“Should You Go To Portfolio School?”
I was browsing various online haunts today, and came across several references to portfolio school. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s some samples:
- “If you want a copywriting job, you’ll be competing against people who’ve spent two years in portfolio school and thousands of dollars getting their portfolio right!”
- “If you can’t get an unpaid internship, then maybe consider spending a couple of years in portfolio school.”
- “If you really think that copywriting is the thing for you, then you might want to consider portfolio school.”
- “To get started in agency copywriting, you’ll need portfolio school experience and most contracts are 60 hour weeks.”
Agency copywriting is a story for another day. But what alarmed was that multiple people seemed to be under the assumption that copywriting portfolio school was a necessity. What’s more, they were passing this information on.
Weird.
One of the best things about copywriting is that you don’t need to do the whole qualification thing. A good copywriter is a copywriter who writes great copy, not a copywriter who has spent thousands on a certificate. (I say this as a person who has spent I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-how-many-thousands on certificates.)
Spending two years in portfolio school and spending thousands to do it seems a really strange way to get copywriting experience. But maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Still, ever the helpful guy, I decided to start my own portfolio school. You can read the whole curriculum below.
The Jamie McSloy School of Building A Copywriting Portfolio
Bear in mind that I’ve never been to copywriting portfolio school. I didn’t even know such a thing existed until I read a reddit comment a couple of months ago. So maybe portfolio schools do give you some massive insight into portfolio building that a civilian like me couldn’t understand.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into how I would go about building an awesome portfolio full of copywriting work that’ll impress people.
Step One: Start Your Daily Copywriting Routine
The first and singularly most important step to building a copywriting portfolio is to be good at copywriting.
Luckily, the bar is set pretty low because instead of building a copywriting portfolio, potentially great copywriters are spending two years and thousands of dollars in portfolio school. By the time that two years is up, you’ll have created a portfolio and gotten a ton of work.
To get good at copywriting, you need to write copy. That’s all there is to it.
Learn about long-form sales letters. Find the best ones you can and copy them out by hand. Internalise what makes them successful.
Learn about headlines and the other constituent parts of a sales letter. If you’re interested in doing video sales letters, adverts or other formats, then learn about those too. (You’ll find that most of them follow the exact same process and structure as sales letters, just with the medium taken into account.)
Step Two: Get Some Freelance Work
Hop onto a freelance website. Get over the fear of pitching your services. Get over the fear of putting yourself out there. Learn the basic mechanics of writing for someone else and delivering a finished piece of work to deadline.
You’ll get testimonials. You’ll get experience. You’ll learn a lot – including the bad stuff as well as good stuff. It’ll be good for you in the end.
You’ll learn by trial by fire.
Also, this could be step one. You don’t have to be good at writing to get work on freelance websites. You just have to have a reasonable level of English (or whichever language you’re working in) and not be a scammer.
Step Three: Start Your Own Project
Start your own website. Write your own book. Sell those things. Write reviews for products you use.
I’ve written about this a ton of times, so I won’t repeat myself: Start your own projects. Look at the data. Improve your writing and get better data.
I don’t know what magical techniques you learn in copywriting portfolio school, but there’s nothing that can sell a client as well as “I’ve written this sales letter and it converts at X%, which has made a profit of $X so far.”
Step Four: Laying Ads Out, Web Design, Etc.
“But Jamie… what about making my portfolio look good? There’s more to advertising than ugly sales letters.”
You’re right… but everything else is basically window-dressing.
If you’re worried about laying out your ads or what your webpage layout skills look like, then don’t spend thousands and years on portfolio school.
Get a copy of Photoshop and then go find a Fiverr seller or someone else who’ll make you some flyer layouts. That’ll cost you less than $20.
For web design, you can use Photoshop. Or, you can get something like Thrive Content Builder (which I use.) The bonus with Thrive is that there are tons of conversion-based templates that make your sales letter look professional that are pre-loaded with the plugin. You just click and you’ve got your page structure set up.
That makes having an online portfolio that looks professional easy. It costs $67, so a ton less than a portfolio school. The guys that run Thrive Themes also have a ton of tutorials so you can set up any possible online funnel thing you can imagine and then put it straight in your online portfolio.
Step Five: Build The “Portfolio”
If you’ve done all the above, then you have
- Copywriting skill
- Testimonials and experience in business
- Projects and data to show you know what you’re doing
- The ability to create and otherwise apply your copywriting to other mediums.
All you need to do is put it all together into one pitch. Focus on the data and conversions. After all, you’re a direct response marketer, and if you can prove that you’re an investment with a positive return, your clients would be stupid to reject you.
That’s all there is to it.
Optional Sixth Step: Actual Working Portfolio
As you go along, you’ll collect portfolio pieces. If you’re at stage 5 (and you haven’t worked as a freelancer or started your own projects– shame on you!) then you might not have any pieces of actual work. If you need to, just approach a handful of companies and off to work at a reduced rate. (Or, gasp, free – but don’t actually do this.)
Five examples of great work that demonstrates the skills you learned in step one will be all you need.
Final Thoughts
Building a copywriting portfolio is not something you need to spend a ton of money going to school for.
Does a portfolio school teach you important things or useful things? I don’t know, I’ve never been.
But that’s kind of the point: You don’t need to go and spend thousands of dollars to have some guy tell you whether your copywriting is good or not. You can build the skills you need and test them in the real world.
If you work hard and consistently, then this won’t take you years either.