Belinda Weaver is the owner of Copywrite Matters, which helps businesses find and communicate their unique voice across their online and offline marketing. From website copywriting and blog writing, to more traditional approaches like brochures and flyers, the company is a specialist in marketing and communications. When Belinda first started out, though, she wasn’t sure she would be successful enough to leave her day job behind. Confidence was her biggest challenge, especially for a businesswoman starting out in a regional area. With the support of the Australian Businesswomen’s Network and its resources, Belinda has since overcome some of these challenges. As a member, she has access to a wide range of webinars from which she has picked up tips to improve her business operations.
As with many businesswomen working from home, learning to establish her workflow was yet another challenge for Belinda when she first began.
Most of her clients are national or international, which has meant working around time zone differences and distance barriers. Technology is therefore critical to her business; Belinda relies heavily on email, social media and Skype to communicate with her clients and to nurture her business relationships at all stages of the copywriting process. She also uses applications hosted in a cloud so that she can work outside her home office when necessary. Belinda’s favourite part of running her own business is the freedom and flexibility it affords her, especially now that she has a growing family. Although she works longer hours than ever before, she enjoys the freedom of being responsible for the decision-making process and the flexibility of being in charge of how she spends her time. “It’s liberating not to have to squeeze ‘life stuff’ into a lunch hour,” she says. Belinda attends business-networking events at least twice a month. She also participates in the ABN’s roundtables, which give her the opportunity to bounce ideas off of fellow business owners, and to seek encouragement and support. Her advice to women just starting out in a regional or remote community is to get online and start networking on social media, as well as within the local community. This will boost your referral network and give you a source of ideas and inspiration to improve your business!
Belinda Weaver was interviewed as part of the Australian Businesswomen’s Network’s ‘Beyond the City’ initiative, which highlights the achievements of women in regional and rural Australia. You can read more profiles here. And, for more information on you can connect, learn and grow, regardless of your location, learn more about the benefits of membership.
