📈 Defying gravity

Happy Friday! The second episode of our new video series, Inspector Lander, dropped yesterday. Did you watch it? Click here if you missed it. Then hit reply and let us know what you think.

Mentioned in today’s edition: TikTok, Meta, BuzzFeed, and CNET. Plus why upselling clients is doing them a favor, and one simple copy hack to squeeze out more conversions.

Read time: 2 minutes and 30 seconds

Making the Rounds

Ad spend on TikTok defies gravity. Industry slowdown? Never heard of her. Big advertisers like VaynerMedia continue to ramp up ad spend on TikTok with no taper in sight.

Meta pays BuzzFeed for help with content. BuzzFeed, the former king of viral content thanks to its quizzes and listicles, is getting $10M from Meta to help creators make content for Facebook and Instagram.

CNET unleashes the AI ~~kraken~~ corrections. After being outed for publishing a slew of AI-generated articles, the company issued corrections on 41 of the 77 stories. Woops. Worth noting: they said the AI tool in question was not ChatGPT.

Working With Clients

Why Upselling Clients is Doing Them a Favor

Most freelancers would rather get a root canal than take a sales call.

Let alone try to upsell an existing client.

But here’s a quick reframe to help you see things differently…

Once you’ve established a successful working relationship, you’re actually doing the client a favor by upselling them on more work or another project.

Why?

Not only are you helping them achieve their goals faster…

You’re also saving them valuable time and money they could end up risking on another spin at the freelancer roulette table.

You see, good people are hard to find…

And hiring can suck up a boatload of bandwidth for busy entrepreneurs.

So if you’re a trustworthy freelancer who delivers high-quality work…

Don’t feel sleazy or guilty about upselling.

Start seeing it as a service to clients instead.

Who knows…you may even learn to like it 😉

From The Copywriting Gig

1 Simple Copy Hack to Squeeze Out More Conversions

Want to know the easiest way to spot a junior copywriter?

Choppy transitions.

And in print, an avalanche of abruptness is a giant panda-sized problem, because if readers struggle to go from one graph to the next…

They’ll never make it to the bottom of the page and buy.

So if you want to squeeze out as many conversions as possible…

Make friends with these transition words and phrases:

But
However
Because
Here’s why
For example
Case in point
With that said
Let me explain
What this means is
Here’s what I mean
So I’ve concluded that

Ultimately, you want readers to slide down the page with little to no effort.

So next time you’re writing a piece of copy…

Read it out loud to identify the verbal stumbling blocks before you hit publish.

Or better yet, ask someone else to read it out loud for you.

And if you’re looking for even more transitions to add to your arsenal…

Then check out this list:

[READ]: 117 Transitional Words and Phrases For Sales Letters and Marketing Emails

Gig Alerts

Looking for clients? These freelance jobs were posted on Upwork in the last 24 hours:

NOTE: We only share job postings from Upwork. We’ve found it to be the most trustworthy platform with the highest-quality clients. Furthermore, job postings must be for high-income skills like copywriting, media buying, funnel building, graphic design, remote closing, etc in order to qualify.

Quote of the Day

“Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning, because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will absolutely be doing things different from everybody else.”

— Sara Blakely