What the work is
Landing pages, sales pages, email sequences, ads, product descriptions, onboarding flows, website copy. A typical project starts with research that has nothing to do with writing: reading support tickets, interviewing three customers, going through competitor pages, collecting the exact phrases buyers use. Then the writing, which is often the quickest part. Then testing, if the client is any good.
Copywriters who skip the research stage stay cheap forever, because without it they're guessing, and guessing is a commodity.
What it pays
$50–200 an hour, but almost nobody bills hourly at the top. Project rates are standard: a landing page might be $1,000–5,000, an email sequence $1,500–7,000, a full sales page for an established business considerably more. Experienced conversion copywriters sometimes take a base fee plus a share of the lift.
The band you land in is set by whether you can show a result. One case study with a number changes every conversation afterwards — see freelance rates for where the levels sit.
How long until you're hireable
Six to twelve months to be competent, two to three years to be genuinely good. It's a craft with a real learning curve, but it's learnable from public material and practice rather than a course. Study pages that are still running after two years — longevity is the closest thing to proof that something works.
Your first three portfolio pieces
One: rewrite a real company's landing page and annotate every decision. The annotation is the sample; the copy alone proves nothing.
Two: a five-email welcome sequence for a product you understand well, with the strategy for each send written above it.
Three: a spec ad set or a product page rewrite in the niche you're targeting.
Since you won't have results at first, sell reasoning instead. Presentation format: building a portfolio with no client work.
Where the clients are
E-commerce brands, SaaS companies, agencies, course creators and anyone running paid traffic — because if they're buying ads, bad copy is costing them money every day and they can see it. Direct outreach works better here than any marketplace, precisely because you can point at a specific weak page. Start with cold outreach that gets replies, and how to get clients on LinkedIn for B2B.
Three years in
The good outcomes are retainers with a handful of brands, or narrowing into one funnel type — email, or ads, or launches — and becoming the person people are referred to for it. That path is in how to increase your freelance income.