Copywriting

Doing free work for potential clients

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Perhaps I’m stupid. Or just naive.

I just spent an hour doing free work for a potential client. He hasn’t paid me anything. He might never pay me anything.

And yet, I watched his current VSL (troubled, to be generous). I then wrote up a nice document with the problems I saw and what I would do instead.

This made me think of one hot summer evening three years ago. I couldn’t sleep. So I snuck out of the bedroom (my girlfriend at the time was sleeping, the heat didn’t bother her). In the living room, I put on a Perry Marshall webinar.

The topic of the webinar was “discovery contracts.” The gist of it was this:

Instead of talking to potential clients to see if you are a good fit to work together… instead of spending time analyzing their situation with nothing in return… instead of coming up with valuable recommendations they can get implemented elsewhere…

… you can do a “discovery contract.”

In a nutshell, as they say, you can do all the stuff I just listed, but charge your potential client for it, up front. You say something like:

“I’ve stopped doing discovery calls with potential clients, but here’s what I can do. I’ll dive into your current copy/product/whatever, and give you my best recommendation of how to proceed, presented in a neat document. You can then go ahead and find the best person to implement those recommendations for you, or you can hire me. I charge my hourly/daily/whatever rate for this kind of discovery project. If you decide to hire me after I finish, I’ll subtract that rate out of my final fee.”

Sounds great, right?

But like I said, I’ve never done anything like this. Maybe it’s stupid. But I have no regrets (not yet).

I’ve had lots of good experiences doing some free work up front for potential clients. And I talk with new clients rarely enough these days that, even if they stiff me out of an hour of work, it’s not the end of the whirl.

But maybe you’re not in the same situation as I am. Maybe you’re constantly talking to potential new clients. Maybe some of them take advantage of you. Or maybe you’re just tired of all the wasted time.

In that case, it might be time to try a discovery contract. You’ll weed out the tire kickers. You might get paid. And the clients who do go for it will likely respect you more.

If you want more free articles like this (you tire kicker, you), you might like my daily email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Sorry to see you go

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Here’s a Days-Of-Thunder-sized personal confession:

I cant “read” marketing.

I find it too boring. As soon as I suspect an email or a web page or an article is trying to sell me something, a switch gets flipped in my head, my eyes get watery, and I start to gloss over the text in hope of escape.

This is definitely a problem, since I make my living writing sales copy, the exact kind of stuff I can’t stomach reading.

So I’ve found ways of working around this.

For example, one of the main benefits I get from hand-copying ads is that it simply forces me to carefully read those ads.

For a while, I was also having success by seeking out trends for a “3-minute DR news” feature for my email newsletter. That helped me actually pay attention to other marketers’ ads, even if I had no interest in what they were selling or preaching.

As part of this, I subscribed to dozens of email newsletters. But over time, I unsubscribed from almost all of them.

I did the same just now with copywriter Abbey Woodcock’s newsletter.

All I know about Abbey is that 1) she was one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs, so she’s gotta know about copywriting and 2) she has some kind of program helping newbie freelancers get started.

Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen in Abbey’s emails, she doesn’t talk too much about 1. But she talks aplenty about 2.

So I unsubscribed. But then, I saw an interesting thing on Abbey’s unsubscribe page.

It’s something I haven’t seen anybody else do. Here’s what happens:

When you click unsubscribe in Abbey’s email, you get taken to her site to confirm. “Yes, I really do want to unsubscribe.” Once you click that, you are taken to one final page.

“Sorry to see you go,” the page says.

And then directly below, it goes on: “Here are some other resources that might be a better fit,” followed by two affiliate links (Copy Chief and something called Effic Planning System).

I thought this was great because 1) it could be genuinely helpful to somebody who wasn’t a fit for Abbey’s stuff and 2) it could make some money for Abbey from an otherwise useless ex-lead.

This illustrates a principle I first heard Ben Settle talk about. (I guess he learned it from Dan Kennedy.)

That principle is to always seek out unused capacity.

Abbey’s unsubscribe page is just one small and clear example of this.

But if you have any kind of business — yes, even as a newbie freelancer — you might have unused capacity that you could profitably exploit.

Take for example these blog posts. For most of the time I’ve been writing them, I simply ended each post without including any kind of call to action.

Unused capacity.

So I started including a CTA each and every time. Something simple. Along the lines of,

I’ve got an email newsletter about marketing and persuasion. If you like what you just read, you might like that too. In case you want to give it a try, click here to subscribe.

Enemies, enemies, enemies

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Famed A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once wrote a promotion called Lies, Lies, Lies. It was about all the scheming swindlers — the lawyers, the politicians, the IRS — working to rip off small investors.

Speaking about this promo in an interview with Clayton Makepeace, Gary said the following:

“Instead of the usual “I’m trying to sell you something,” which sort of sets up immediately in the reader’s mind a you-versus-me mentality, I found a way to shift gears by saying, “it’s you and me against these other guys.” And if you can create an enemy in your copy, that’s what happens. You set up a three-point discussion and you come around from your side of the desk to be on the reader’s side of the desk and then it’s you and the reader against the enemy that you’re railing against.”

Then and now, creating an enemy = power.

But what if you’re a peace-loving hobbit who only has good will, even towards orcs and trolls? Well, in that case, young Frodo, you have to start thinking outside the box.

To help you out, here are 10 categories you can look to for potential enemies, along with a couple of examples I just made up from the copywriting and marketing space.

By the way, I’m not telling you to go out and make war against these specific enemies. Nor am I saying these are enemies of mine. Just use these examples to get your ideas jogging around your head.

Anyways, here are 10 rocks under which you can find gruesome and evergreen enemies, enemies, enemies:

1. Industry insiders. Examples: Successful copywriters boasting about their fees and selling their “secrets.” Copywriting coaches who haven’t written a word of copy in years.

2. Snake oil salesmen. Examples: No-name marketers who have only sold copywriting courses by tricking those less experienced than themselves. Newbies who regurgitate what they’ve read but never tried writing copy themselves.

3. Government institutions. Examples: The FTC, which makes regulations to keep the little marketer down but allows big corporations to get away with murder. The FDA, which will suppress promising products, because it is in the pay of secret interests.

4. Big corporations. Examples: Facebook and Google, who will gladly take your money and sell you fake clicks. Amazon, which will take your successful product and make a clone of it.

5. Price points: Examples: Ridiculously high prices (eg. $10k) for a couple of videos. Ridiculously low prices (a free guide on how to achieve a 7-figure income).

6. Customers and prospects. Examples: Freebie seekers. Serial refunders.

7. Ways of doing business. Examples: Copy hype backed up by low-quality products. Maximizing one-time sales at the cost of long-term business.

8. Ways of leveling up. Examples: Hand-copying old ads. Writing ads for nonexistent products.

9. Ways of working. Examples: Working for an hourly wage. Not working for an hourly wage and getting paid peanuts.

10. Received wisdom. Examples: Making big promises in your headlines. Writing your body copy in choppy sentences…

… with each sentence fragment on its own line.

Still not enough enemies? Come and join my daily email newsletter. I sometimes rail against my enemies there, but these rants are reserved for my subscribers.

The beginnings of empire: How Agora made its first sales

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You look out your window, past your gardener, who is busily pruning the lemon, cherry, and fig trees… amidst the splendor of gardenias, hibiscus, and hollyhocks.

The sky is clear blue. The sea is a deeper blue, sparkling with sunlight.

A gentle breeze comes drifting in from the ocean, clean and refreshing, as your maid brings breakfast in bed.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven.

But this paradise is real. And affordable. In fact, it costs only half as much to live this dream lifestyle… as it would to stay in your own home!

What you’ve just read is the opening of the International Living sales letter.

Bill Bonner — the founder of Agora, a $1B+ publishing company — used this sales letter to launch his first newsletter over thirty years ago. The letter supposedly brought in $3 for every $1 of advertising spend. Today, it still continues to bring in new paying readers.

I bring it up to illustrate a powerful marketing truth, which I first heard from another famous copywriter, Dan Kennedy:

Sell escape, not improvement

Bonner wasn’t selling people on eking out more from their meager social security. He was selling them escape, to heaven, with nothing more than what they already had. Well, with nothing more but a subscription to International Living.

You too can do the same. ​​Selling people a lighter shade of drab is hard work. Selling them a bright and exciting new color, well, that’s the kind of approach that can help you start a billion-dollar empire.

Speaking of escape:

Imagine checking your email every day, and among the dozens of boring, pushy, or irrelevant messages from God-knows-who, you see it.

It’s a daily email, one that I sent you. It talks about marketing and persuasion, but mostly, it’s a way to escape for a few moments.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven. But this paradise is real, and surprisingly affordable. In fact, it’s free. You can sign up to make this dream a reality by clicking here.

Tempting your prospect into adultery

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I just read an Atlantic article about why people cheat, even in seemingly happy relationships.

The article describes the case of one Priya, a dutiful woman married to her “dream guy” but cheating with a tattooed truck driver. Priya is torn and miserable about how she is risking it all and how horrified her husband would be if he found out. But she can’t let the affair go.

It seems to me the real reason why people cheat is unknowable, even to those doing the cheating. ​​My theory is that people do these kinds of things from layers upon layers of deep and hidden motivations, which are usually plastered over by a story the cheater tells him or herself (“There’s no more passion in my marriage,” “It just happened”).

But enough about sex. Let’s talk marketing.

Specifically, let’s talk adultery, but within the context of getting people to start cheating on their current solution, and having an affair with your offer instead.

Fact is, if somebody is in a given market, then they have problems and deep motivations that are not being satisfied by the current solution they are using. That’s by definition. If they were perfectly satisfied, they wouldn’t be in your target market.

And there’s a clever way to tell your prospects a story that gets their minds and wallets a-wandering. It’s a combination of something I heard from marketers Stefan Georgi and Rich Schefren. And it’s something I’m writing up in a little book I’m putting together just now.

That book will be out in the next few weeks. If you’d like to get notified when it’s out, so you can read about this little adultery-causing technique, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

What boomers and Tik Tokers crave the most

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A while back, I was listening to a coaching call by top-level copywriter Dan Ferrari. And one of the guys on the call — it might have been copywriter Mike Abramov, I’m not sure — was writing a sales promo for some Agora health affiliate.

You might know how these Agora health promos look: a miracle discovery in the jungles of a remote Pacific island… an FDA conspiracy to suppress a powerful natural cure… long-lost scientific gold uncovered again by accident.

Anyways, the Agora copywriter in question said the following insightful thing:

“People are just really bored, and the one email each day with the curiosity-teasing clickbait is the highlight of their day.”

This ties into something Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief wrote in an email several months. Kevin was talking about the shift from selling to entertaining, and how this is indispensable today as direct response markets shift from the boomer generation to whatever generation comes after the boomers (gen X?).

Kevin says, it’s just as important for a copywriter today to study Quentin Tarantino as to study Claude Hopkins.

I agree. And more people becoming aware of it. But as the Agora copywriter above commented, this is not just if you’re selling to millennials or gen X or whatever Tik Tok-enabled crowd today.

In today’s market, whatever and whoever you sell to, odds are, your prospects are bored. And the sales copy you send them — emails, FB ads, advertorials, long-form sales letters — should be the entertaining highlight of their dreary days. Entertain first, and you might have a chance to sell, too.

And if you yourself need an occasional cure from being bored, I write a daily email newsletter than can help with that. Or it might not. But if you want to give it a try, and see if amuses you to read, you can sign up for a test here.

The grandmaster of marketing secrets fesses up

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A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the trouble with marketing “secrets.”

​​It’s not that packaging things up as a secret doesn’t work. It does. It works great, and that’s why so many marketers use secrets as a crutch.

Today, I want to warn you about secrets again, but from the other side. Not a warning to you as a copywriter peddling secrets… but to you as a prospect getting sucked in by the promise of secret copywriting knowledge.

And to do that, I want to share a quote I heard in a speech given by an A-list copywriter who might be called the grandmaster of marketing secrets. I’m talking about Mark Ford, who, along with Bill Bonner, was one of the key people who made Agora the direct marketing behemoth it is today.

In case you don’t know, Agora is a conglomerate of a bunch of smaller publishing companies. Much of what Agora does is sell secrets — in the finance, health, and most recently, make money online markets. From what I understand, the selling of secrets at Agora all started with Mark Ford, who literally wrote the book on selling secrets (Great Leads, along with John Forde).

So Mark Ford and Bill Bonner were talking about the psychology underlying what they do… and they concluded the following:

“There is an inverse relationship between the value of knowledge and what people are willing to pay for it. The most important things in life you’ve probably heard a hundred times before, but you’re not paying attention. When you’re in the right place and you hear it, you have that ‘aha’ moment and everything changes.”

In other words, these two guys, who have collectively made hundreds of millions of dollars selling secrets, concluded that secrets aren’t worth that much.

So what am I saying?

Nothing. Draw your own conclusions. But perhaps Mark Ford’s confession above is something to remember the next time you hear an alluring promise of “insider knowledge” and “7-figure copywriting secrets.”

Speaking of alluring promises:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s full of non-secret, highly valuable information. If you’d like to sign up for it, here’s the link.

Jab, jab, right hook — for sales copy

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Gary Vaynerchuck has this famed marketing idea of “jab, jab, jab, right hook.”

The idea is to give value a bunch of times (the jabs) before making any kind of ask from your audience (the right hook).

I don’t subscribe to this way of splitting up value and sales.

But I do think this “jab, jab, right hook” approach can make sense in straight-up sales copy.

Fact is, when you get in the ring with your prospect, his defenses will be strong. If you try to hit him right on the nose with your most powerful claim right away, he’s just going to duck and weave and keep his guard up.

So what do you do instead?

Well, this ties into the discussion of gradualization from my post yesterday.

In a peanutshell, you jab your prospect first with a bunch of softer, less powerful, but more believable claims. Let me give you an example:

“How Doctors Stay Well While Treating Sick People All Day Long”

That was the headline of a successful magalog written by Parris Lampropoulos.

What do you think this headline is about?

Odds are, you think of clever ways that doctors avoid getting the common cold.

And that’s pretty much how the copy leads off. Here’s a breakdown of the beliefs and claims that Parris cycles through in a few paragraphs:

1. The official line is that doctors don’t get sick because they wash their hands all the time

2. But it’s not true! Studies show that three out of four doctors don’t wash their hands between patients, and over 2 million patients get sick in doctors’ offices

3. The truth is that doctors actually rely on herbs, folk remedies, and non-standard cures to keep from catching infections

5. And doctors also use these “forbidden treatments” to lower their cholesterol, get rid of pains, and prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s

Whoa! Did you catch that?

We started out talking about clever ways doctors use to keep from getting the common cold. Now we’re talking about preventing cancer and Alzheimer’s.

And over the next couple pages, it gets more extreme.

Parris shows you how there are proven but non-standard treatments, not just to prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s, but actually to cure these killer diseases.

For this audience, that’s the right hook. It takes an A-list copywriter like Parris to hold off on this knockout punch long enough that he can be sure to land it, plum on the nose.

In the words of Gene Schwartz, who first wrote about this process:

“This fact — that your most powerful claim does not always make your most powerful headline — is a paradox that many copy writers still cannot accept. Mail order advertisers, however, have a simple way of proving it. When a power-claim headline doesn’t work — for reasons either of Awareness or Sophistication — they immediately split it against a second head, with far fewer claims but far more likely to be believed. Then they build a belief bridge from this second headline, to the same exact claims they featured in the first, but now anticipated by careful preparation every step of the way.”

Screenwriting & copywriting: “If the structure is unsound, forget it”

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One of my favorite screenwriters of all time is William Goldman, the guy behind The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.

Writing about his craft, Goldman made the claim that “screenplays are structure.” He explained in more detail:

“Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it’s nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it.”

Same thing in copywriting.

You can have all the nifty dialog and terrific characters you want, but if your arguments are out of order, or if you introduce a claim that doesn’t belong, you’re a dead duck.

Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. So here’s a relevant quote from one of the great A-list copywriters of the last century:

“If you violate your prospect’s established beliefs in the slightest degree — either in content or direction — then nothing you promise him, no matter how appealing, can save your ad.”

Ahe A-list copywriter behind this thought is Gene Schwartz. In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene wrote that the structure of your ad should be a bridge of belief between the facts your prospect currently accepts, and the final facts you want him to accept. Gene called this process of bridge building “gradualization.”

So how does this look in practice?

Well, in Breakthrough Advertising, Gene gave a line-by-line breakdown of gradualization in a famous ad (“Why haven’t TV owners been told these facts?”).

But that ad is kind of old. So I’ll give you a more recent example.

Except, it’s getting late. It’s time for me to quickly re-watch the swordfighting scene from The Princess Bride, and then get to bed. I’ll share that gradualization example with you, and all its structural wonder, in my email tomorrow.

What, you don’t get my email newsletter but you want tomorrow’s email? No problem. Sign up here.

A small, cosmetic copy change to keep clients happy

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“This is the best copy you’ve written for us. Really excited to test this out.”

A couple years ago, I started writing a bunch of advertorials for a client who does dropshipping.

Every few weeks, these guys would launch a new product. I’d write the advertorial and the Facebook ads that would drive hapless moms and grandmas to my advertorial horror story.

The first advertorial I wrote for this client did well, and beat the copy they were using.

So they had me write a few more. Some of these offers did well. Some not.

But overall, my approach to writing advertorials during this time was much the same in each case. The client was satisfied enough, but never made any special comments on the copy.

But then I changed something up.

At the time, I was re-reading Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book. And somewhere around the middle of that book, Joe suggests a small, almost cosmetic change you can make to your copy to get readers hooked on reading more.

So I started making this change in my advertorial copy. It took all of 5 minutes after the copy was done.

Did it make a difference?

Well, the client was happy. That quote above, about the best copy, was what he said after I delivered the gussied-up advertorial.

As for sales, the offer ran successfully on cold Facebook traffic for a few months.

The advertorial still does well for us as a back-end product, and converts at around 6% on email traffic.

I’ve been making this same change with all the advertorials I’ve written since. I can’t be sure what it’s doing for sales, but I suspect it helps a bit. And as long as it doesn’t hurt, but it keeps my client happier, that’s a win in itself.

So what is this small, cosmetic change?

Like I said, you can find it in Joe Sugarman’s book.

But if you don’t want to go hunting for it there, you’ll also be able to find it in my upcoming book on wisdom handed down by A-list copywriters.

If you want to get notified when this book is out and available, sign up for my daily email newsletter, where I write about persuasion, marketing, and copywriting lessons won on my own skin.