How to Win Copywriting Work in Australia

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

Will the recession never end? If you're a UK copywriter, you might have thoughts like this, in your darkest hours. Maybe the downturn is affecting your business. Maybe it's rumbled on just a bit too long. Maybe it's time for Plan B.

A few years ago, it all seemed so easy. If you hadn't climbed the North face of Google, you could throw some cash at Google Adwords and the work would just pour in. Life was easy.

But those days are over. Many UK copywriters now report that they go weeks or even months without a sniff of an enquiry from their website. Let's face it, the UK copywriting market is on its knees. It seems that copywriting is the first thing to go in a recession. That seems a strange philosophy – are businesses proposing to save their way back into profit? Anyway, growth seems a distant dream.

So, for those frustrated UK copywriters wondering where to turn, here's that Plan B. It worked for me and it can work for you. In these troubled times domestically, the UK government is asking home businesses to consider export.

This seems like a good plan. After all, there are parts of the world untroubled by the recession that should surely be explored. And words must be one of the simplest commodities to export. In the age of the Internet, everyone's on Skype and email, and everyone can send Microsoft Word documents and PDFs.

So, which are the countries that are booming right now? Brazil is an obvious choice. The South American country is doing fine on the back of a great minerals harvest and a recent oil bonanza in the Atlantic.

It seems unfair that Brazil should also win the right to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, too.

Yet the Brazil copywriting market is owned by US nationals making use of their close cultural ties with South America. Not so fertile ground for the UK copywriter.

India, although equally buoyant, is also a non-starter. Why? As every UK copywriter knows, India has its own army of content writers, bashing out pages of tripe at $3 a go. It wouldn't make much economic sense to try to reverse this process at £50 an hour or so.

What about Australia? Australia has become an economic superpower and offers fertile ground for UK copywriters. Largely untouched by the recession, thanks to the stuff they keep digging out of the ground, Australia has the advantage of speaking English, and Australian businesses are always looking for native English writers for their export trade.

How do you go about conquering Australia's copywriting market? A couple of methods spring to mind. One is to apply a little geographical focus to your Google Adwords account – turn off the UK and switch on 'Australia' in your geographical setting.

The other is to write a website page about copywriters in Australia. Back it up with good H1 and H2 tags and some useful backlinks and, hey presto, you've just become a copywriter in Australia.