Copywriting 101: How Much Money Do Copywriters Make?

Watch on YouTube! The question EVERY newbie copywriter wants the answer to - how much money can you make off of copywriting?

Hello everybody, and welcome back to our Copywriting 101 series.

Let’s cover a question we get asked a lot.

And we mean a lot.

“How much money can I make as a copywriter?”

It’s probably the question we see and hear most, for obvious reasons.

Although there is no definitive answer to this question, we’re going to go ahead and give the frustrating answer - it depends.

We say that because it really does depend.

It depends on how smart you work, how hard you work, who you know and the jobs you land - those kinds of things.

There really is no ceiling for how much you can earn as a copywriter - and the factors listed above will heavily influence your personal success.

If you’ve recently got into copywriting and have been researching the kind of money you can expect to make, you may have seen or heard the term “Six Figure Copywriter”.

And it gets thrown around quite often.

We don’t use or like that term here at Copy That! because it’s an arbitrary benchmark used to lure in copywriting hopefuls.

The reality is this: how much you earn directly correlates with how hard (or smart) you are willing to work.

That includes the amount of effort you put into making connections, the kinds of jobs or gigs you get, as well as the standard of work you do.

All of these points are vital to making your career in copywriting a success.

The point we like to make is that you can earn as much as you need to as a copywriter, rather than chase these meaningless figures you see online.

The doors that copywriting opens for you are fairly endless.

You are learning a skill that is transferable to pretty much any job you will ever have in your life. To add to that, it’s a skill (especially if you’re focusing on sales, conversion or direct response copywriting) that is directly related to how much money a company earns.

So the more money you can earn for a company with your copywriting skills, the more money you can earn for yourself.

And occasionally, you can also earn royalties from these increases.

So the amount of money you can earn and the success you can achieve really does come down to you.

We’re going to break the taboo here and talk about how much we earn as copywriters (Sean and Alex, that is).

We have actually already talked about our personal earnings before in another video we did titled “How Much Can I Make As A Copywriter?”.

Sean also discussed how much he earned previously in the Copywriting Collective Discord server.

It’s another question we get asked a lot, but it’s one that we aren’t all comfortable answering.

But for the sake of transparency, let’s talk about how much Sean and Alex earn as copywriters.

In 2020, Sean earned approximately $415,000. As for 2021, he earned upwards of $300,000. Those figures are from copywriting alone.

Alex earns six figures in GBP (and his best month ever was £26k…)

As you can see, the lure of copywriting (especially freelance copywriting) is that there really is no ceiling for how much you can earn.

Unfortunately, there’s also no floor for how little you can earn either.

Although you can earn a good amount of money from copywriting, it can be a real grind when you first begin.

Even once you have gotten your skills to a stage where you can start charging money for them, you will be at the bottom of the ladder working up.

For freelance copywriters, this could mean taking on work and clients that you may not be comfortable with, or charging less than average in order to compete.

If you’re looking for jobs in-house, then you may have to accept a job that has a low starting base salary and involves a hefty amount of grunt work just to get your foot in the door.

One of the benefits of working in-house is that while the base salary may be low, it is secure and gives you a foundation to build on.

It also gives you the chance to gain valuable experience and start building a portfolio.

There’s no “right” place to start, but it’s important to keep both options in mind when considering the route you want to take.

So, while the ceiling for earning may be very high for copywriting, it’s also worth remembering that it can be pretty rough when you first start.

But if you’re serious about copywriting, then you need to start somewhere.

Just don’t get caught up chasing this idea of a “six figure salary” thinking that is everything - being human means never being satisfied and always wanting the next thing.

The advice we like to give for new copywriters looking at what they could earn and what they should charge is to always work out how much it takes for you to live a basic life, and then how much it takes for you to live a comfortable life and aim for that.

It’s very difficult to give an average figure as it differs massively from person to person, including the people we know.

We know people that make a lot of money. We also know people that aren’t making a lot of money.

This means the skew has a very wide deviation.

From our experience, the amount of freelance copywriters that are making between $0 - $1000 a month massively outweighs the number of people who are making a decent living every single month.

And the people that aren’t earning a lot of money include newbies and people that have tried for ages to crack copywriting, but ended up getting nowhere.

There are so many different components of copywriting - especially if you’re a freelancer.

Not only do you need to be an amazing writer and a really good marketer and good at sales and understand human psychology etc., you also have to be really good at pitching yourself.

And most writers are not very good at selling themselves - they are not very confident people. Most of them write because they want to be left alone.

That is also one of the biggest lies we see beginners get told when they get into copywriting.

If you’ve ever been told that this is a good job for introverts, then we would argue against that based on our own experiences.

And that goes double for if you want to earn the big bucks.

In most cases, you’ll need to get used to networking and selling yourself if you want to reach that acclaimed “six figure” status.

In any case… we hope you make a million dollars.

For more home-copywriting-truths, be sure to check out the next one in our 101 series here.

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