Copywriting Buyer Guide

So You Need to Hire a Copywriter

Most people screw this up because they treat it like buying a pair of shoes. They look at the cover price, flip through a portfolio for a few minutes, and pick the cheapest option that doesn't look terrible. That approach works fine if you need a product description for a Shopify store that will never see more than 400 visitors a month. But the moment your revenue actually depends on the words — and most of you are in that territory — it costs you a lot more than the savings on the hourly rate. I spent three years managing freelance copy projects before I got bored enough to write this down. The project that cemented it for me was a landing page rewrite for a SaaS company that had been burning through $18,000 a month on Google Ads with a conversion rate stuck at 1.2 percent. We brought in a writer who had great testimonials and a shiny portfolio. Six weeks later the page was live. Conversion rate went to 1.4 percent. We fired them, brought in someone else who had basically nothing on paper, and within four weeks it was at 3.8 percent. The first writer knew how to write well. The second one knew how to make a stranger convert on a cold landing page at 2 AM.

Copywriting Buyer Guide

Step one: define the actual outcome you're paying for. This is where everyone goes wrong immediately. They say they want "copy." Copy is a medium, not a result. You want a landing page that converts at a specific rate. You want email sequences that generate a specific open rate and click rate. You want product descriptions that reduce return rates by a certain percentage. Write down the metric before you write a single message to a potential hire. If you can't articulate what success looks like in numbers, you will not be able to evaluate their work honestly later, and you will end up defending mediocre output because you have no objective standard to measure it against. Step two: figure out which type of copywriter you actually need. The industry has roughly four categories and the labels are used loosely enough that you need to verify what someone actually does rather than trusting their LinkedIn title. Brand copywriters work on voice, messaging frameworks, and long-form narrative. They are not the people to hire for conversion-focused sales pages. Direct response copywriters specialize in getting strangers to take specific actions — sign up, buy, book a call. SEO copywriters understand keyword architecture, search intent, and the mechanics of ranking. Technical copywriters handle documentation, API docs, whitepapers, and complex B2B explainers. A good direct response writer might struggle with SEO. A strong brand voice writer might bore you to death on a sales page. Match the category to the outcome you defined in step one. Step three: test them before you commit. Never hire someone for a full project without a paid test first. The test should be a real piece of work, not a creative writing exercise. I usually ask for one thing: write the headline and subheadline for a specific offer, and explain in three sentences why those choices were made. The explanation part matters more than the headline itself. It reveals whether they think about the audience, the friction points, and the value proposition, or whether they are just pulling tricks from a list. The candidate who writes "Make money fast" and says "it's attention-grabbing" is not going to work for you. The candidate who writes something dry and boring and explains the psychological mechanism behind it probably will.

This cost me a client once because I was too impatient to run the test properly. We were behind schedule on a big catalog overhaul and I skipped the headline test for a senior copywriter who had worked at a well-known agency. The headlines were clever. Every single one of them was clever. None of them converted. The client's e-commerce director, who had no marketing background, loved them. They read like something a marketer would enjoy reading, not something a tired person scrolling at midnight would act on. I ate the rewrite cost and never skipped that test again. Step four: vet the portfolio for specificity, not aesthetics. Anyone can put a nicely designed mockup in a portfolio. What you need to look for are results, constraints, and context. A portfolio piece that says "increased conversions by 47 percent over 90 days" with a brief explanation of what changed and why is worth more than ten beautiful case studies that show screenshots and no numbers. If a writer claims results, ask for the data. If they can't share it because of NDAs, ask what proxies they have — screenshots of analytics dashboards, recorded calls, or a reference you can actually contact. Vague portfolio pieces are not a red flag by themselves. They become a red flag when the writer cannot discuss the specifics of their work in detail during the interview. Step five: negotiate the revision structure upfront. Most contracts I see are written to benefit the writer, not the buyer. They include one round of revisions, vague language about what constitutes a revision versus a new request, and payment terms that lock you in before the work is evaluated. Push back on that. Ask for at least two revision rounds included in the base price. Define what a revision means in writing — changes to existing copy, not new copy added after you realize you forgot something. Establish a cap on total revision hours so the writer cannot inflate the bill by making every minor tweak a billable event. The writer who pushes back hard on reasonable revision terms is usually the one who is not confident in their work or the one who has been burned by scope creep before. Both are fine to understand, but you need to know which one you are dealing with.

Step six: manage the brief properly. A bad brief produces bad copy every single time. Your brief needs to include the target audience described in behavioral terms, not demographic ones. "Women aged 28 to 42" is useless. "People who are considering switching from Spreadsheet to our tool because their current system breaks when they add more than fifty rows" tells the writer exactly where the pain lives. Include competitive landscape notes. Share actual customer conversations if you have them — support tickets, sales call recordings, review snippets. The copy will sound more like your customers that way. Provide examples of copy you like and copy you hate, with honest explanations for each. "I like this because it feels personal" is not a useful note. "I like this because it leads with the problem instead of the feature" is. Step seven: pay fairly and stop micromanaging. Good copywriters are expensive because they charge for outcomes, not hours. A skilled direct response writer might charge $2,000 to $5,000 for a single landing page. That sounds like a lot until you factor in that a page turning 3.8 percent instead of 1.2 percent on $18,000 monthly ad spend could be the difference between profitability and losing money every month. If a writer quotes you $300 for a full sales page, run. They are either a beginner who will cost you more in rewrites, or they are cutting corners you will regret. Pay what the market rates and then step back. Micromanaging a copywriter word by word destroys the work. Give them the brief, the guardrails, and the outcome. Let them write. Review the draft against your metrics from step one, not against your personal writing taste. There are real downsides to this approach that nobody talks about. Fast-turnaround copy is almost always worse than copy given proper time. If you need something in 48 hours, expect functional but forgettable work. The writers who deliver excellent work under extreme time pressure are rare and they charge a premium for it. Also, this method assumes you have some baseline understanding of your own business. If you do not know your audience, your value proposition, or your conversion metrics, no copywriter in the world will fix that for you. The best writer in the industry will produce good work for a confused client and the client will still fail because the underlying strategy is broken. In those cases, the right hire is a strategist first, a copywriter second.

If you are just starting out and your budget is tight, consider working with a senior copywriter for the core assets — the landing page, the main email sequence, the headline framework — and then using a junior writer or internal team to handle the derivative content that flows from those pillars. That gives you quality where it matters and keeps costs manageable on the volume work. It is the approach I ended up settling on after trying to do everything in-house and watching it fail repeatedly.