What if I told you that one of the GREAT secrets to making more money… and I mean way more money… as a copywriter is…
SPEND LESS TIME WRITING
I better clarify a few things before I get flogged for writing heresy!
I’m not suggesting that you give up writing.
In fact, I’m a HUGE advocate of writing every single day.
When you write each day, your skills improve, your confidence goes up, and, best of all, when you do it write, following my Daily Compelling Content system, your daily writing can attract dozens of high-quality clients.
So, writing everyday is really, really, really… and REALLY important!
The other thing to clarify is what I mean by “way more money”...
In November 2012, I landed a retainer contract for $5,000 a month.
My job was to write a sales letter each month, plus 10 emails, a landing page, an order form, and a thank you page.
That’s all.
I did my very best on that project.
I wrote, rewrote, and rewrote again.
Some of my letters had over 30 revisions and upwards of 12 headline options.
That’s a ton of writing.
With all that writing, can you guess how well the sales letter performed?
The truth is… it did terrible.
So bad that the company cancelled my retainer agreement.
I was sooooo confused.
All of my training said that if you wrote and edited and rewrote and tweaked and fixed your copy then it would likely do well and clients would love you.
It turned out that was a lie.
At least it wasn’t true for me.
Since then, I’ve discovered that its not really true for any serious, A-Level writer.
By contrast, not long ago, I landed another retainer agreement.
The deliverables were basically the same, but the pay was $15,000 a month plus 5% commission on revenue that my copy produced.
So, I was making 300% more for the same volume of copy.
But, here’s the kicker…
I was spending ⅓ of the time actually writing… and overall, I was writing way less. Usually a first draft and 1… maybe 3 revisions and done.
ON top of that, my copy was cranking out hundreds of thousands in sales, making me some really nice commissions.
Can you see how cool that is?
I was working less hours and making way more.
I did one little thing that made all the difference.
And it had nothing to do with grammar… spelling… letter structure… or any of that kind of thing.
Yes, those things are important.
But compared to this ONE THING I changed, everything else was only 20% of the equation.
What was that ONE THING?
Let me tell you a little story and see if you can discover what this magic ingredient is….
When My wife and I first got married, we moved to Pomona, CA.
We both had the same job.
Selling pest control service contracts by going door-to-door.
We worked the same street… she would go down one side of the street and I would go down the other side.
When we got to the end, we would meet up and kiss, like newlyweds will do :)
(We called it “paid vacation”, even if it was only for 5 minutes a few times a day… LOL)
Even though we were on the same street, in the same neighborhood, my wife outsold me by 3 to 1.
She literally would get 3 contracts and I would only get 1.
How did she do it?
She ended up knocking less doors, but sold 3x what I was selling?
At first it baffled me. I couldn’t understand what she did that I wasn’t doing.
Then one day we had this conversation.
“Margie, I can’t believe you sell so many contracts. You’re the top rep on the area. How do you do it? It must be just because you’re so insanely beautiful, that’s it, right?”
(I secretly thought her stunning good looks were the real reason. It made me feel better thinking she had an unfair advantage… way better than thinking she was just a better salesperson than me… LOL)
She smiled at me, “Well, I don’t waste time with people that haven’t seen bugs around their house. And I always find out who has seen bugs before I pitch them.”
It seemed so simple.
“Don’t waste time with people that haven’t seen bugs”
There is a very real application of this idea for us as copywriters.
From what I can see after training and teaching thousands of writers, most of them start off metaphorically wasting their time talking to people who haven’t seen any bugs.
They do this in how they look for clients.
And they do this in their actual writing.
The result is that most of them have lackluster results.
There is a better way… and all you have to do is change ONE THING.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what that one thing is and how to easily implement it in your writing routines.
If you do, you’ll likely make more and spend less time writing… then you can have more time doing other fun stuff.
Yes you are right. It is a great way that will help others a lot.