 

So, I went and I talked to small little non-profit organizations that maybe have one or two employees, small budgets of like $50,000 or $100,000 a year and that was my comfort zone and so, I was marketing to them when and I was selling to them and I was telling Bert this, and Bert was like, “Ooh.” He wasn’t in the nonprofit industry, but I could see the wheels were turning in his head. 

He was like, “Yeah, I may be guilty of talking to small companies in my industry. Maybe I’m not selecting the right clients.” 

And then I finished telling him the story, which was I said, “Bert here’s the deal. I got to the point where I realized that, gosh if I’m going to do all this time and effort and money and sweat equity, and I’m going to figure out how to market myself and sell myself, then I’m going to do it to big clients. They’re going to pay really well”. 

And I made that little decision change in my mind, and that had a huge impact on my net income. So, instead of marketing myself to somebody who was frustrated with paying me $500 for a fundraising letter, because that was out of their budget, I went and started marketing myself to organizations that were happy to pay me $5,000 for a fundraising letter because it was well within their budget. Does that make sense? 

And what allowed me to discern who those clients were and where I could focus my time was this four-part formula. 

And I explained that to Bert and then we walked through the formula and then we analyzed every single one of his clients against this formula, and when we did that, light bulbs came on. 

Bert was like, “Okay, I know based on this formula that really, I could be targeting this client, talking to them this way, doing this approach”, and it changed and he restructured everything. 

So that within a short period of time, literally, he doubled and tripled and then quadrupled, and then he landed a huge client that’s helping them to do all the things that he really loves to do. Meeting his lifestyle goals, meeting his income goals, all because of this formula here. And I’m going to share this formula with you right now. 

So before we look at the formula, or as part of looking at the formula, let’s look at the actions that you should be taking leading up to and including this right here. You’ve heard about me talk about these before so this is a bit of a refresher course, but I want to put it in context of this guy right here, this formula. 

So the first thing is, the first action you should always take when you’re thinking about increasing your income and creating more success as a writer is you are going to seek clarity on your lifestyle. 

Now… the reason why I say you got to seek clarity is that this is a moving target. I remember when I thought, “If I could just make $100,000 in a year, I would be rich beyond my wildest imagination, and like I would be set for life”. 

Because the most that my mother had ever made I think was about $30,000 maybe $35,000, somewhere in that neighborhood. Less than $50,000. 

And I didn’t know anybody who had made over $100,000. I was like… that was awesome. And so when I was a teenager and I was thinking about my life and I was just thinking, “Man, if I can make $10,0000″… and then I remember making $100,000 and starting to live that lifestyle. 

And with seven children… that wasn’t that much money. And then we had eleven children, I have to change my lifestyle trajectory and target. So you’re always seeking clarity on what exactly you want your lifestyle to be like.

I always like to think well how much time do I want to work for how much money I’m going to make, I think in those terms. 

Number two, the second thing is in building out your business you want to establish what I call non-negotiables. You want to establish those non-negotiables: What time are you going to be doing your marketing? When are you going to be doing your morning or evening routine? What does that routine look like? When are you establishing connections with friends and family and people that you love? 

And I’ve got training on this in other places, but just know that you need to establish non-negotiables with your family, with your business contacts, with your own personal development – fueling in your own self – you need to establish those non-negotiables, it’s very important. 

Number 3, is you need to choose a fun and profitable. You need to choose a fun and profitable niche because the niche where you focus your time – it helps you leverage yourself. You can focus on and be more effective with the writing that you’re doing, with the marketing that you’re doing. 

If you’re going to do the non-negotiables, you’re going to have a set time to market and build your business, why not do that to the highest leverage possible? I mean would you rather get paid $500 for a project, or $5,000 for a project or $50,000 for a project? 

All of those projects are out there, and let me tell you from experience, the same amount of time and money and effort that you put into closing a $500 deal is the same time money and effort it takes to close a $50,000 deal. You only think that it’s bigger because the end result is bigger, the end income is bigger, but it’s actually not. 

And I discovered that when I said, “Okay I’m going to switch, I’m going to target big companies”, and I started going after Corel, and Sony, and Google, and Microsoft, and Toshiba and General Motors and these major corporations and I was like, “Ha-ha! This is the same amount of work to close those guys as it was to close other clients.” 

So what I want to do is I want to look at this 4 part formula that’ll help you define choosing this fun and profitable niche which will help you establish the lifestyle and get clarity on that and get clarity on the non-negotiables. 

So let’s look at what this is. This 4 part formula is in effect the definition that I have for fun and a profitable niche that’ll meet your lifestyle goals and will make your non-negotiables high leverage. 

So the very first part of the formula is to focus in on clients that are easy to contact. You want these guys to be easy to contact, you want to be able to jump online, go to LinkedIn, going to social media areas, going to list vendors, and you’re going to find these people and the cool part about it is that if they use writers, and they do a lot of communication, they’re going to be easy to find. 

This is always an indicator to me like people say, “Well I picked this clientele and I can’t find any information on the decision-makers, on what they’re doing”, and I’m always telling people, people who want… people were doing a lot of writing and they’re putting a lot of stuff out there, they’re not hiding in a closet, they’re not trying to hide from you, they want to be found because when they’re found people buy stuff from them. 

So number one, easy to contact, number two, is they speak the same jargon. So you want to focus on a group of people that speak the same jargon as the rest of the pool of people. 

This is really important because I found at one point I was marketing to political people, to non-profit people, and to technology people, and tech geeks speak a different language than political people and they speak a different language than non-profit organizations. 

And so I was constantly switching up my sale arguments and my decision-making factors and what I thought would be a great deal for them and all the language, and the offers and the marketing materials were always shifting and moving around, it was driving me crazy. 

So, I decided to pick a group of people and focus on them that spoke the same jargon so that I can have the same conversation over and over again – I can leverage my time. This is a big problem that Bert was having is he was all over the map, targeting a lot of different people and he was never specializing in conversation. 

Number three, number three is very important and that is, they need to use your writing. They’ve got to use your writing so if you’re writing emails, they should use emails. If you’re writing sales letters, they should use sales letters, if you’re in white papers, they should use white papers, you understand what I mean? Like… they need to be using… And ya know, again here’s an interesting thing:

Writers are calling me all the time and say, “I picked this industry and I’m really excited about it and I want to do white papers and none of these guys have white papers, you think I could convince them to use a white paper?” 

And I go back to the principal Like Attracts Like. If they’re not already using it, they’re probably not going to use it. So don’t try to re-educate them, go where people are already using your writing. 

Finally, the last thing is they have money to hire you. They’ve got money to hire you, this is really important because if they don’t have money to hire you, then it doesn’t matter. 

I was going after these non-profit organizations that have $100,000 a year budget and they didn’t have $5,000, $10,000 to invest into me as a writer, and then I went to organizations that had, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year annual budget and they could squeeze out $5,000 to help me bring them in $100,000. You see, I went to the companies they had money to spend, now how do you know if they have money to spend?

Again… They want to be found and it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing, what’s the price point of stuff they’re selling, who are they marketing to, is in a fluent market or not a fluent market, are they very popular, and you know like are they selling stuff on Amazon and have a higher rating, can you find them right off the bat when you do a Google search for them, can you see ads that they’re running or on Facebook do you see stuff popping up? 

There’s a lot of indicators, but the biggest indicator is are they active in the market and when you see them can you sense, “Okay they’re professional”, if they’re a publicly-traded company, you can see the stats about what their stock prices at and you are going to have a good sense of where they’re at. If they’re non-profit organizations, there are reports. You can go onto I think it’s Charity Navigator and you can see what they are doing annually inside of their budget, and you can get a feel for these things. 

So this is the four part formula where you focus your time, how do you focus your energies? Well you find clients that are easy to contact, that speak the same jargon, that are using the kind of writing that you’re writing and you’re selling, and then they’ve got money to spend. 

And I just put this down here, I’ll just wrap up with this, if you really want to leverage your time, you really want to double, triple, quadruple your income, get tighter and tighter and tighter on this, look at every single one of your potential clients and ask yourself these questions:

 “Can I get in touch with them? Do they speak the same jargon? Do they use the writing that I’m selling? “Do they have money to spend?” And just go tighter and tighter and tighter into this formula right here, and if you’ll do that, then getting clients and making a lot of money will get easier and easier and easier and I always tell my students that when you’re doing this don’t talk to clients, don’t talk to prospects that you don’t believe are a four out of four. 

In other words, every one of these criteria should be met before you start going after in approaching and being serious about contacting that client, because if it’s a three out of four, you’re reducing your leverage. If it’s a 2 out of 4, you’re almost dead in the water, if it’s a one out of 4, it’s worthless to even go and talk to them. 

If they’ve got money to spend, but they’re not using your writing and they don’t speak the same jargon, you’re all over the map and it’s driving you crazy, but it doesn’t matter. 

So 4 out of 4, that’s the criteria, that’s the formula, that’s what Bert did, that’s what I did, that’s what thousands of my other students have done, that’s what I’m encouraging you to do. 

Remember, see clarity in your lifestyle, have non-negotiables, pick a fun and profitable niche and use this four part formula in deciding where your time and energy is going, so that you can have maximum leverage, maximum return on that effort. Sound good? All right, talk to you soon, bye now.