"If you're a copywriter working through freelance agencies, those agencies are not your team-mates; they're your competitors. Read that again."
If you're handy with a keyboard and you've dipped more than a fingertip into the topsy-turvy world of freelance copywriting, I dare say you'll be familiar with the notion of the “free trial”. It might go by an alternative name, but it's the one where the hirer ever so politely explains that before you're given paid work, you either write at least one free article to “authenticate your ability”, or you take an extended hike.
The condition is rigid, and applies whether or not you already have a catalogue of content online. And the employment? There isn't any. You're “trialling” for the chance to be exactly what you already were. A self-employed freelancer who will still need to prove themselves over and over with each individual task. You're not being appointed - you're just registering. Under these circumstances, is it fair for the would-be hirer to demand a “free trial”?
I'm going to start in a place that may appear irrelevant, but it will magically begin to make sense in a moment, I promise…
If you blog, and you have a presence in search, chances are you get emails from “SEO specialists” professing the wherewithal to improve your online visibility. There's an irony in the fact that your own SEO has to be fairly competent for them to find you in the first place. And there's a glaring contradiction in that the “SEO specialist” is someone you've never heard of, and can't find on Google.
But if you've had these emails, you can instantly see why the senders can't even manage to SEO their way onto the lower reaches of Page 307. Two or three sentences of badly formatted cut and paste, with suspect grammar and a spelling mistake… Lazy, incompetent, and most of all, a clear encapsulation of the sender's attitude to work.
This is my first point. You can tell almost instantly from people's communication whether they're conscientious, whether they care, whether they're talented, whether they're original, whether they go the extra mile… Or whether they burble clichés, cut every single corner they encounter and have a bare minimum ethos. And you can check the Internet to see whether their claims are demonstrable. So there's no need to ask ye self-styled SEO specialist to work a “free trial”. You can ascertain within a minute whether or not they can do the job.
And even if there were any point in asking them for a “free trial”, you could be assured that these people would never, ever accept any such challenge…
This is my second point. If you were thinking of hiring a painter and decorator, would they paper your back bedroom as a “free trial”? If you were thinking of hiring a lawyer, would they write you a cease and desist as a “free trial”? What would their reaction be if you asked them?
Almost all self-employed individuals offering services, skilled or unskilled, expect people to hire them solely on say-so. But in copywriting, the market is such that there's often a blurred line between employment and self-employment. And that can have a big impact on the onus of authentication.
If you're chasing employment, you know it's likely that you'll have to authenticate yourself in some considerable depth. You'll probably have to provide references and certificates, do tests, identify yourself with highly official documentation. That's fair enough. Employment law is strict, and employers are making a big commitment. And if you succeed, you enter a stable situation with protections and other benefits. You have a whole future to play for.
But in self-employment, establishing trust traditionally takes nothing more than advertisement. Someone saying: “I'm a tree surgeon, here's my brochure.”, and the world automatically accepting that they're capable of the task.
Even when we visit a dentist for anaesthetised treatment which could, in the wrong hands, actually kill us, we don't ask for ID, or medical accreditations, or a DBS certificate, or any references from previous clients. We trust that they're a competent, qualified and professional dentist because that's how they advertise and present themselves.
People in self-employment have to be competent and competitive to survive. It's not like employment, where de-motivated staff can do the bare minimum and survive courtesy of employment law. If you are self-employed, and you do bad work, you are history. And you know that.
This is one of the reasons we generally do trust that any individual trader who can muster competence in presenting themselves, will muster competence in their work. If they don't, people are not going to hire them again. They also need to protect their personal brand reputation. One bad job and some negative publicity could devastate their income overnight.
Life would get pretty irksome if we had to ask every last taxi driver for ID and the phone numbers of two professional referees before getting into their cab. And we quickly learn that such insistences are unnecessary. We're intelligent enough to discern competence on first impression, and we're almost never wrong. Result: the self-employed are spared the economically untenable prospect of authenticating themselves to each and every customer.
However, for a self-employed copywriter, the dynamics of engagement are often turned around to the point where he or she is expected to authenticate as an employee. The requirement for pre-hire “hoop-jumping” has increasingly reared its head in freelance copywriting, and it looks set to become more prevalent still. Free trials, interviews, even requests for references… All of this can be a worthwhile investment for a worker when the prize is stable, long-term employment. But for freelance work which might amount to no more than one £50 engagement? Spending a lot of time jumping through hoops is a very different matter.
In the main, freelance hoop-jumping is a product of the middle market - a controlling raft of platforms and agencies that gate access to a large chunk of the copywriting client base.
Some of the middle market is highly scrupulous. But its less scrupulous sector often attracts clients by dangling the bait of very low prices in very highly visible areas of the Internet. Baiting with these doubletake prices is something an individual writer can't really do unless they, personally, are prepared to work for £2 per hour. So it's extremely difficult to compete against. And it cultivates an environment where high profile platforms play off one creator against the next, listing them side by side, with ranking points and/or reputation scores, and their lowest rates often forcibly on show for everyone to see. The clear goal is to foster a pre-haggled buyer's market, in which sellers desperately compete, with little or no bargaining power beyond lowering their rates.
Platforms such as fivesquid and Fiverr hook in purchasers with suggested selling prices of £5 or $5. Writers on these platforms can commonly be found offering to produce blog posts for £10 or less, and this forms a reliable emergency subcontracting fallback for the next tier up – the dedicated freelance copywriting platforms and agencies. This next tier up is where a writer is most likely to encounter the “free trial” requirement. And it's the self-worthlessness engendered by digital sweatshops like fivesquid and Fiverr, that glamorises the work these "free trials" are gating.
We've already seen that pre-hire hoop-jumping is not the norm for self-employed traders, and we've taken a look at why. We can see that the idea of traders jumping through hoops before being hired is not only economically untenable from their viewpoint, but also widely considered unnecessary from the buyer's angle. So why are certain freelance agencies and platforms demanding that self-employed writers submit to “free trials”, interviews, referencing processes and the like?
Are creatives – renowned for their conscientious nature – really so much less trustworthy than, say, decorators? Speaking as someone who once worked for a large decorating operation I can assure you that the answer is no. But maybe it's not about trust. Maybe it's about something else…
Here comes the most important statement in the post… If you're a copywriter working through freelance agencies, those agencies are not your team-mates; they're your competitors. Read that again.
Agencies are racing you to the clients, winning the work, and then choosing who actually does that work. Which may or may not be you. And as your competitors, they are going to exploit every possible advantage you're willing to give them.
Every hour you spend jumping through their hoops, is an hour you could have spent writing content for your own blog or website – which could have put you, as opposed to the agency, directly in front of a client. But that's only the tip of the iceberg…
Have you considered that when you supply an agency with two client contacts as referees, that agency is gaining access to two content consumers, to whom it can subtly (or not so subtly) market itself? And have you considered that if five hundred other freelancers do likewise, the agency gets a pretty spectacular list of hot leads out of it? Are these agencies asking for the referees as a final clincher, once a work offer has been made, as employers do? In some cases, definitely not. Some demand them as a first resort, on their registration form. So they're gathering the data from the majority they reject as well as the minority they actually register.
Have you considered that when you submit to a “free trial”, you're providing original angles or ideas, which have not yet been used online? Because you want to prove you're original, right?… If you really feel you should contemplate “free trials”, find out who will own the “trial” content. If it's the agency or platform, the agenda clearly stretches beyond testing your abilities. And even if it's not, copyright doesn't cover your ideas. Anything you come up with in a free trial can feasibly be spun.
Have you considered that when you answer interview questions, you may be giving away important information which could render you less competitive? Have you considered that when an interviewer asks “How would you tackle this situation?”, you may be teaching them a technique they don't already know? Never forget that if you're approaching agencies, it's because they have more market presence than you. If you're giving valuable insights to competitors with more market presence than yourself, there's only going to be one outcome – and it won't, I can guarantee, be a helping hand up the ladder.
Freelance copywriters have enough to contend with, without donating free labour to get gigs which are already foregone conclusions. If you have a body of existing content online, and you can prove you wrote it, no one has a right to question your ability. If a hiring party is not intelligent enough to look at your blog and ascertain how well you write, how much you know, and how much you care, that's a problem for them to remedy. Not you. And if you can point to hundreds, or even just scores of articles that you wrote out of pure enthusiasm, how dare they question your commitment or work ethic?
Only in the creative industries do we see these demands for self-employed people to work “free trials”. And the reason it happens is that creatives do care. Creatives care the most. Creatives care so much about doing their job, that they will consider doing it for nothing. It's a cliché, but part of the market's rationale for asking creatives to labour for free, is simply: because it can.
But opportunity is not licence, and “free trials” as a blanket policy are not a fair ask. There are some “middle market” entities who are not even satisfied with one “free trial” article. They want more. And they want publishing rights on those free articles. And this shows that in some cases at least, hoop-jumping has nothing to do with authentication. It's freeloading. And whether it's freeloading of content, or freeloading of ideas, or freeloading of competitive strategy, or freeloading of leads, all copywriters should be aware of the intent that can lie behind these schemes.
I believe in personal choice, and if a copywriter, of their own volition, wants to demonstrate their ability to a potential client for free, that's their business. I know for some it's worked. But let's not confuse an ambitious writer choosing to send an article or a rewrite to a huge and influential brand on spec, with a middle market opportunist's bid to freeload on a disingenuous premise of authentication.