Here's How This Freelancer Made the Move to Business Owner After years of helping others, this young entrepreneur decided to help himself.
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Many business owners have unique stories about how they built their businesses and the journey that led them to building it in the first place. One of these unique stories is that of 23-year-old entrepreneur, Danavir Sarria.
From age 16 to 21, Sarria was primarily a freelance direct response copywriter. Working as a freelancer, he was asked to create promotional materials to sell information products for clients who worked in very competitive markets.
However, after five years of repeatedly helping other people build their businesses and burning himself out, Sarria decided it was time to build his own business. To transition from freelancer to business owner, he found there were three main avenues. The first was to keep freelancing and spend a couple of hours a day working on his new business. The second was to replace freelancing with a job and start his side business. Last was to figure out a way that would allow him to completely focus on his new venture.
Being completely burnt out from client work, he chose the last option. He decided to drastically cut his expenses, drop all of his clients, live off his savings and pour all of his time to his new venture, CopyMonk.
With the promise of helping business owners and copywriters get better at direct response copy so they can make more sales, he made the leap. Now, 11 months later, CopyMonk has grown into one of the most influential online courses that businesses use in copywriting.
To put freelancing aside and make CopyMonk his full time gig, Sarria took three main steps:
1. Develop a radical content marketing strategy.
Copywriting is a notoriously "old-fashioned" market in terms of content marketing. The big juggernauts in the space, Copyblogger and Copyhacker, are primarily blogs. While popular, the sites are not nearly as aggressive with their social marketing as they are with their blogs.
To counter this, Sarria decided to do something completely different. Instead of relying on old fashioned text plus image posts, he created the world's first comic about direct response copywriting. Within 24 hours, his comic became a viral hit in the biggest community for direct response copywriters out there, The Cult of Copy.
Related: 5 Reasons You Need a Content Marketing Strategy Right Now
2. Build a community from scratch.
Another problem Sarria saw in the copywriting space was that the majority of copywriters did not put in the time to build a real community behind their brands. Most relied almost exclusively on their email list.
Instead, he built the CopyMonk Facebook group. Now considered by his followers as one of the top two copywriting groups on all of Facebook, that community has grown from 0 to almost 3,000 members in a relatively short time. The biggest benefit Sarria says he's gotten from owning the group has been in developing deep relationships with his customers.
Related: Stop Dawdling and Get Real About Entrepreneurship
3. High-converting copywriting.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to sales. That's what copywriting is for, and the better you are at it, the more sales you'll be able make -- even if your audience is small. Fortunately, this was Sarria's strength as he just happened to be an experienced copywriter by the time he started CopyMonk.
Copywriting is the art and science of writing persuasive and promotional messages. It happens at every stage of your marketing funnel, from blog post headlines to landing page headlines. Using his copywriting skills to increase his conversions at every stage of his marketing funnel, Sarria was able to make sales and grow his business with a fraction of the effort.
Related: The 7 Business Lessons You Should Learn by 30
Though freelancing is a great way to develop your skills and build up your client base, you'll still be tied to a per hour base of pay. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, get to make their own schedules and don't get paid on a per hour basis. If you're a freelancer and have been considering making the leap to entrepreneur, it's time to make the jump!
