Let me tell you a copywriting client experience that still stings:
About two years into my freelancing career, I got the opportunity to write some emails for RealDose Nutrition.
RealDose is an 8-figure supplement company, started by a couple of direct marketers and an MD. They sell actually legit supplement products — their USP is right there in the name.
Long story short – I did a good job with those emails. I even tripled results in one of their main email funnels.
Impressed with those results, the CEO of RealDose asked me to write a sales letter next, for their probiotics product.
The only problem was, at this stage of my career, I had never written a full-blown sales letter.
What to do?
I took Gary Bencivenga’s olive oil sales letter and analyzed the structure. I wrote something that looked nothing like Gary’s letter, but was the exact same thing under the hood.
I gave it to the guys at RealDose. They shrugged their shoulders. They copy seemed okay… but I guess they weren’t sold. Because as far as I know, the sales letter was never tested.
Some time later, I got that sales letter critiqued by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. Parris said the body copy was fine. But the hook? The headline and the lead?
Parris used my headline and lead to publicly illustrate what an uninteresting promise looks like. “Are you the first person on the plant to ever sell a probiotic?” Parris asked me. He laughed and shook his head.
I never got another chance to write anything else for RealDose. I always wonder how my career might have gone had I done a better job with that big shot that I got.
I bring this up because today, I made a list of 10 mistakes I’ve made in copywriting career.
That RealDose sales letter, with the uninteresting promise in the headline, was no. 1.
No 4. was that this newsletter, the one you are reading now, is actually the third iteration of my daily email newsletter.
I deleted the previous two versions.
Version one was very much like this, and ran for a few months in 2016.
Some time later, I deleted it because I started writing about crypto marketing.
Then in 2018, I deleted that crypto daily email newsletter… and started writing this current iteration, starting over where I had left off two years earlier, and wasting a bunch of time, effort, and opportunity in the process.
So those are mistakes no. 1 and no. 4.
And then there’s mistake no. 7.
Mistake no. 7 is that i didn’t treat my freelancing career as a business for way too long. And when I say that, I might not mean what you think I mean.
For example, I always paid a lot of attention to the prices I was charging clients. And I worked hard on getting those prices higher.
I was also always on the hunt for new leads and new ways of getting leads.
And yet, at the same time, I didn’t ask myself, until way too late, “How can I promote this? How can I make a spectacle out of this? How can I get this offer that I have — meaning myself and my copywriting services — in front of a much bigger audience?”
Maybe what I mean is best summarized by Dan Kennedy, the very smart and successful marketer I’ve mentioned a few times in the past few days. Dan once said:
“Your growth will have less to do with your talent, your skill, your expertise or your deliverables than it will your ability and willingness to create and exploit your own status.”
Dan claims this applies regardless of what business you are in, whether you are selling services or products. In fact, Dan gave the above advice to a guy with a software company.
Which brings me to my offer to you for today.
How would you like a free consulting day with Dan Kennedy?
A daylong consult with Dan normally costs $18k. But you can get it for free.
Well, fine, not the whole thing.
But you can get three highlights of the consulting day that Dan gave to marketer Mike Cappuzzi.
The fact is, I told you one of the highlights of that consult day above. But in case you think a little bit of Dan’s $18k/day wisdom could benefit your business, here’s where you can read Dan’s other two consulting day highlights:
https://mikecapuzzi.com/an-insiders-glimpse-into-a-consulting-day-with-dan-kennedy/