Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.

I bet you Swami Sivananda didn't think about this as a way of gaining and retaining clients for copywriting! Whatever - it's a great philosophy for life as well as work.

Now I'm puzzling about how to write this blog without it sounding as though I'm bragging.

Modesty, one of my many great attributes...

Oh, I'll just tell you -  I AM NOT BRAGGING - simply offering what has worked for me as a copywriter.

Two new clients, limited budgets.

One asked me to edit a nine page document in two hours - which, possibly, I could have done, very scantily, very badly. (It needed a lot of TLC.)

However, I don't DO bad, scanty jobs. It's my pride, not to mention my reputation as a copywriter.

I negotiated an extra two hours. It STILL took me a lot longer - maybe another two hours on top of that. (By the way, I'm NOT a slow worker - this just needed facts checking, more creative input, amending, re-formatting, careful consideration of the target market to get the tone just right, page numbers, indexing ...)

I'm only charging for the four hours. It's a conscious gesture of goodwill, NOT borne out of desperation to appease clients at all costs and work for peanuts so I hang on to them...and then get resentful.

On the pragmatic side - the company has a better chance of succeeding if the online copy is as good as it can be. This may translate into more work for me.

The other client, presumably thinking about his budget, didn't ask me to proofread the website as I had suggested after I'd provided the copy.  I did it anyway. There was a blooper on the landing page, which I mentioned to him.

I just received an email which simply said 'Thank God for you :)'

I think, if more work ever comes up for that client, I might stand a fairly good chance of getting the commission!