OK, OK major caveat before you listen to this Build Your Copywriting Business podcast episode: If you’ve made any of these mistakes you’re not alone.
Kate and I have made a few of these. So I promise we’re not here just to rattle off a list of no-nos and tell you, “don’t do it!”
We’re talking through the biggest mistakes we see freelancers (copywriters, or otherwise!) make again and again, and sharing how you can avoid them. A lot of this is—you may have guessed it—mindset work.
Because it’s very easy as freelancers to blame our lack of work on outside variables—AI, the economy, crummy clients.
But when you strip away the feeling and look at the facts (Kate even brought statistics for this one …), you realize there’s a lot more in our control that maybe, just maaaaaybe we’ve let go.
Ready to get honest with each other?
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Looking for closed captioning or a transcript? Watch the episode on YouTube!
A Sneak Peek at the Episode
[01:15] Nicki shares the LinkedIn post that inspired this episode. A person had posted something like: “The freelance market has completely dried up.” But, as Nicki says, she’s been freelance copywriting for nearly 25 years and throughout all of those 25 years, there have always been people saying, “No, no, no, no, the freelance market just isn’t what it used to be. The freelance market is completely dried up. Copywriting just isn’t what it used to be. You can’t make a living at it anymore.”
[2:50] There are freelancers who have freelanced for decades but they never actually learned how to build a freelance business. So, if work starts to slow, suddenly they’re looking for something to blame. It’s much easier to point to AI or general industry than taking a hard look at what you’ve been doing to get work. Or, more likely, what you haven’t been doing because you never learned!
[3:00] Nicki and Kate talk about the referral trap. This is when you have so many referrals that you just don’t have to even think about getting clients. They just keep coming to you, or you have enough retainers or enough ongoing clients. It can be very easy, if that’s how you started your freelance journey, to never learn the process for finding and landing clients.
[4:40] When you see one or two posts on LinkedIn, it can color how you see the world, whether on an unconscious level or conscious level. You think, “Oh, if they’re having trouble, maybe is that true?” And we start to believe it too for ourselves. This is a reminder that one person’s experience is one person’s experience. It is not necessarily reflective of the broader state of things. And the algorithm is designed, if you stopped and read these doom-and-gloom posts, to give you more doom-and-gloom posts.
[7:00] When you experience a challenge, it is an opportunity to turn it back around and go, “Okay, what have I let slide a little bit? What have I been taking for granted? What have I not been doing? What have I never learned how to do?”
[8:55] Kate shares statistics around the freelancing industry. This episode was recorded in Q4 of 2026, and so Forbes has an article, Why 2026 Is The Year To Start Freelancing. Kate predicts they will change that headline to Why 2027 Is The Year To Start Freelancing, and just update this with new information. The report found 29% of executives say freelancers are essential to their business, and that they couldn’t get by without them, and that 48% of CEOs are planning to increase their hiring of freelancers.
[10:44] Nicki and Kate talk about being a producer versus a partner to clients. The producer is someone who waits for a project, does the project, gives it back, waits for a project, does the project, gives it back. A partner is thinking strategically. They’re asking strategic questions and making sure that even the creative brief is, is built on solid ground. They’re also thinking about potential future projects and how this one project connects to everything else the company is working on.
[13:17] It can be easy to phone in projects, especially if you’ve been working with a client for a long time. That’s when it’s time to move on from that client—for their benefit and the benefit of your reputation—or recognize you’re getting lazy and shake up your creativity.
[17:30] Nicki and Kate talk about removing the emotion from the situation and objectively looking at what’s going on. It may feel like freelancing has dried up at certain points in your career, but what else is going on? What do you have control over? You don’t have control over the economy or AI. Ask yourself the following:
- Have I been reaching out to new clients? When was the last time I did that?
- When was the last time I sent any sort of outreach, whether it was talking in person, going to a networking event, sending an email?
- Was it a, a personalized, well-written, alue-packed outreach email, or was it just, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’
- When was the last time I connected with, with old colleagues, not just to like ask for work, but to touch base with them, see how they’re doing, get a coffee?
- When was the last time I updated my website?
- When was the last time I shared anything of value on LinkedIn beyond just kind of the same AI slop that we see there, and other, regurgitated things that other people are saying?
[20:00] Escape your industry bubble to find new ideas. The one email you wrote for a yoga studio client, can you apply that same tactic for your higher education client? What projects have you worked on in other industries that you think could work and benefit clients in other industries?
[25:00] Like any career, copywriting and freelancing in paricular requires you to keep learning and growing in order to stay successful. And that may feel like “Oh, but I’ve already done so much work,” at first. But it’s exciting. It keeps things interesting.
Must-Hear Takeaways
As with every episode, we highly encourage you to listen to the entire conversation! But here are a few of the highlights:
“ I will tell you the vast majority of freelancers have never learned how to prospect for work. Never, ever learned how to do it. Or if they learned how to do it, they tried it with some kind of like send out a mass pitch to a bunch of different people , and as our students know, that is absolutely not the way to get people to respond to you.” – Nicki
“ We talk about being a partner to your clients versus being a producer. The producer is someone who waits for a project, does the project, gives it back, waits for a project, does the project, gives it back. A partner is thinking strategically. They’re asking strategic questions and making sure that even the creative brief is, is built on solid ground.” – Nicki
“ We’re human. We like to find a place to put blame, a very neat, easy like, ‘Here’s the one thing I can pinpoint of why this is happening, and it gives my brain a way to organize and explain, and I can move on.’ When sometimes it’s just, sometimes all the time, it’s always messier.” – Kate
“ There’s so many things that we just stop doing [networking, outreach, connecting with past clients, updating our portfolio, posting on LinkedIn] because we don’t have to.” -Kate
“ That’s not any career. You can’t just do the one thing and expect to get people to throw jobs at you or expect people to throw projects at you.” – Nicki
Related Links
- Episode 207: Calling Yourself a “Freelance Copywriter”: Good or Bad?
- Episode 190: Freelance Copywriting Through Divorces, Separations, and Breakups with Cleo, Nicole, and Dorothy
- Episode 49: How to Build Your Own Benefits as a Freelancer
- Ep. 41: Actual Freelance Copywriting Salary: Digging Into One Copywriter’s Numbers
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About the Build Your Business Podcast
Ready to turn your love of writing into a successful copywriting career?
Join professional copywriters Nicki Krawczyk and Kate Sitarz to get the tips, tools, and training to help you become a copywriter and build a thriving business of your own. Nicki and Kate have 20+ and 15+ years of experience, respectively, writing copy for multi-billion-dollar companies, solopreneurs, and every size business in between.
Whether you want to land an on-staff job, freelance full-time and work from wherever you want, or make extra money with a side hustle, the best place to start learning is right here.
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Last Updated on October 23, 2026
