First, I have to state that I am adamantly ANTI-online portfolio for writers. After years of working for ad agencies, and watching people speedily flip through copywriters' portfolios and decide at a glance that they weren't good enough to interview, I determined that creating an online portfolio would only encourage this behavior. If you're going to decide whether or not I'm a competent copywriter, you have to read my work!

So now that every job I consider applying for requires an online portfolio, what do I do? Keep in mind that most of my samples were created before online portfolios were being used. I'm not an art director, so I don't have files for any of the work I did prior to my current job.

Is there a service out there that can take my samples and either scan or photograph them to where they can actually be read online? I'm working two jobs, running my own online jewelry company, and building my husband's Web site, so I just don't have time to create my own online portfolio. There has got to be someone out there who does this, but I can't find them!

I don't do copywriting, but I do pay for it so you might be interested in my view on this.

First of all, as a buyer of copywriting, I really love to see portfolios. Actually, everybody I know does. So I highly recommend you have your work displayed on your website.

As far as scanning your old documents, you might just have to do it the hard way and re-type them. Just take the time to re-type them and maybe try to put them in a "sales letter" type format so they look nice.

You can see how Michel displays his work here: We Transform Your Words Into Wealth » The Success Doctor, Inc.. You can use that for some inspiration for yourself.

If you need someone to do all the work for you just post a quick job on Outsourcing to Freelance Programmers, Web & Logo Designers, Writers, Illustrators on Elance or somewhere like that. Give them all your work and tell them to translate. They can probably do this for like $100 - $200 max.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the reply, Ricky!

I think I may not be making myself clear -- I have a portfolio; two, to be precise. But they are old-fashioned, "offline," three-dimensional, touch-and-feel portfolios. I don't freelance, so I'm talking about applying for salaried, full-time positions like I have now. I've gotten all of my jobs by going in and interviewing and walking people through my portfolio.

But now, I'm interested in applying for jobs out of state. In the "old days," (four years ago!), people would ask you to submit non-returnable samples along with your resume. But now, I'm seeing that most places are asking for electronic samples. Some job ads even say, "If you don't have pdf samples, we don't want to talk to you."

I've always built my hard portfolios myself, but I knew of other people who sent their samples to places to have custom portfolios built for them. I assume those kinds of businesses are still around, and doing the online version, and am wondering if anyone out there knows of one. I've tried searching for them, and can't locate one.

There has to be at least one firm out there specializing in building online portfolios for creative people.

Having your copywriting samples online can bring you high paying, high quality clients if you niche yourself effectively.

If your copy samples are in your wordprocessor you can have someone get screen shots, shrink them down as jpegs and put those online.

Some good word processors will convert your documents to pdf files which will also work.

Or you can have someone use a scanner to scan in your files and put them online.

None of this is highly technical work.

You may be able to find someone who lives on your own street to do the work.

Then all you need is a one page directory of your samples - preferably with a nice header.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh
27 Copywriting secrets revealed in these samples of freelance online copywriter Andrew Cavanagh
2 Free Videos - the secrets of web design that sells

Thank you!

To my fellow copywriters,

If you want to see a good example of an online portfolio, please look at the one on my web site, Portfolio of Francis Ardi's Copywriting Samples

The link I just provided displays my Portfolio Menu Page which has brief descriptions of my samples grouped into categories, each with a "click here to see this example".

Each link opens a new browser window to view the individual samples so that your menu page will still be there for your prospective client to look at another sample after finishing reading the first.

If you do copywriting for the Internet, I'm sure you, just like me, use a web page editor like Front Page to do your writing. Such a menu page is really not that difficult to lay out yourself.

Let me know what you think.

Francis Ardi
Landing Page Specialist
Francis Ardi - Copywriter

JewelChick,

As Andrew mentioned, it's not all that hard to get paper copies in suitable online format. Scanning and/or creating PDFs (PDFs is the way I would go) isn't hard, but it can be a pain. It's one of those things that my husband kindly takes off my plate because he knows I hate to do it!

How about hiring a virtual assistant for a few hours? Some of them are sure to specialize in document creation/manipulation/what-have-you. It would probably be an easy job that you could get done for a couple hundred bucks, if that.

I Googled on "virtual assistant document creation" and found a bunch of names. I know you can get some help finding a good VA here, as well. As it's a pretty straightforward thing, you could probably just go the craigslist route, too.

Hope that helps.
Elizabeth

Try Kinkos. They do stuff like that.