In my original plan when I went to Law school, I was going to practice law and have a column in a newspaper where I discussed regulation.
While I was studying law, I always thought that maybe lawyers weren’t doing enough to help people understand the law as it is relevant to their lives. As my career took another turn, that kind of fell through, but my idea of writing about law never really left my mind.
I’ve dabbled on and off on blogs since I moved to Seattle. Talking about law was never part of it. This is a travel/living abroad blog, which I love, and I hope we can pick it back up soon. Hawaii and Corona have seriously messed our travel lives. However, the idea of having more to say in more subjects has also been on my mind, even if I spent more time and energy in establishing my teaching career.
Now that I feel like I’m a bit more established as a teacher, my mind has more free space to think about how I can use writing to communicate, educate, and help others.
Also, Hawaii is expensive and I wanted to make more money, because life is too short to pay bills and student loans forever.
I knew that people could make money writing online – blogs can be monetized, and some sites pay for posts. I wasn’t sure, however, if it could amount to anything for me.
Enter copywriting.
There is a fine line between writing content and writing copy, but the jist of it is – copy involves a call to action, which can be as simple as subscribing to an email list, or commenting on a post, or can be more involved, like buying a product.
In my attempt to learn more about writing online for money, I came across Sarah Turner, a medical copywriter who’s put her knowledge onto a course. She has a free condensed course on Youtube, (this link takes you to her channel) which is, in a lot of ways, a preview to her full course. At the same time, I also came across a content mill, where I started writing and actually selling articles. Not for a lot, but it gave me the proof I needed to believe that someone would find my writing valuable enough to pay for it (even if it was just $10-15).
After a few months, I decided to take the leap and buy the course. It’s an investment, and at first I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the investment, but I decided to take the risk and Cameron supported me.
When I was trying to figure out what to focus on (niching down is better from a business standpoint than writing about anything and everything and running around like a crazy person), my brilliant husband was essential. I had some ideas about travel and maybe small hospitality businesses and whatnot. At some point our conversations led to immigration as my niche. According to Cam, I’m “good at it”, and “understand the rules very well”, which goes into what you should write about if you want to write online: things you like to learn about and things people ask you about.
And then it dawned on me that if I wrote about immigration and global mobility, I could do what I originally wanted to do with my law degree.
Immigration law is stressful, complicated, and deeply personal. People need to understand it on their own, and lawyers shouldn’t be boggled down with writing for a blog when they need the time to help their clients.
That’s where I come in. My job is to write about new or updated regulation for immigration firms in a way that non-lawyers (so everyone) can understand. You can see some of the published work I’ve written here.
I paid off the course with one job. It was a research job and I got it on Upwork. Took a few months, but it was a great experience.
In her course, Sarah first focuses in working on mindset and then doing the business building thing. That is absolutely the right approach. Don’t skim on your mindset work. You are your most powerful asset.
You can sign up for the course using my affiliate link. I’m not going to lie here and say you’ll be flush with cash without doing any work. It’s work. But it is a route that can be very rewarding and a type of work with a lot of potential considering that now everyone realizes they need a website.
I only have one retainer client. I’m working towards more. I have no intention of leaving teaching. But I do love working on this.
You can read a review about the course from another student here.
We’ve always kept this blog about our experiences living and working abroad and it’s always been about sharing our lives with people we may not be in touch with often. We’ve never really had a monetization goal with it (as you’ve probably guessed given how little it’s been updated). But I do think that copywriting can be a viable option for people to build something that works for them in terms of work, with very little investment. That’s the only reason why this article has an affiliate link on it – because I think we’ve all seen through the pandemic that we can’t take anything for granted. Having options plural is always going to be better than having no options, or only one option that may or may not make you miserable. So if you do buy the course through the link included, I’ll get a small kicker. It doesn’t make the course any more or less expensive.
So in addition to everything else, I’m now a copywriter in the global mobility space. In fact, the #1 global mobility copywriter on Google. Ya girl is important on the Interwebs lol.
This is a total brag. I don’t care. It’s cool.
In travel news, well, Hawaii still has an inter-island quarantine in place, so we can’t visit other islands for the moment. Starting in 9 days, you can bypass the travel quarantine if you’re coming from out of state if you have a negative COVID test from the previous 72 hours. Some airlines, like United, are offering tests with some of their routes to Hawaii (Specifically the SFO-HNL route). We’re hoping that’ll mean maybe some visitors.
But we are stuck here for the foreseeable future.
If you want to chat about copywriting and starting a business feel free to drop me a line at hello@saturriamcgregorcopy.com
Until next time,
Ana