"I love that copywriting and being an entrepreneur allows me to use both sides of my brain – the analytical and creative side... And I get to work with some of the most amazing, powerful, and ambitious women in the world."

00. Intro: My Journey from Backpacker to Launch Copywriter

In this first episode, I'm sharing the story of my journey I took from being a budget backpacker and breaking free from a conventional life to where I am today -- a launch copywriter and full-time traveler.

Take a BTS look into my story of leaving behind societal expectations to create a lifestyle on my own terms and why I am SO passionate about helping other women create their freedom-based lives.

From working as a ski instructor to living and traveling to almost 50 countries, crossing the Atlantic Ocean by boat and many other adventures around the world.

Join me to explore what led to the birth of Erin Morris Co. – A launch copy studio for dreamers and visionaries.

Topics discussed:

• My Journey from 13 years of backpacking the world and breaking through societal norms to discovering my purpose as a launch copywriter.

• My unconventional lifestyle, pursuing passions and exploring the world

• Navigating societal expectations and breaking free from the "shoulds"

• Challenges faced along the journey, including societal judgment and self-doubt

• Finding stability and purpose amid uncertainty

• Discovering the power of entrepreneurship and copywriting

• Building a business from the ground up that allowed me to continue living my dream lifestyle

• A mission was born – To help others earn more and live their BIGGEST life -- because life is too short to stay in the lines.

Thank you for listening to the first episode of Copy to Freedom: The Podcast. Subscribe for more lighthearted, inspirational, and actionable chats about business, marketing, and reclaiming your freedom.

Connect with Erin:

Website: https://erinmorris.co/

Instagram: @erinmorris.co

Would you love a free 30-min strategy call with me? These strategy calls have previously been reserved for my DFY high-ticket clients and are valued at over $250.

All you have to do is leave the show an honest review. Take a screenshot and send it to [email protected] and you’ll go into the monthly draw to win a 1:1 strategy call. These calls will be a gamechanger if you’ve got an upcoming launch or need an existing piece of copy improved.

Transcript

If you had told me 5 years ago, that I’d be supporting my full-time travel lifestyle as a launch strategist and copywriter I would have said two things to you. WTF is a copywriter (haha, yes, really) and Holy shit, I did it! So let’s rewind My entire 20s were spent working and traveling the world. As soon as I turned 18, I left home and moved from Australia to Colorado to what I thought was my just one gap year doing one snow season before I started uni and got dare I say – a real job.

I fell deeply in love with ski seasons, travel and the start of what I know now as an unconventional lifestyle. Fast-forward 6 years, and that one gap year, that one ski season had turned into 6 years of back-to-back winters while working as a ski instructor between the southern and northern hemispheres. It was a love I couldn’t shake. And yes, 6 years of back to back to winter, meant 6 years of no summer. But this wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows or blizzards and snowstorms.

While working snow seasons are a lot of fun, I was weighed down by the “shoulds” and the linear view of success that society puts on us. I should go to university. I should get a real job. I should settle down. These all weighed in the back of my mind. I knew my calling was not to be a ski instructor forever. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was meant for something more. I was constantly being asked by peers, friends, and strangers, isn’t it time you settle down? But the hardest part was trying to convince myself it was okay to break free from these societal norms. It’s funny to look back on this now. Early 20s me thought she needed to figure out her entire life. If you’ve ever tried to break free of the linear view of success that society holds, you’ll know exactly what I mean. It’s not easy. We’re conditioned to think that any variance from this path deems us as unsuccessful and hey, people are not afraid to tell you that.

My friends were starting to move up in their careers, settle down, have families. But that felt so far from a reality I wanted for myself. During my snow seasons, I had also been at university studying a bachelor of Paramedic science. So by the time I graduated I knew it was time to “settle down” – I hope you can hear the sarcasm in my voice. Back in 2014, I ended up leaving the ski resort industry (like many of my friends had already done) to get that conventional society I had the degree and was excited to get a job in Australia as paramedic and thought, this is it!

I quickly bought a brand new car on finance. I spent the first few months enjoying having a regular salary and spending every weekend doing local trips. All of my days off were spent traveling and planning trips - I even used every sick day and annual leave to travel more. For a while, it was great. But after about 9 months, the lack of freedom started to get to me. I was working out at a boys club being bullied by men between 40 and 70 who thought I was an inconvenience. I was stuck in this unhealthy and controlling environment where my mentor would regularly make me cry. I had no autonomy over my day and was stuck navigating government politics as a year 1 paramedic. It didn’t take long before I knew this lifestyle wasn’t right for me.

The ambulance service was going to tell me where in the state to live. And I was only allowed to take my vacation time as one slot or in 2 equally split blocks at the times they chose for me. That was the final straw and I decided I would only be young once, no one could take my degree from me. So I left my job as a paramedic to travel for a couple of years, thinking I’ll come back once I have this out of my system. If you haven’t tried to break free from conventional society, let me share a couple of comments I still remember word-for-word. From a colleague who I barely knew, “I would love to do what you’re doing but I don’t want to ruin my life.” And this one from an ex-boyfriend, “If you continue to travel you will never be happy.”

So as a quick tangent, if you are looking for someone to support you on your non-linear path, I deeply, deeply do, and I promise you, you will not regret it. Please DM me if you want someone to chat through crazy plans with:) Ok, back to the regularly scheduled episode, I had some of the most incredible once in a lifetime experiences. I spent 3 months backpacking around Southeast Asia. The food, ahhhh. I met one of my now best friends who invited me to a festival in California with his friends and over a decade later, I’m still going to this festival with them. Caught a 3-day ferry into Alaska where I didn’t even have a cabin. I slept in my cow onesie on the public chair for 3 days.

I solo-hiked in grizzly bear country and found an ice cave under a glacier. As I started to run low on money, I got a job working as a deckhand on superyachts (yes, just like in Below Deck – fun fact, I was asked to audition for the show, which I politely turned down). Career suicide. I’ve crossed the Atlantic ocean by boat – twice. Explored islands of the Caribbean, all around the Mediterranean, survived the Bermuda triangle, shared laughs with crusty fishermen in a bar on the Azore Islands. Spent a year on a remote island in the northern Great Barrier Reef. Fallen in and out of love. Paid astronomical amounts of money for a beer in Norway. And genuinely lived my life as hard as I could. This experience took me around the world, living and traveling to almost 50 countries. Oh… and it wasn’t a couple of years, like the original plan. 7 years later life came to an abrupt stop.

Hello March 2020. As someone who traveled to live. I felt like my entire identity had been stripped from me. What was I going to do? Turns out, the pandemic was the best thing to happen to me.

I was reaching a point in my travels and with the arrival of my 30s I wanted to have more stability. While I loved the lifestyle Being stuck in the cycle of work, save, quit, travel was getting tiring. Always starting at the bottom and for minimum wage wasn’t as exciting as it had once been. I’d wanted to find an online job that stimulated me and allowed me to continue traveling for some time. But I’d never given myself the space to actually find something.

But what could a woman who’d had 26 jobs, got bored easily and a degree in paramedic science do online? You think your arts degree is useless… Try having a paramedic degree. I knew if I wanted to work online, I was going to have to start my own thing. I was living in Myanmar, searching and searching for something, anything that paid more than $5/hour transcribing. For a while, I considered it. Then right as the world was closing down, and I just happened to have a flight back to Australia, I watched a free online masterclass that sold me into a course to become a virtual assistant.

Now, you may find this hard to believe but I had no idea this female entrepreneurial world even existed until then. I didn’t know anyone who was an entrepreneur. Having always been overly ambitious, despite my lifestyle, I knew being a VA was never my end goal. But I used it as the stepping point to learn everything I could about my different clients and the types of work I would love to do. I was pretty certain I wanted to be a funnel builder, including the strategy, copy, and design and signed up for the Funnel Gorgeous FG Society.

After also becoming a certified triple threat marketer and completing Amy Porterfield's Digital Course Academy, clients started figuring out my specialty before I did. I had clients hiring me just for copy projects and in Jan 2022, after 2 years of consuming and learning EVERYTHING I could, I went all in on being a copywriter. I’ve done a lot of cool things over the years, but this was by far the best decision I have ever made. It was like everything led to this one moment.

I love that copywriting and being an entrepreneur allows me to use both sides of my brain – the analytical and creative side. I can combine sales psychology and structure with creative ways to make that fun. And I get to work with some of the most amazing, powerful, and ambitious women in the world. What not to love. I continued to further my skills and specialties until I found my place in an area I know will help the most people and keep me entertained and thriving. Since doing FG Society, strategy has always been a huge part of my copywriting process. So much that I assumed all copywriters did strategy, it wasn’t until years later that I realized this was one of my differentiators. Because I loveeeee getting on a call with a client and hashing out all of the launch details and helping them improve their offer before going to launch.

I discovered that many of my clients, while they are experts at what they do, dreamers and visionaries. Launching was always this big stressful thing and I knew it didn’t need to be that way. I didn’t deliberately go into launch copy either; this was another avenue that my clients started seeing my strengths before I did. Slowing my website projects dropped off and in 2023, I wrote over 20 sales pages, 16 launch sales sequences, 6 hype event/nurture funnels, and an uncountable number of standalone sales emails. Phew!

I quickly started getting great results and clients commenting on how well I captured their voice and how working with me was different to other contractors, like they felt I cared about their business. Which was confusing because obviously I did. Wasn’t that how everyone worked? I realized this was the job I’d been searching for for over a decade. The job came naturally for me. I love writing and helping people who are so skilled at what they do but struggle to translate that into words that their audience connects with. But what I love most about launch copy, is launches have the power to quantum leap your business.

You can be ONE launch away from your entire income of the previous year. Anything is possible. And so my mission was born, to help women earn more and live their biggest life. Because everyone should have a lifestyle-first business – whether that’s for more travel like me, to spend precious moments with your kids or whatever it is that lights you up. Life is too damn short to not live your biggest life. And maybe I’m biased, but I truly believe that copy is the cornerstone of every business. And when you can write copy that deeply connects with your audience and stands out, you’ll break-free from your business running you, to you running a lifestyle-first business with clients knocking down your doors to get inside your programs. And that’s where I step in.

I knew I could write copy for anything (and really have), but my passion lies in copy for scalable offers. Because this is where true freedom starts to come from. Scalable, long-term sustainable freedom. I wanted to help more women break free from 1:1 client work where they are still trading time for money to selling out their group offers where they get to serve and impact more people. The idea of this podcast comes from. I want to help more people earn more and live their biggest lives even if you’re not yet in a position to pay for DFY copy services.

Because you shouldn’t have to spend months creating a new offer only to get crickets when you launch. You are unique and your offers are unique, so you deserve to learn how to write the copy that sells what you do. Because you have so much knowledge and skills that it isn’t fair that this isn’t translating to sales. Copywriting is a skill. I have learnt it. And now I can help you. Using my connection-first process, this podcast is the place where you can come for fun and actionable chats about learning how to give your offers personality so you’re not trying to get sales, but instead your offers are attracting their dream partners because the copy is doing its job and doesn’t sound like a robot wrote it.

It evokes emotions that make your readers laugh, cry, and rejoice – “Babe, I found her!” Because with connection, comes conversions. So if any of that sounds good to you, I am SO excited you’re here. Remember to subscribe because we’ll be demystifying and destressing the launch and copy process so you can build the skills needed to earn more and live your biggest life. It’s my goal for this podcast to become your go-to for lighthearted, inspirational, and actionable chats about business, marketing, sales psychology, and how you can reclaim the freedom in your business. Thanks so much for listening to the first episode of Copy to Freedom: The Podcast and I’ll see you next time.