Hello, fellow tinkerer 👋

Happy Wednesday. This week's newsletter comes from Kyle Rinker, an email copywriter and strategist for SaaS brands. Kyle and I met through a mutual friend and I'm grateful that he was willing to contribute to my newsletter while I recover from brain surgery.

Want brain surgery updates? You can check out my blog.

Here are a reflection, product, and tip from Kyle:

1) Reflection:

After being laid off last winter from my long-held SEO specialist role, I took stock of where I was in my career and spent some time thinking about how I wanted the next part of my life to look like. Should I continue pursuing SEO roles or am I open to exploring something new?

I pulled out my resume to begin the dreaded updating and editing process and noticed something about myself that I hadn’t realized before: I have spent a good portion of my professional life writing. I’ve written SEO on-page content, contributed to social media content, and written sports articles on a small site for several years. Though it was never supposed to be a key part of my past job descriptions, I realized I always found myself taking on writing tasks and looking forward to opportunities to contribute to copy.

With a newfound passion and professional direction, I started pulling together a copywriting portfolio with a focus on writing spec emails for SaaS and E-Commerce brands. Soon after, I started volunteering with non-profit organizations to start getting some official copywriting under my belt. I was able to develop email sequences and brochure copy for some really awesome people.

Moving forward, I am eager to jump into new projects where I can flex my new copywriting muscles, and I am hopeful that I will find opportunities that will help me transition into a copywriting career full-time.

2) Product

With freelance copywriting, finding leads is the most important part of your career. I’ve been cold emailing companies, brands, and agencies manually to find work. However, I’ve found it’s time consuming and can be difficult when first starting your career. Cold emailing without leads and years of experience can not only lead newbies like me into logistical problems like wrestling with spam folders, but it can also really shake our confidence.

But we all know, the name of the game in marketing is pairing a solution to someone with a problem. It didn’t take long for the marketing gods to bless me with the knowledge of https://www.smartlead.ai/. SmartLead helps me save time when doing email outreach. It offers different plans for every situation. I found it to be one of the more user-friendly outreach programs, and at a fairly affordable price as well.

Try it if you use cold outreach for finding leads.

3) Tip

One of the things I decided to do when pivoting my career focus from SEO to copywriting was to audit my workday routine and find little ways that I could help support my process for getting into a good flow. I tried several tips and tricks until one day I came across something called “Brown Noise” when I was listening to my typical focus-time Lo-fi playlist.

I did a little research and found out just how helpful it is if you need to focus while working or studying. While I am not the expert on why it works, I do know that it seems to be something that many people rely on to provide enough background noise to not be distracted by wandering thoughts while still being dull enough to not become a distraction itself. I’ve been using it ever since when I need to do deep work like writing.

I’d say give it a try whenever you want to turbocharge your productivity. There are many links on YouTube or on streaming platforms like Spotify that you can find mixes of brown noise to use!