1. In my early days, I worked with OH, who loved meetings, pushing me around like his secretary, and telling me how it’s going to be, to the point where I had trouble falling asleep because I was so insulted and angry
2. In my late days, I worked with SA on a commission-only job, which involved a ton of preparation, the frustration of writing daily emails in his voice, and which paid me nothing, in spite of promises of a huge profit share from his million-name-plus email list
3. I wrote cold emails for any business that would pay me, until I figured out no amount of copywriting hacks will compensate for the fact that a generic offer targeted at uninterested leads will not sell
4. I wrote a weak lead for RealDose’s probiotics sales letter, they rightly dragged their feet on it, and it never ran
5. I started a daily email newsletter twice before, and I stopped and deleted all the archives twice before finally starting writing daily emails for good, which you are reading now
6. I spent the first six months of my professional copywriting career thinking I had learned all there is to learn about copywriting, since I had read Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book and Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters. During that time, I didn’t crack open a single copywriting book or listen to a single training, and I made a bunch of screaming mistakes as a result
7. I didn’t formally collect endorsements, testimonials, or client success case studies
8. I worked with WT, who thought the answer to every copywriting and marketing problem is to apply the AIDA formula, and who exploded in anger when I suggested otherwise, and who translated my innocent comment about not having to fit everything into AIDA into an attack on the value of his MBA education (no joke)
9. I wrote a seventh and final batch of emails for a real estate investing fund out of Chicago. They had paid me for all the previous emails, and on time. They never paid me for this final batch. To date, they are the only client who has ever shafted me for anything
10. I did not take a moment every three months to ask myself, “What have I learned to do pretty well over the past three months?” and then package up that new expertise into a presentation or a mini-course or a little report I could sell, both to make a bit of money, and to build up a lot of status
There are many more mistakes I made. No matter. I learned, quickly or eventually.
I stopped working with clients who didn’t suit me. I became obsessive about studying and improving my skills. In time, I even started thinking about how I present myself, and now just what I can do.
All of which is to say, I don’t really regret making any of the mistakes above, or any of the countless other mistakes I made in my freelance copywriting career.
Except one.
There’s one mistake I regret it because I persisted in it for so long.
I regret it because it cost me so much, both in terms of the kinds of work I missed out on, and the piles of money that blew off in the wind.
And really, I regret it because it would have been so easy to fix, had I only kept one thing in mind.
That one thing is the topic of my Most Valuable Postcard #1, which is available for purchase right now.
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