I was out of clean underwear, and things were looking bleak.
I was staying in an Airbnb apartment. I put my clothes to wash earlier in the morning.
But halfway through the cycle, the washing machine got stuck. It blinked stupidly. Even though I talked to it and comforted it, it wouldn’t spin or finish the cycle. My clothes, including all my underwear except what I had on, were stuck inside.
I wrote to the owner. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she answered. “My husband will come after work to take a look at it. If he can’t fix it, we’ll call the repairman.” It was 10am.
A few hours passed. I walked by the washing machine and spotted that the floor was wet. The washing machine was leaking somewhere. Water had pooled behind the machine, and was running along the wall all across the room. It even reached the next room, with the hardwood floor.
I wrote to the owner again. “Oh my God!” she said. “I’ll call the washing machine repairman right away!”
The point being, incentives matter. And on that topic:
Today I got paid the second 50% of the biggest copywriting project I have done to date. And so I did a debrief for myself, to see how the project went, and what I could learn from it.
My conclusion was this: I did a good job. I put in a lot of work, I gave the client much better ideas than they had initially, and I delivered solid copy.
And yet:
Will the client actually get value out of my copy? Will they simply send some cold traffic to it, and have the copy make money out the gate? And if not, will they know what to fix and tweak and test?
If I’m being honest with myself, I know there would be a bunch of things I’d have done differently if there were was some revenue share at stake on this project.
I would have taken more control of the project to put this copy into action sooner… I would have pushed back harder against client ideas that I thought were suspicious… I would have insisted on being involved in the project even now, after I’d delivered the copy.
Royalties are a good system. I’ve told my clients this for a while. And if you’re a copywriter, maybe you can do the same, using the same argument I’ve just given you.
And if you need an argument to bite the bullet and actually make this suggestion to your clients, and to even insist on it, then remember Dan Kennedy. “Copywriting is a business,” says Dan. “You have to get paid on the back end, otherwise you just have a job.”
That’s all the motivation I have for you for today. Now for the sales pitch:
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