Write These 5 Assets for Your First Copywriting Portfolio
What type of content do writers need to put in your portfolio, anyway? In this blog, we’re unpacking the most popular content that clients and companies ask their writers for every day — and how to write them like a pro. Let’s learn how to write SEO Blogs, Email Sequences, Landing Pages, Social Media, and Video Scripts. While each one of these is powerful on its own, when developed strategically, they can create a magnetic flywheel that accelerates any brand’s growth.
And stick around the blog because this is Part 1 of 2. This blog is a dedicated crash course to help you understand how to write these 5 types of content at a professional level. Essentially, this is a rapid-fire info-dump of all my best tips and insights after writing for tech companies, consumer packaged goods, retail, real estate, manufacturing, and more over the last 9 years. The next blog is dedicated to what you’ll write and for who…no spoilers ;-)
SEO Blogs
SEO is a type of content designed to get traffic to a site or landing page. Usually, it will offer helpful tips, advice, or perspective to their audience at the moment their audience needs that information. In contrast to other traffic-driving methods like paid search, influencer partnerships, sponsored posts, and others, SEO is largely a one-time investment, as close to “set-it-and-forget-it” as it gets.
And it’s a great asset to include in your portfolio if you want to be a writer. My very first portfolio was mostly blog content and it helped me land a job in email marketing. All that to say, blogs showcase a wide range of writing skills like clarity, formatting, continuity of ideas, narrative, storytelling, and so much more.
So how do you write an SEO blog?
Here are my top 3 pro-level tips to help you write a great blog content:
Tip 1: Know your goal
Know the message you want your reader to walk away the action you want them to take before you write a word. This helps keep your content on message, to the point, and above all, helpful to the reader.
Tip 2: Have a Keyword
Your blog will perform best if you have a targeted keyword that you can weave into your Title, H1s, H2s, and Body text. Don’t overstuff – Google can shift out low-value content. Instead, be strategic about how you’ll weave in that long- or short-tail keyword.
Tip 3: Show off Your Personality
You have free reign in your blog samples to get clever, use wordplay or puns, or get creative with an analogy. Showing off your personality sometimes makes all the difference when clients and recruiters are reviewing your work. They’re hiring a writer because they want their information to land with their audience. Interesting words are better than buttoned-up and bland.
Email Sequences
About 89% of US email users check their email at least once per day. Email is the direct line from brand to audience and with around a 36 to 1 return on every dollar spent, it’s one of the most lucrative channels for any company.
Which means every brand needs excellent email marketing and writers to create it.
What makes a good email?
Well, there are several different kinds of emails, each with its own purposes. From Welcome emails to promotional, nurture, sales, and newsletters there are nuances to all of them. But, there are a few keys that are consistent throughout no matter what.
They are:
Hook to catch their attention
Grabby Preview Text to make them click
Snappy Content to make them read
Personalization to help them feel connected
When you’re writing your email content, you’ll want to ensure you have a subject line and that the first 60 characters or so are attention-grabbing.
Now, when I say “attention-grabbing,” I mean targeted language. You’re writing to a very specific audience, so what do they care about? What did they break away from in order to clear out their inbox? What challenges are they facing and how can you help? This is how you can build it out with clear, concise, and compelling copy. Add your sign-off and you’re done!
Social Media Content
Social Media still dominates the inbound, content marketing, and lead generation game. Companies and brands stay in front of their audience, grow brand awareness, and stay relevant. Social media is even becoming an important customer service channel.
If you have been paying attention to the changes in social media this year and how it’s shaping up for next year, then you might be wondering how to approach writing content. The good news is that as a new or early-stage writer, you won’t likely be in charge of strategy or picking which platforms your brand will leverage. That takes the pressure off and allows you to simply write.
There are a few core best practices that show up in your clever, heartfelt, and engaging writing style. They are:
Consider the platform
Entertain, educate
Have a perspective
Keep up on algorithm and platform updates
Have fun
This is so important because in 2024 platforms are becoming more and more segmented and isolated from traditional advertising.
Scripts (Podcasts and Videos)
Video is the fastest-growing type of digital marketing with 93% of marketers leveraging and spending $92 billion in 2023. Among all channels, YouTube is preferred by 88% of marketers.
YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn Video, Facebook video, Snapchat, and Pinterest Ideas Pins, Podcasts, and Webinars. We are seeing companies embrace video all sorts of platforms in their marketing — and they all need scripts.
There’s good and bad news with this type of content…
The good news is that the industry standard format is really simple. It’s two columns, one for the script and one for the visuals.
The bad news about scripts is that it will force you to use different muscles than you might be used to as a writer. Instead of just considering the words, you also have to think about what the audience will see alongside it. It really reminds me of when I did plays in high school and college. You would have the script and then you’d have the visual cues or blocking for the cast, audio, and lighting technicians in the margin.
Here are some tips to writing scripts:
Write to script first.
Write visuals after the script is complete.
Know your types of visuals: Talking Head, B-roll, Graphics, Cut-aways, and Text Overlays
Landing Pages
A landing page is where traffic ‘lands’ after clicking on a link or button, used to invite the audience into the funnel. It’s similar to a sales page in many ways, but it is usually for the top of the funnel instead of the bottom where the company makes a sale. It is a first-touch offer like a promotion, a coupon, a discount, free resource, a newsletter, and so on.
Landing pages truly come in all shapes and sizes. When I was at my tech company, we wrote long-form landing pages and these are the kind I see the most. But there are also short-form landing pages that have less than 50 words of content.
The key to writing great Landing Pages is to EDIT so the path to an action is clear. They need to be persuasive in as few words as possible. The easiest way I have found to do this is to get all of your ideas out in a Google Doc and then start the refining process.
Here are 3 editing tips:
Who are we talking to
What action do we want them to take
Are we making the challenge and solution clear?
Wrapping things up…
Now that we have unpacked the top 5 content pieces companies need, you might be thinking that you have a huge project ahead of you if you want to create these for your portfolio.
I thought you might be thinking that so I have built something for you to help you create this content without confusion or overwhelm.
In my Writer’s Portfolio Starter Kit, I have built 5 company profiles — your first 5 “clients”* and 8 writing projects.
Imagine these companies have asked you to create content — an assignment. Inside the kit, you’re introduced to each brand through a company brief and a project description. Then you can write that content inside the provided industry-standard deliverable templates, guided by 8 content crash courses.
Want to be the first to be notified when this resource goes live? Join the waitlist and I’ll keep you in the loop!
Happy writing and stay FU$$y.