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If the thought of sending invoices, chasing unpaid bills and negotiating payment terms fills you with horror, this episode of the A Little Bird Told Me freelance writing podcast is for you. Working out exactly how to word those awkward emails and at what stage to introduce your payment preferences are discussed here, as well as tips on getting paid on time. Have a listen, and let me know what you think!
Show Notes
Plain English copywriting contract
How to write the perfect email subject line
How to write magnetic headlines
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Transcript
LH: Hello, and welcome to Episode 24 of A Little Bird Told Me: the podcast about the highs, the lows, and the no-nos of successful freelance writing.
You can find us on the internet at alittlebirdtoldme.podomatic.com, and there you can subscribe to this wonderful podcast in any number of ways, including RSS feed, iTunes, Stitcher Smart Radio or just on the Podomatic page itself. You can also find the link to our Facebook page, where you can come and have a chat with us. There will be plenty of tips, tricks and topics to enjoy, and of course we’d love to have any questions from you. I’m Lorrie Hartshorn…
An example of a cheque. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
PW:…And I’m Philippa Willitts! This week we are going to talk about the art of getting paid. Now, as a freelancer, this can run incredibly well most of the time, but at other times it can become a pretty tricky topic. So, we are going to look at invoicing and negotiating payments, as well as what to do if somebody always pays late, or doesn’t pay up at all. Unfortunately it does happen, and if you have freelanced for any length of time you have probably come across it.
LH: It seems to be an inevitable part of a freelance career that you start out afraid to put your foot down. Now, we’ve discussed it before when talking about setting deadlines, for example: too often, as freelancers, we’re worried to tell a client, “This is how it is.”
PW: Yes, you get so scared of losing clients when you start that you daren’t be at all assertive at first – and you agree to all kinds of ridiculous things!
LH: It’s true – you can spend months or years even wondering what’s going wrong, and actually thinking that freelancing isn’t a sustainable way of making a living. It’s not for you, it’s not working. You might find yourself working through the night to get something finished in a ridiculously short space of time, or – as we’re talking about this episode – find ourselves consistently dissatisfied with the way we’re getting paid.
LH: Late payment is a bit of an inevitability in the world of freelancing. While you can put methods in place to protect yourself – and we’ll outline these over the course of the episode – there’ll always be someone who thinks that they deserve to get your work on time, but that you only deserve to be paid for it when they feel like it. And unfortunately that might be never.
PW: That’s it. These situations are going to occur – hopefully only occasionally – but when they do, you need to know how to handle it.
LH: True! You have to have an arsenal of ways to deal with this. We can’t 100% protect you from it – it’s good to know how to deal with it because it will happen. So, the first thing we’re going to talk about is when you’re starting out, how to introduce new clients to your preferred payment methods
LH: As I say, when you start out as a freelancer, you’re generally more accommodating and more lenient than when you’ve got a few years under your belt. Pip and I are a little bit jaded by now…!
PW: Haha, yes – we take no nonsense by this point!
LH: It’s zero tolerance from where we’re standing. But when you start out – and I think it’s fair to say that most of us are the same – i can seem really terrifying to lay down your payment terms for the first time, but it’s something that I’d recommend you get sorted as quickly as possible. You’re going to have to do it – trust us on that! – so it’s best to get used to being up-front with clients as early on as possible. Then no one’s confused about anything.
PW: Yes, you can feel a bit, when you start out, that, “This is my art! I shouldn’t be dirtying it with money!” and forget that you’ve got a gas bill that needs paying. You do have to come to terms with the fact that people are going to pay you for this, and that it’s not bad to ask to be paid when that’s the agreement.
LH: Haha, I have heard from some people that, “Ooh, I don’t want to be paid for my writing!”
PW: Yes, I don’t want to sully it!
LH: By all means, tell your clients to pay me instead – I’m happy with that! So, yes, when I’ve not worked with a client before, I try and secure a 50% down payment on the project before it starts. Now, if you’re looking at a single piece of work that’s worth, say, £20 it might not always be worth splitting the cost in two – in which case, it’s up to you to decide with the client whether you to get payment in advance or payment afterwards. This can depend on a lot of things, such as how well you know the client (they might be a friend of a friend, or they might be someone who’s contacted you via your website and whom you’ve never heard of before) or on what experiences you’ve had with other clients in the past.
PW: Absolutely. With new clients, I sometimes insist on full payment in advance, actually. It depends on various things, and often I have to admit it’s down to a gut instinct. I do appreciate that if I’m their new writer, they don’t know me any better than I know them, so they might be suspicious that I might take their money and run, just as I might be suspicious that they’d take my writing and run! Like you say, it’s often not worth splitting it in half if it’s a small amount, so looking at full payment upfront is another option.
LH: True – when you start working with someone new, one of you has to go out on a limb. For the sake of my new clients’ peace of mind, I have a page of testimonials on my website, which can also be viewed in situ on LinkedIn as proof that they’re real – they’re attached to someone else’s profile, so new clients can see that I’ve not just written them myself. It goes some way to reassuring clients that I’m a reputable service provider.
PW: That’s a really good idea.
LH: Another thing I’d say is that it’s important to remember is that asking a client to pay up front isn’t about making an assumption about the client’s character – even if you’re going off a gut instinct, it’s nothing personal at all, and if you ask for up-front payment, you’re not insulting someone or implying that they aren’t trustworthy. No decent client is going to be seething about the fact that you want to get the payment sorted.
PW: No, not at all. Often, I find clients are more reasonable than I was going to be, if you know what I mean. A few months ago, I was negotiating some possible work and the client wanted to see what I could do. He said, “Oh, if you write me two test articles…” and I thought, “Oh, here we go…”. And then he said that he’d pay me for the two test articles, which was great.
LH: I had the same thing happen to me, actually – I completed a couple of test articles for an agency and they just sent me a purchase order number afterwards, so I was like, “Ooh! Thanks!”. I knew they were a reputable company, but you’re so used to it being one of the most common scams – someone asks you for a test article and a couple of weeks later, the article ends up on the net.
PW: Yes, yes. And at this stage I would also recommend that, especially if you are doing the work before being paid, make sure you have full contact details for the client. If they are representing a reputable business then you don’t have to look too far to find out how to contact them, but if they contact you with a yahoo.com email address and a username where their real name should be, don’t do any work until you either have contact details, or payment. Should it get to the awful situation of trying to claw money from them, you have no hope if you don’t even know their name!
LH: Good point! It sounds really obvious but when you’re just starting out, you’re probably so busy cheering to yourself that you’ve finally attracted a client on board that you can easily get carried away and forget to protect yourself. Make sure you have contact details, make sure you visit the website they’re talking about. Be a bit careful. You don’t want to make judgement calls on people but you need to be as careful as possible.
PW: And equally, you might expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. A guy contacted me from a Yahoo address, with no real name – all those things we’ve talked about – and he wanted a series of 12 articles on health related topics, which is a subject I specialise in. He didn’t want to give me too much information, so it looked a bit suspicious. So I sent him my invoice, he paid up, I did the work and he was really pleased with it. So it goes to show that you shouldn’t automatically write people off when they don’t have an email address for their own domain name, for example, but it’s still best to be cautious.
LH: Definitely, you can only go off past experience, so don’t rely on someone 100%. The more you look, the more you learn and the more your ‘spidey sense’ can start tingling. As the years go on, you can still be wrong but your instincts will help you.
PW: And you don’t do any harm by being a bit more careful
Just Pay The Invoice (Photo credit: industriarts)
LH: Yes, as long as you don’t say to them, “Wow, you look dodgy – here’s my invoice. Sorry love, nothing personal!”
PW: Hahaha! Another issue to look at when we want to get paid, it’s also worth looking at the different types of payment that are out there. I’m quite happy to be paid by Paypal, for instance, in certain circumstances – it’s instantaneous, it’s pretty reliable, and it’s especially handy for my clients who aren’t based in the UK. In those cases, I like it a lot.
PW: However if you are being paid a decent amount, the fees they extract from the payment can start to be quite prohibitive, so my preferred method of payment for UK clients is a simple bank transfer. I do also accept UK cheques, but with one notable exception I’ve never been paid in that way. I think it’s pretty archaic now, but still useful if that’s how a client likes to work. It’s a bit slower and involves a trip to the bank, but it’s really no big deal.
LH: Yeah, I stick with all bank transfers. I do have a client who’s based in the US and she’s pretty trustworthy, so I’m happy to accept cheques from her. Until recently, I was banking with a building society, and it was pretty difficult to arrange international transfers as they need to be made via a bank. I also don’t like using PayPal more than I have to, for the reasons you mentioned just now. So yes, cheque can work, but again, make sure you’re protected – I made sure I received the cheque before I started any work, and there was no problem.
PW: Sure, and also check with your bank about whether they charge for international cheques – some do, some don’t. Check the cheque situation! There are also going to be the odd situation you may encounter when a client is in one of the countries that PayPal refuses to deal with. There are some alternate payment providers that deal with those countries, but make sure you don’t get scammed – do your homework.
LH: So the next thing we want to talk about is how to decide on a payment period. Now, my payment period depends on the client. Most of my regular long-term clients get a payment period of 30 days, and most of them pay promptly – long before they reach the due date. Another client I know does their accounts weekly, so I invoice them every Tuesday for payment on Wednesday or Thursday. Their payment period is reduced to seven days accordingly.
LH: Now, other clients might do their invoices at the end of the month, in which case, this needs to be taken into account. A number of agencies that I work for arrange payment of invoices at the end of the month, so even if I send something in on the first, I know it’s not going to be paid until the 30th or 31st.
LH: This is actually a pretty problem-free payment method – the longest you’re going to have to wait for payment is 30 days or so, all being well, and invoices that you submit later in the month will also be paid at the same time. So if you submit something on the 22nd, you’ll only have to wait six days.
PW: If you’re very new to this…I remember the first time I got asked for an invoice, years and years ago. Someone approached me, wanting to buy one of my photographs, and they asked me to invoice them. I went, “Um…OK!” and then googled, “How to send an invoice.” And it really is that simple, actually – just choose one that’s appropriate to your country, just so the terminology is right, pick one that looks nice or has the fields you need, and you’ll get the hang of it. If just the word ‘invoice’ fills you with fear, don’t worry!
PW: Now, for regular clients I tend to send out monthly invoices on the first of every month. For more ad hoc work, I send my invoice along with the completed work. You will find you get into patterns with different clients about how it works. Also, for the journalistic and media work I do, I have a LOT less say in how the payment system works! They have long established procedures and you just have to lump it. In my commercial work, I have a lot more control over my own terms and conditions. So, especially because I do commercial work as well, I really notice the difference.
LH: Yes, you do have to have a certain level of flexibility when it comes to payment times – at first, any less-than-savoury clients might be able to pull the wool over your eyes with stuff about their accounts department, but as you get more and more used to freelancing, you do start to see patterns and, basically, your bullshit radar gets a bit more sensitive! As I mentioned, agencies tend to pay invoices at the end of the month. And as Pip says, media organisations are often a bit dogmatic about their accounts and take a lot longer. So take note of how you’re paid, so you can detect whether something seems out of the ordinary.
PW: Speaking of clients trying to pull the wool over your eyes, my accountant has been very helpful at decoding the nonsense I get from accounting departments. I tell her what they say, and she says, “Oh, that means they’re pretending they’ve paid but they haven’t yet”, or, “Oh, if they say that it means they know they’re going to be late but won’t admit it”. It’s quite funny that there’s a secret language for all this stuff that I’m not normally privy to!
LH: I think your accountant could make a lot of money from an exposé on this kind of stuff!
PW: Ha ha! I’ll suggest it to her! And of course there will always be circumstances where someone genuinely messes up, like we all do from time to time, and they legitimately forget, be off sick or whatever. That’s fine, you have to live with that, but perhaps be more clear for the future about how to avoid it.
LH: Definitely – you can’t operate a one-strike and you’re out policy – as Pip says, people muck up from time to time. Maybe they’re off sick – if it’s a one-off, then you don’t need to do anything. If they’re off a bit more often, maybe see if you can CC someone into your emails. Even if a normally reliable client forgets to pay you on time more than once, there are things to do before you get to the “No more Ms Nice Freelancer” stage. The first step is reminding them. The second step is finding out if there’s an issue. The third step is seeing what you can do to help – maybe you could communicate with the accounts department directly. Maybe you could send them a reminder a few days before the invoice is due. Talk to your client.
PW: Communication is key.
LH: Definitely. So, now we’ve talked about how to be flexible, it’s time to talk about how to chase payment when it hasn’t happened. Now, the first thing I would say – and it’s not actually chasing per se – is give someone a chance – don’t chase on the very morning payment’s due. Three, two, one…no invoice? Get on it!
PW: Oh, absolutely. If nothing else, the bank computer might be having a glitch and the payment will appear in another 10 minutes! I give a few days grace at least – most often longer than that, to be honest.
LH: Yeah, I tend to give five to seven working days, and take weekends into account. The second thing I’d say is check and double check your account to make sure you’ve not been paid. Don’t just give it a cursory glance, as the company paying you might not be the name you’re used to associating with that firm – it might be a parent company paying you. Or, they might have combined two invoices together, so the figure you’re expecting to see might not be there. Cross check the company and amount before you get in touch with client.
PW: This can be so confusing. A lot of small businesses also ship out their accounts. If they don’t use the invoice number or their usual name, it can be really confusing! But cross-referencing the amounts I have been paid and the dates can help a lot.
PW: Sometimes it does get to the point where you have to start chasing a client for payment. It’s unpleasant, but there are ways you can do it that make the process easier, not just for you but also for the client. Always start by being really polite about it – if your first email to them is, “Oy! Where’s my money?” then you’re not going to open a dialogue with them! They might have been off sick or something when the payment was due to come out. So start by just enquiring – mention that you were expecting to have received the payment by now, and you were wondering if everything was ok at their end. Always attach a copy of the invoice in question again too, just to be clear about exactly what you’re chasing.
LH: Yes, 100% agree. Even if you’ve done it a thousand times with other clients and 100 times in the same morning, and you’re feeling very jaded – because it can feel really unfair! – remember to give every client the benefit of the doubt. There’s no point getting belligerent , especially not at the start, because it’s going to alienate your client, show you in a bad light and possibly wreck your chances of getting paid at all – if you’re client’s a bit that way inclined.
PW: Ooh, belligerent is a good word, by the way.
LH: Thanks, I like it! I do have favourite words sometimes! So yes, when you’ve enquired, your next step depends on how the client reacts.
PW: If you don’t get a reply, or if they promise to pay you today and don’t, then after a dialogue with them (as best you can manage, depending on how they react – or whether they reply at all) you might need to get a bit more direct. Again, still not rude, just more insistent that you have completed the work – or whatever the agreement was – and that you haven’t been paid as agreed. Don’t feel shy about pointing out that they did agree to this!
LH: Yes, when it gets to that point, I start talking about the fact that my work was (and usually always has been) submitted on time, often on very short deadlines. I mention how long their payment period was, and how late they are. I mention any previous promises to pay, (“I’ll sort it tomorrow, I’ll pay you today” etc.) and finish off with a very direct request that they pay and confirm payment immediately. It’s a shame to have to cut the pleasantries but, while you shouldn’t be rude, it’s a little false to keep including small talk at that point. Normally, emailing a client, I’ll have a bit of chat with them. But once you’re past that dialogue, don’t be apologetic or worried, because if someone is not responding to your communications about them not paying you what they owe you, then you don’t have to be super friendly. Again, as Pip’s just said, this is *after* a dialogue has taken place.
PW: Yeah, I think mentioning the date is a good point. I sent an email today – bear in mind it’s January – saying, “I refer to my invoice of August 2012…”
LH: That’s ludicrous. That’s last summer!
PW: Absolutely. I will also sometimes withhold work if a payment gets very late. I let them know it is done, and ready, and as soon as I receive the payment I will send it to them. I really, really, really hate having to do this, but there doesn’t seem much else I can do sometimes. And that only works with regular work, of course. But yes, if there are real problems, it’s something you can use. I don’t like it, but it’s something you can use as a last resort. I’ve even told clients that I don’t like it!
LH: Yes, I think that that’s a good example of the open communication. It’s not good cop vs bad cop, from “Oh hi, how are you?” to “Where’s my cash, now now now!”
PW: Yes, and you’re not a robot. Humanising yourself can sometimes help to get through to them.
LH: Yes. I think it’s acceptable sometimes to, for want of a better phrase, to play the guilt card. As Pip says, you’re not a robot. If your client has let you down and left you out of pocket, I think it’s OK to let your client know how seriously they’re inconveniencing you.
PW: Yes, when you get to an accounts department of a medium sized business, they’re paying freelancers but they’re also paying massive distributors and suppliers etc. and they may forget that there’s a human at the end of the email who’s being really inconvenienced – it can make a difference.
LH: Yes. But choose the recipient of your sob story carefully – only be open with people you have that kind of communication with!
LH: In terms of other ways of protecting myself from late payment, what I’ve started doing – and it’s something we’ll talk about in a bit more detail in a mo – is including a clause in my writing agreements that reverts copyright of a piece of work to me if payment is late by more than a certain amount of time. That way, the writing belongs to me, not the client, unless they pay for it.
PW: So, while often it’s just something that’s been overlooked, sometimes – as in the case of my August invoice! – things are getting really ridiculous.
LH: Yes, when flexibility crosses the line into bare-faced cheek, we need to talk about what to do when someone keeps paying you late. When someone is starting to take the proverbial, there are tell-tale signs. As we mentioned earlier, you’ll recognise these more easily as time goes by. But, things like a failure to answer your calls or respond to your emails. Excuses that don’t really hold up. Seeming indifference to the fact that you’ve not been paid for the work you delivered to them – these aren’t very good signs at all, and you’re within your rights to note them down in your little black book and to decide how you want to progress with that client in future. You might want to solve the problem – you certainly want to get paid! – but it’s time to question whether you want to work with them again in future.
PW: God, I had one client use the same excuse twice! They’d obviously forgotten they’d used it before. It wasn’t something awful like the death of a parent, but it was clearly their stock excuse.
LH: My father’s died! Again!
PW: Haha! Another sign is if they are normally very quick at answering emails, and all of a sudden they are not available, it may be time to get suspicious.
LH: Yes, it’s horribly clichéd, isn’t it? You wouldn’t believe that a full-grown business person could resort to something like hiding from emails and phonecalls, but it’s usually what happens if someone’s planning on skipping out on a payment.
LH: So, if a client is a persistent late payer, the first thing I tend to do (and I mean in terms of progressing with the working relationship, rather than chasing them) is to reduce the length of the payment period so I can keep a closer eye on what’s coming in and when – and that’s IF I want to keep that client on in future. The fact is, I don’t want to spend a month knowing full well that a client will pay me late and that I’ll then have to start chasing on a weekly basis thereafter. It prolongs an already awkward process.
PW: Another thing to remember is that nowadays, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking email is the only option. Actually, in these cases, it’s good to pick up the phone. You’re harder to ignore, and you’re more humanised. They have to face it a bit more. And you may finally get to the truth of what’s happening – when you get them on the phone, they might just say what the problem is.
LH: It can be difficult sometimes. Pip and I don’t enjoy cold-calling people, and chasing payment over the phone can feel similar, can’t it?
PW: Uuuuugh! That’s how much I enjoy it!
LH: Haha! I think it might be a generational thing – email feels like the appropriate method of contact.
PW: Yes – and I totally worry if I’m interrupting someone, and I feel like I should email first to check it’s a good time.
LH: And you get round to the first point: that it’s not nice to chase for money. And for those clients who are trying not to pay you, it’s not nice to phone that kind of person up and chase them for money. You can only hope it embarrasses them into paying you!
LH: If you decide you want to carry on with a working relationship with a bad payer, a good suggestion that was made to me by a fellow freelancer was to encourage clients, and particularly late payers, to buy “credit” from you.
LH: So, a client can pay you, say, £100, and you complete work to that value. Once their ‘credit’ is getting low, you send them a reminder. I do work this way very occasionally – it tends to be for new clients who want a one-off job doing, say, a website rewrite. I’ll give them a time estimate (and this feeds back into Pip’s last solo episode, so if you haven’t listened to that already, go and do that straight after this!) and ask them to pay 50% or 100% of that up front. Once I’ve used all the hours they’ve paid for, I send them a time-sheet (and obviously the work!) to let them know exactly what they’ve paid for. If more time is needed, this is then added on; if less time is needed, it’s subtracted from the remaining balance.
PW: The credit-style idea is a really good one. I think it’s not one you’d want to use all the time, but I can see it working really well in some situations.
LH: Yeah, it’s just to protect yourself. The recommendation was made to me when I was complaining to my friend about not being paid by a particular client again.
PW: Now, another thing I probably don’t do often enough is setting out formal written legal agreements when you’re setting out with new clients or renegotiating with current clients.
LH: Yeah – I do it sometimes, not other times. Some of it does go off gut instinct with me. As I said earlier that’s not a judgement on the client – it tends to go off recent experience, whether I’ve been paid late a lot recently – things like that! But yes, it’s a nice idea to protect yourself with a copywriting agreement. I spotted one, and it was the Plain English copywriting contract by John McGarvey – it’s a really, really plain English document, very down to earth, and it outlines what’s expected of both parties. I’ve looked through it, I found it a bit patronising but I can see it working for one off clients, sole traders who aren’t up to date with legalese and stuff like that. You’ll want to tailor this agreement for yourself, but if you get your clients to sign something, you’ll know where you stand.
PW: Also, the video that got me into a lot of trouble at *that* networking event, called F* You Pay Me, is all about the importance of contracts to protect yourself against shady clients. Links to both these things are in the show notes. When I first started thinking about contracts, I wondered if it would seem overly formal. But the best recommendations I’ve seen – one self-employed guy has a general contract embedded in his website, and in his email signature, he says that, “By working with me, you agree to these terms”. Or, you can send an agreement over with your quote, and say “Agreeing to work with me assumes you agree to these terms”, it just softens it.
PW: Yes, even if I don’t send an official legal document, I always try to send an email to all parties, summarising the agreement we have come to verbally, so that everybody is clear. If they agree with my summary, we start work from there. If not, we adapt it until we all agree. But it stops people backpedalling, and also it protects the client to a degree as well, they have exactly what we promised to do written down.
LH: While you can tailor a project agreement to suit you, the thing I’d suggest in all instances is that you protect your copyright.
PW: Some freelancers also build late penalty fees into their contracts with clients. If the payment is a week late, 10% is added to the total; if it’s 4 weeks late, 30% is added on, or whatever. As long as the client has signed the contract, then they are likely to try and pay on time! I have never done this, but I would probably consider it if I was involved in a massive project, especially if it involved working with other freelancers as well or needing to pay other people.
LH: Yes, I’ve never used a late fee but I would if I thought it would help. But yes, I’d definitely suggest, in all instances, that you protect your copyright – as in, your rights to a piece of writing. If a client isn’t planning on paying you at all – and sadly, there are some like that – a late penalty or the threat of a late penalty won’t have any effect on them: it’s just one more thing they’re not intending to pay. However, if you stipulate in your agreement with them that late payment means that the rights to a piece of work revert to you, your client has a lot more to lose. Any attempt by them to use the piece of work they’ve not paid you for will result in a breach of your intellectual property rights, and it’s not a situation that many clients will want to find themselves in.
PW: Yes, absolutely. Similar to what Lorrie said, I just keep the copyright until I’ve been paid. I always clarify that the copyright moves to them once I have received payment. Until then the copyright is mine. (For commercial work that is, it’s different with media and journalistic stuff, again). But for commercial work, especially ghost writing, like blog posts published under clients’ names, that’s my agreement with clients. Once they’ve paid, it’s theirs entirely – until then, it’s mine.
LH: I might start implementing that actually – it just cuts out a step.
PW: Yes, and it’s not hard to implement. Nothing changes hands, so it’s easy. There is also, in the worst of worst case scenarios, the option of taking the client to court. Now, neither of us has any idea about legal advice – we’re not lawyers – but this is a pretty drastic action. This will work differently in all different countries, but be it the Small Claims Court here, or whatever, it’s a pretty drastic action, but if you want to do it on principle, or because you simply want to be paid for the work you did, it could be worth considering – as long as you never want any repeat business from that client again!! You really, really have to be at a stage where you are happy to burn your bridges to take this step, but would you really want repeat custom from someone who refused to pay anyway?
LH: No, you don’t want that sort of person on your books. The amount of stress caused by chasing late payments, it’s just not worth it. One thing I would suggest before you get to the point of going to court – and it’s not like we’re suggesting that you go from chasing payment to BAM – court summons! – is that you should get someone, say a debt collection agency, to try and get the payment first. I heard this can be a really effective step but, as Pip says, this isn’t something to be tried unless you’re happy to lose your client.
PW: It’s now time for our Little Bird Recommendations of the week. My recommendation is related to one of Lorrie’s previous ones – the website, Unbounce, which is full of information on sales pages, conversions and things like that. Now, all last week, they had a theme going on about email marketing conversions. And last Thursday, they wrote a great post about writing the perfect email subject line. Now, this is interesting because, when you have a whole page of copy to write, you can be very persuasive and emotive. But when you’ve got only an email subject, you have no room to mess up. Now, apparently the average working professional receives 100 emails a day – I can agree with that, I probably get more. I now archive more emails than I ever read, but sometimes, an email that would normally get archived just has something about the subject line that makes me open it.
PW: This post goes into the science of it. Subjects between 28-39 characters had the highest open rate in a study of 200 million emails. So yes, it goes into some of the very tested things plus some of the more stylistic things you need to know. And it has a six-step method to improve email open rates, and if you do any kind of sales copy – and I’m sure a lot of it would apply to blog titles as well – or if you have your own email mailing list, it’d be really helpful as well. Plus, this post is an infographic, which I love – I’ll post the link in the show-notes, so you can see the whole thing.
LH: It’s interesting what you said about it being useful if you have your own mailing list. What you don’t want to do is alienate your mailing list. People don’t really realise how valuable legitimately acquired data is. If you start sending emails to people with rubbish spammy titles, they’ll click spam on you and you’ll end up blacklisted.
LH: My recommendation is a fairly similar one. It’s a series of posts by Copyblogger.com. I love their posts – and their emails are brilliant as well. They give you a proper summary of their posts, they’re not annoying or spammy, and you go over and get a really good article.
PW: Copyblogger is one of those sites where I’ve never read a post that’s disappointed me.
LH: So yes, Copyblogger is great, but the series of posts I want to recommend is called “Magnetic headlines” and it’s a series on how to get your article, press release, blog post headlines all right. And it makes a huge difference to how many will click and read what you’re telling them, and how much traffic you’ll get.
PW: Yes, you’ll see these headlines spinning down social media and you’ve only got a moment to get it right.
LH: Yes, it’s super important and super difficult – you’ve got a two-figure number of characters to get it right in; if you get it wrong, people aren’t going to click. So in the Magnetic Headlines series, and these are all full blog articles, and they’re very informative and accessible, Why You Should Write Your Headlines First, How To Write A Killer ‘How To’ Post, Seven More Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work.
PW: Lists are really popular as well.
LH: Yes, and choose an unusual number – steer clear of things like five or 10 (just a free tip from us there). People like unusual numbers! But yes, these articles are a really comprehensive guide to giving the right first impressions. And they’re by Brian Clarke, who’s the CEO of Copyblogger and he really knows what he’s talking about. Copyblogger articles are really good, and this is an 11-part series. As we’ve talked about, training is really important as part of your freelance career…
PW: Yes, and it can just be reading something like this, instead of going back to University!
LH: Yes – so sit there and have a proper active read of these; get a pen and paper and really engage with the articles and keep your skills up to date. My next solo episode will be on how to command a higher salary as a freelancer; integrating training and development into your regular routine is absolutely crucial to increasing your salary. So yes, take good note of the things we recommend – they’re all things we’d look at ourselves; we don’t just throw stuff out there!
PW: And I think that listening to the A Little Bird Told Me podcast can legitimately be included as part of your training!
LH: As long as you cite us – and come and say hello!
PW: Yes, we know we’ve got loads of great listeners, but then we go to our Facebook page and we’re all lonely again. So come and say hello – you’ll make two Northern lasses very happy indeed. So we hope that what we’ve covered today will be some help in helping you to negotiate payments, payment terms, payment types, and also how to handle things if someone pays late, particularly repeatedly. If you have any comments or questions, let us know. If you want to find our contact details, they’re all at alittlebirdtoldme.podomatic.com. I’ve been Philippa Willitts
LH: …and I’ve been Lorrie Hartshorn, and we look forward to talking to you again next time.
