“Are you the founder or owner of a profitable business that could explode if you had constant access to a great copywriter? If so, read on.”
The sentence you’ve just read was supposed to be the lead of an ad. It’s an ad I started to write — to sell myself. Here’s the background:
Earlier this month, I got my copy of the April issue of Ben Settle’s Email Players.
As you may know, Email Players is Ben’s paid print newsletter. It comes out each month and it sells for $97 a month.
In this month’s issue, Ben revealed some big news:
He is starting to sell ad space — one page of it — on the back cover of his 16-page newsletter.
The price?
A low and introductory $5,000.
Whoa, you might say. That seems like an awful lot. But since my goal for this year is to become a top-paid sales copywriter who’s booked months in advance, my “red shirt” detector went off.
In other words, I realized this might be an opportunity I should take seriously.
After all, if I get just one good client out of this promotion…
I would easily make back my $5k investment.
And if I got two or more such clients, I’d be on my way to reaching that goal of becoming booked months in advance.
In the end, I decided not to run the ad — for reasons I might talk about another time, but not today.
But the whole thing popped up in my mind again last night because I re-read a famous classic ad, from another copywriter looking to sell himself.
The copywriter in question is the Prince of Print, old Gary Halbert.
Thing is, Gary wasn’t fishing for copywriting clients in his ad. Instead, he was looking for love, or at least sex and adventure with the right woman.
So he wrote a three-page ad and ran it in the Los Angeles Times. And he got hundreds of responses, and (I believe) a long-term relationship out of the deal.
If you’re a copywriter and you’re thinking of writing an ad to promote yourself, you should check out Gary’s ad. After all, it’s not easy to write a personal ad (or a “looking for clients” ad) and not seem desperate.
And yet it can be done. If you want to see how, here’s the link: